The virus panickers are at it again

How many times does Zeynep Tufekci have to be wrong before we all agree to ignore her?

Zeynep Tufekci¹ — the sociologist who became famous during Covid for telling New York Times readers no more and no less than what health bureaucrats thought they should know — just warned the world about hantavirus!

Years after Covid blew into our lives, the main thing standing between us and the next global pandemic is luck… [and] that luck may well be running out.

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Sorry, my mistake.

That’s not Zeynep warning about hantavirus.

That’s her warning about bird flu in November 2024.

This is her warning about hantavirus!

Wealthy nations must do everything possible to stop the disease’s spread… [or] the United States and the rest of the world may get an unfortunate shot at a Round 2 of the virus too...

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(Subscribe — before the virus gets you, or the 20% off sale ends tonight!)

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Wait, dang it, wrong again.

That wasn’t hantavirus either! That was Zeynep writing in August 2024 about mpox [nee monkeypox].

Hold on, I know Zeynep has screamed about hantavirus like Chicken Little after an-all night crack binge recently offered careful, measured public health advice.

Ahh, here it is:

There’s no question that another pandemic will strike, but no one knows when or which virus will be the cause…

If we’re lucky, this hantavirus outbreak will peter out… if we are unlucky? It should be unthinkable, but here we are.

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(Just Zeynep being Zeynep, with apologies to Manny Ramirez)

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Unthinkable, indeed.

Maybe let’s think about it instead.

To review: people generally are infected with the pulmonary variant of hantavirus after inhaling urine or feces from infected wild mice or rats. Most people do their best to avoid inhaling rat urine, so human hantavirus infections are pretty uncommon.

The first two patients in this outbreak are German birdwatchers who likely contracted it after they visited a landfill in Argentina. They then spread it to several other people aboard a cruise ship, more or less the ideal vector for passing viruses, respiratory or otherwise.

Hantavirus can spread from person-to-person, according to a 2020 New England Journal article that tracked an outbreak in Argentina in winter 2018-2019 which infected 34 people and killed 11. But doing so almost always requires prolonged and close contact with an infected person showing symptoms, often in social settings where people are likely to be talking loudly and with their mouths close together. Even hospital workers caring for patients during the Argentina outbreak faced almost no risk.

And the outbreak in Argentina ended quickly once authorities isolated people with hantavirus and asked their close contacts to quarantine.

In other words, hantavirus is not Covid or the flu. Though it can spread between people, its primary target is its rodent hosts and its mode of transmission zoonotic — from animals to humans. This is very typical for more lethal viruses like hantavirus, which burn through humans too fast to spread quickly.

Nor is hantavirus likely to have changed much since that outbreak; it is generally very slow-mutating.

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(Faster mutations, delivered!)

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In only the last two years, Zeynep Tufekci has sounded urgent warnings about three different viruses that collectively kill a couple of hundred people a year worldwide (mostly from hantavirus, mostly in Asia).

By way of comparison, about 150 people die every hour of every day from traffic accidents globally. Nor is there any evidence that hantavirus, mpox, or even bird flu are becoming or will become more dangerous in the wild.

Why? Why do Tufekci and all the other panickers in the legacy media and health bureaucracies keep doing this?

Three possibilities come to mind.

First, health bureaucrats need to stay employed. Your fear is their work.

Second, talking up these threats is a backdoor way to lionize vaccine companies — mRNA companies in particular, which supposedly can produce vaccines against emerging threats very quickly — and thus attack Robert F. Kennedy Jr., whom Tufekci mocks in her hantavirus piece.

And third, all this nonsense distracts from the fact that the only really serious respiratory virus epidemic in 100 years almost certainly leaked from a lab and would never have happened had virologists not caused it.

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(The truth. Discounted!)

One-time donations also welcomed…

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Here are two predictions that are LEAD-PIPE LOCKS — as the guys advertising to gamblers on late-night sports-talk radio used to scream.

First, this hantavirus outbreak will burn out quickly, with a death toll in the double digits at most. (I’d say single, but I want to be conservative.)

Second, Zeynep will be back in 2027 or 2028, 2029 at the latest, to warn her faithful sheep audience at the New York Times about pigeon flu or funkypox or Sars-Cov-6 or whatever.

Why wouldn’t she? Being wrong doesn’t matter.

Fear is her business. And business is good.

1. I originally transposed the “c” and “k” in Zeynep’s last name throughout the piece (though not in the headline). My mistake. I regret the error. I have corrected it throughout.