Summarised by Centrist
Public health physician Dr David Bell says the World Health Organisation is devoting disproportionate attention to a small hantavirus outbreak while diseases such as malaria and tuberculosis continue killing thousands daily with little public attention.
Bell notes that “almost 2,000 people, mostly young children, died of malaria” yesterday alone, while “about 4,000 people died of tuberculosis (TB)”. By contrast, the recent hantavirus outbreak aboard the cruise ship MV Hondius reportedly infected fewer than 10 people and was linked to three deaths.
Bell says the WHO estimates “10,000 to 100,000 hantavirus cases occur every year”, yet the current media panic concerns “about one thousandth of the cases expected this year”.
He questions why the WHO is giving the incident so much attention, asking: “Why the pictures of hazmat-suited emergency response crews and desperate contact tracing when we don’t usually notice?”
Bell argues the organisation is “making all the mileage it can from the fear created around this epidemiologically irrelevant event” while pushing support for its proposed Pandemic Agreement.
He also raises concerns about conflicts of interest involving the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and Moderna, which is reportedly developing a hantavirus mRNA vaccine. Bell writes: “The WHO is now an organisation in which its largest funder also has large, vested interests in the sales of specific health products.”
He says that “public health messaging becomes increasingly incoherent and detached from reality” when “several cases of hantavirus among tourists on a cruise ship” are treated as an international crisis while far deadlier diseases receive a lot less focus.
