Teddy Rosenbluth and Steven Lee Myers
Influencers and others on social media have seized on the hantavirus outbreak to revive disinformation that sowed distrust during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Some users on the social platform X have called the outbreak, which began on a Dutch cruise ship and was first reported to the World Health Organisation this month, a hoax designed to influence a new round of elections in the United States, or have falsely claimed that hantavirus is a side effect of the COVID vaccine.
Others have warned about the possibility of lockdowns and vaccines, despite the fact that there has been no discussion of such measures, and there’s no widely available shot on the market. The claims have been viewed millions of times on X, TikTok, and other platforms, according to researchers who track online content.
“The conspiracy theories from COVID-19 never really died,” said Yotam Ophir, who studies misinformation and conspiracy theories at the University at Buffalo. “They lay dormant for a few years.”
Public health experts say the outbreak of hantavirus, which spreads rarely from person to person, poses far less of a threat than COVID, which killed more than 7 million people worldwide after it emerged in China in late 2019. But the rush to embrace a new round of conspiracy theories has them concerned.
Even if the hantavirus outbreak is quickly brought under control, they fear it is a warning sign that officials will face significant pushback should they need the nation’s co-operation to control the next major health threat.
“The next time when we need to face a big challenge as a society, we’re just not in a good place to cope with it,” Ophir said.
Part of the problem, he said, is that much of the misinformation and distrust generated during the COVID pandemic was never meaningfully addressed.
One 2024 survey found more than a quarter of respondents still mistakenly believed COVID vaccines caused thousands of deaths, years after Americans started getting the shots. Another 2023 survey found that more than a third of Americans believed the virus responsible for COVID was released on purpose, a theory unsupported by any credible evidence.
Some of the people responsible for spreading COVID misinformation and sowing distrust in the nation’s public health institutions now lead them. Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr has previously faced backlash for suggesting that the coronavirus targeted and spared certain ethnic groups, for example.
Another issue, experts said, is that the COVID pandemic left an infrastructure of influencers who have built their platforms around health misinformation, making it easier than ever for conspiracies to catch on. They have pushed similar content in response to other public health threats, including measles and bird flu, experts said.
“It really follows the same playbook,” said John Gregory, who leads the health misinformation team at NewsGuard, a company that tracks false narratives online. “It’s basically conspiracy theory Mad Libs; they just take out the nouns, and then they replace them with whatever the new outbreak is about.”
The accounts gaining the most traction are familiar to those who monitored misinformation during the pandemic.
Dr Mary Talley Bowden, a Texas physician who promoted ivermectin to treat COVID, wrote in an X post last week that the drug “should work” against hantavirus as well. (There is no strong evidence that it is effective at treating either virus.) That post generated 3.5 million views in one day, according to NewsGuard.
In response to a request for comment, Bowden said the best way to understand her approach to treating viral infections is to read her upcoming book.
Former congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene, who was banned from Twitter during the pandemic for violating its COVID misinformation rules, reposted Bowden’s comments and racked up millions more views.
Social media platforms are primed to spread disinformation, with algorithms and revenue-sharing policies that reward sensationalised content. Advances in artificial intelligence tools have made it easier to produce photographs and short videos that are hard to distinguish from real ones.
One TikTok video, identified by Alethea, a digital risk analysis company, featured an AI-generated map of hantavirus cases showing dozens of red clusters across the world. In reality, fewer than a dozen cases have been confirmed.
Another AI-generated photograph posted on X on May 6 purported to show an ashen man being escorted off a boat that was not the MV Hondius. The caption mis-stated the number of Americans onboard and falsely claimed they had already disembarked the ship. It had been viewed 2.5 million times as of Tuesday, according to X.
The wide availability of AI tools has made fighting disinformation in health crises an even greater challenge than it was during the pandemic.
“With COVID, you still needed to have, you know, ground truths to have at least a little bit of an inkling of a truth,” said Manny Ahmed, the founder and chief executive of Open Origins, a company in London that detects fabricated images, including the photo that appeared on X.
“Now you can just generate entire new scenes,” he added. “And that is just a capability that misinformation actors didn’t have before.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
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