One can only admire the stamina of our international health bureaucracy. Like a ageing actor who has played Hamlet once too often, the World Health Organization has returned to the stage with a new production, this time featuring not a melancholy Dane but a rodent-borne virus that has had the temerity to appear on a cruise ship. The MV Hondius, a vessel whose very name sounds like a suppressed sneeze, has become the unlikely theatre for this drama. Some nine cases, three deaths, passengers from twenty-plus countries, contact tracing, quarantines, and the faint but unmistakable whiff of another opportunity for the great and the good to demonstrate their indispensability.
Dr David Bell, a man with the weary air of someone who has seen this particular farce before, points out the obvious with the sort of bluntness that used to be mistaken for common sense. Hantavirus, in its various guises, infects somewhere between 10,000 and 100,000 people a year across the globe. Most of it comes from rodents doing what rodents do best: leaving little gifts in corners where humans would rather not look. The fatality rate can be grim in certain strains, but the disease has been plodding along for decades without requiring the mobilisation of the planetary nervous system. Yet here we are, with the WHO fanning the embers of a cluster into something resembling a conflagration. One is reminded of that line from the old master: the louder the protestations of urgency, the stronger the suspicion that something else is being sold.
The strain in question is the Andes variety, which possesses the rare and thrilling ability to pass, on occasion, from one human to another—usually after the sort of prolonged close contact that cruise ships, with their shared buffets and confined corridors, regrettably facilitate. This is not nothing. Three people have died, and one does not mock tragedy. But nor does one pretend that a handful of cases on a floating retirement home constitutes the opening act of the next great extinction event. The CDC itself, not normally accused of reckless insouciance, rates the public risk as low. The passengers are being dispersed under appropriate precautions, and the rest of us are invited to return to our lives without immediately donning hazmat suits to collect the post.
Yet the machinery grinds on. Notifications, alerts, disembarkations in Tenerife, the inevitable talk of treaties and preparedness. One pictures the conference rooms in Geneva, the earnest slides, the polite applause for yet another framework that will require funding, coordination, and—most importantly—more of the same people who brought us the previous performance now taking a victory lap for their vigilance. Bill Gates, that tireless philanthropist whose fortune seems to expand in direct proportion to global health anxiety, has interests in this area, as does the broader ecosystem of vaccine development. Malaria continues its patient work of killing some 2,000 people daily; tuberculosis around 4,000. These lack the glamour of a cruise ship outbreak. They are simply there, year after year, like reliable character actors who never quite make the poster.
The satire writes itself. In 2020 we were treated to the spectacle of the world locking itself down with a unanimity that would have impressed the more ambitious emperors of old. Models predicted mountains of corpses; television screens filled with graphs climbing like Jacob’s ladders; experts appeared hourly to remind us that we were all in this together, preferably six feet apart. The public, to its eventual regret, largely complied. Economies were torched, education disrupted, mental health collateralised, and a great many liberties accepted as temporary inconveniences. We were told it was science. It was often modelling, politics, and fear dressed up in a white coat.
This time, however, the audience has read the script. The replies to Toby Young’s post and the broader murmur online carry the unmistakable tone of people who have seen the sequel and recognise the same director. “We’re not buying it,” as one succinctly put it. The trust that was squandered so profligately during the coronavirus years has not been magically replenished. People remember the shifting goalposts, the suppressed debates, the economic devastation handed out with the breezy assurance that experts knew best. They remember, too, how certain interests—pharmaceutical, technological, administrative—profited handsomely while small businesses and the young bore the brunt. A cynicism has set in, and cynicism, for all its sourness, can sometimes function as a healthy immune response. There is something almost touching about the WHO’s persistence. Like a missionary in a land grown sceptical of miracles, it continues to preach the gospel of coordinated global action against the latest zoonotic interloper. Hantavirus on a cruise ship! Quick, dust off the pandemic agreement, convene the working groups, prepare the communications strategy. One almost expects Tedros himself to appear on deck in a hazmat suit, striking a solemn pose for the cameras. The optics are irresistible: decisive leadership in the face of a novel-ish threat. Never mind that the novelty is mostly in the setting, not the pathogen.
The language of emergency is seductive because it flatters the emergency-mongers. It turns bureaucrats into heroes, modellers into prophets, and the rest of us into grateful extras. Yet reality has a stubborn habit of intruding. Most hantavirus remains a rural, rodent-afflicted affair. The Andes strain’s person-to-person transmission is real but limited, requiring the sort of intimacy that does not scale easily to continents. The cruise ship cluster is a genuine if contained misfortune—precisely the sort of incident public health systems should handle with quiet competence rather than orchestral fanfares. The public, one senses, has grown tired of being cast as the perpetual victim in these morality plays. They have mortgages, jobs, children to raise, and a healthy suspicion that the next round of restrictions, digital IDs, or “benefit-sharing” mechanisms for pathogens will serve everyone except them. The lesson of 2020 was not that viruses do not exist or that precautions are always foolish. It was that fear is a potent political solvent, and those who wield it rarely surrender the tool voluntarily.
So here we are again: a handful of cases on a ship, three tragic deaths, and the machinery of panic revving its engine with familiar enthusiasm. The difference this time is the audience. They have seen the show. They know the plot twists. And they are, in increasing numbers, refusing to applaud on cue. In the long run, that may be the healthiest development of all. A public that has recovered its scepticism is harder to lead by the nose, even when the nose is pointed firmly toward Geneva. The rodents will keep doing what they do. The question is whether we will let the human ones do the same.