Test tubes labelled "Hantavirus positive" are held in this illustration taken Thursday. Reuters-Yonhap
WASHINGTON — An outbreak of the deadly hantavirus on a Dutch-flagged cruise ship is reviving conspiracy theories about vaccines, alleged depopulation campaigns and miracle cures that flourished during the Covid pandemic.
The multilingual misinformation, which dominated online discourse and disrupted public health responses to the coronavirus, resurged even as the World Health Organization insisted Friday that there remained minimal risk to the general public from passengers of the MV Hondius.
"LOCKDOWN ALERT: Globalists Launch Covid 2.0 As Hantavirus Spreads Worldwide," InfoWars founder Alex Jones said on X. "Just Like A Light Switch."
A flurry of similar posts declared the outbreak a "plandemic" — borrowing from the title of a widely discredited pseudo-documentary from 2020 that pushed falsehoods about Covid.
A passenger is believed to have contracted the rare respiratory disease before boarding the ship in Argentina and infecting others on board.
Yet, an AFP analysis found widespread claims alleging a sinister plot to force vaccines on the masses, coerce people into lockdown, or sway America's November elections by justifying expanded use of mail-in ballots — a voting method that election deniers have insisted without evidence is rife with fraud.
"The almost-immediate resurrection of Covid-19 era conspiracy theories is a reminder that misinformation doesn't simply disappear once the crisis that yielded them is over," said Yotam Ophir, head of the University at Buffalo's Media Effects, Misinformation and Extremism lab.
During the Covid pandemic, health misinformation became more entwined with political identity, he said, so the election-rigging narrative "primes existing beliefs."
Other posts pointed to past coverage of potential vaccines for hantavirus, Covid-era comments from billionaire Bill Gates and a fictional 1990s television show as evidence the hantavirus was intentionally released to reduce the population or make money for vaccine manufacturers.
Source: Korea Times News
