By Clayton J. Baker, MD at Brownstone dot org.

The WHO, Big Pharma, and the other bad actors behind the Covid catastrophe are at it again.

At this writing, they're churning out industrial-strength fear porn regarding an alleged outbreak of Hantavirus infections aboard a small cruise ship, the MV Hondius. If all this gives you flashbacks to the Diamond Princess cruise ship incident from the early days of Covid, you're not alone.

But before we all hide in our closets (again) until Moderna and friends save us (again) with another toxic gene-therapy pseudo-vaccine (which of course, they and about a dozen other Big Pharma profiteers have been working on for years), let's take a moment to consider the pathogen in question – Hantavirus.

I have seen one case of Hantavirus in my 30-year career in internal medicine. It happened around the year 2000, when I was a young physician with the Indian Health Service on the Navajo Reservation. A Navajo man presented to clinic, initially having been feverish with severe muscle aches for several days. Later he developed progressively worsening shortness of breath, which prompted him to seek our attention.

His chest X-ray showed a pattern consistent with diffuse bilateral pulmonary edema – fluid throughout both lungs. It was springtime, and he had been cleaning out a mouse-infested shed several days before, sweeping and vacuuming mouse droppings in the process. I cannot claim that I made the diagnosis. An older, more experienced physician, who had seen one or two similar cases of Hantavirus in the past, recognized the cause.

The patient was treated with "supportive care," maintaining his blood pressure with IV fluids and his breathing with supplemental oxygen. He was very sick, but I recall he did not require endotracheal intubation and mechanical ventilation. (Back in the good old days, we never intubated and ventilated anyone unless it was absolutely necessary.) Eventually the patient made a full recovery.

Even today, this case is instructive for several reasons.

First, the case reveals the natural reservoir of Hantaviruses. As my trusty old copy of Mandell's Principles and Practices of Infectious Diseases states, "These agents are fundamentally parasites of wild rodents and insectivores." Mandell goes on to state that "each presently recognized [hantavirus] viral species has a single major rodent host species." (Italics my own.)

In other words, certain species of rodents and insect-eating mammals (e.g. voles) harbor specific species of Hantavirus. It doesn't just float around in the ether, nor are human beings a reservoir of the virus. They simply aren't.

Second, Hantavirus disease is rare in humans. It is rarely spread to humans from its natural rodent hosts. When that does happen, it is usually due to the inhalation by humans of virus-infected droppings or dried urine.

Third, before this episode on the cruise ship, human-to-human hantavirus transmission was essentially unheard of. Well, apparently not exactly. According to a report in NPR:

"There are like 20 to 30 different species of hantavirus worldwide that can cause human disease, and there is only one [of those] species — the Andes Virus, which is found in Argentina and Chile — that has been implicated in human-to-human transmission," explains Dr. Emily Abdoler, a clinical associate professor of medicine at the University of Michigan. "One of the first clues that emerged is that this ship disembarked from Argentina."

Color me skeptical. It's hardly enough that these passengers happened to have visited Argentina, which happens to harbor the one species of hantavirus that happens to have been "implicated in human-to-human transmission" to suddenly determine that a naturally-occurring, contagious Hantavirus strain is circumnavigating the globe aboard cruise ships.

As I mentioned previously, Hantavirus is the subject of intense "vaccine" research by over a dozen research groups, including such established bad actors in the field as the US ...