Hantavirus Scare Revives COVID-Era Conspiracy Theories
WHO said the public faces minimal risk as false claims about vaccines, bioweapons and ivermectin spread online, despite at least three deaths on board.
- On May 6, 2026, health personnel boarded the Dutch-flagged cruise ship MV Hondius off Praia, Cape Verde, following a hantavirus outbreak that killed at least three people. The World Health Organization insisted Friday that the risk to the general public remains minimal.
- Misinformation from the Covid-era has resurged alongside the outbreak, with social media posts labeling the event a "plandemic" or "bioweapon," mirroring falsehoods that disrupted public health responses during the pandemic.
- InfoWars founder Alex Jones claimed on X that globalists launched "Covid 2.0," while former US representative Marjorie Taylor Greene alleged the virus is a "bioweapon" meant to profit off "poison" vaccines. Others baselessly accused billionaire Bill Gates of engineering the outbreak.
- Anti-Establishment physicians and politicians, including Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, promoted ivermectin as a cure despite warnings from virologist John Lednicky that there is "extreme misinformation about ivermectin." Dr. Mary Talley Bowden amplified these claims, which AFP fact-checked as misinformation.
- Yotam Ophir, head of the University at Buffalo's Media Effects, Misinformation and Extremism lab, said the election-rigging narrative "primes existing beliefs," while experts note online influencers may seize the outbreak to curry political favor or generate profit.
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12 Articles
Bill Gates Hantavirus Conspiracy Theory Debunked: What the Microsoft Co-Founder Actually Said About Pandemics
Bill Gates has been named in online conspiracy theories linked to the ongoing hantavirus outbreak that has already killed at least three people aboard a Dutch-flagged cruise ship. The co-founder of Microsoft previously made comments about pandemic preparedness, and his words are now being misrepresented as part of the spread of conspiracy theories surrounding the hantavirus. Well-known conspiracy theorist Sean Adl-Tabatabai recently uploaded a v…
An outbreak of deadly hantavirus on a cruiser has rekindled conspiracy theories about vaccines, alleged depopulation campaigns, and miraculous cures that proliferated during the covid-19 pandemic.
Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, director general of the WHO, acknowledged that the case revives memories of the 2020 pandemic, but insisted that the current conditions are different and are under the control of international authorities. Switzerland.- The WHO assured that the outbreak of hantavirus detected on a cruise to Tenerife does not represent a scenario [...] The post WHO calms fear: Hantavirus on cruise “is not another covid” appeared first …
On board the "MV Hondius", a hotspot of hantavirus revives the spectre of a pandemic. Experts' verdict: vigilance, but not panic.
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