The acting head of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has attempted to soothe public concern over the hantavirus outbreak on a cruise ship — which has seen 17 Americans evacuated from the vessel and seven others return to five states — saying: “This is not Covid.”
Three people died and five others have fallen ill in the outbreak which originated on the MV Hondius ocean vessel last month. Travelers were evacuated from the ship in Spain’s Canary Islands Sunday.
None of the 140 passengers who remained on board have virus symptoms, global health officials said. Hantavirus is spread when people inhale contaminated residue of rodent droppings.
The 17 Americans from the boat will be taken to the National Quarantine Unit, a secured facility on the University of Nebraska Medical Center campus in Omaha. They will be “interviewed and assessed for risk,” Acting CDC Director Dr. Jay Bhattacharya told CNN Sunday.
“This is not Covid and we don’t want to treat it like Covid,” he said. “We don’t want to cause a public panic over this. We want to treat it with our hantavirus protocols that were successful at containing outbreaks in the past.”
Bhattacharya, acting head of the U.S. government’s top public health agency, added: “The key message I want to send to your audience is that this is not Covid. This is not going to lead to the kind of outbreak. We shouldn’t be panicking when evidence doesn’t warrant it.”
“We seem to have things under very good control,” President Donald Trump also told reporters Friday, when asked about the hantavirus.
Experts say the situation has not spiraled because, unlike Covid-19 or measles or the flu, hantavirus does not spread easily. It has been experts in other countries, not the U.S., who have been dealing primarily with the outbreak in the past week.
The CDC has been missing in action, according to a number of public health experts.
“The CDC is not even a player,” Lawrence Gostin, an international public health expert at Georgetown University, told the Associated Press. “I’ve never seen that before.”
The agency’s minuscule role in this outbreak is an indicator that it is no longer a key player in international health, experts told the outlet. Jennifer Nuzzo, director of Brown University’s Pandemic Center, said she didn’t think hantavirus was a “giant threat to the United States,” but said the situation “shows how empty and vapid the CDC is right now.”
In a statement to The Independent, a HHS spokesperson said: These claims are completely inaccurate. The U.S. government is conducting a coordinated, interagency response led by the Department of State. HHS, through ASPR and CDC, is supporting efforts to protect the health and safety of U.S. citizens, including repatriation, medical evaluation, and public health guidance.
“Since the start of the Hantavirus outbreak, the CDC activated its Emergency Operations Center to support response activities and deployed a medical team to assess American cruise ship passengers traveling to the Canary Islands. It tracked and notified state health departments of returning U.S. travelers and initiated state-level monitoring of potentially exposed individuals who had already returned. It disseminated traveler risk assessment guidance and published a Health Alert Network advisory to inform clinicians and health departments about the hantavirus cluster linked to the cruise ship,” the statement read.
The statement concluded: “The agency also hosted national stakeholder coordination calls, refined exposure assessment tools, and released a hantavirus outbreak toolkit for the public. In addition, it deployed a team to meet returning American cruise ship passengers in Omaha, Nebraska, for further assessment, monitoring, and coordination.”
The outbreak began last month when a 70-year-old Dutch man became sick with a fever on the cruise ship, traveling from Argentina to Antarctica. The man died less than a week later. The man’s wife and a German woman also died from the virus.
Two dozen Americans were on the ship, including seven who disembarked last month and 17 who remained on board.
The American passengers who left last month returned home to five states – Arizona, California, Georgia, Texas and Virginia. Officials said the passengers who returned had no symptoms and are not considered contagious. Those passengers are being monitored by health officials in those states.
The 17 remaining passengers will be flown to the Nebraska facility after disembarking in Spain Sunday. The CDC has insisted the risk to the American public is “extremely low” and described the U.S. government as “the world’s leader in global health security.”
Hundreds of workers at the Department of Health and Human Services, which includes the CDC and is overseen by Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., were fired last October. The Trump administration sent “reduction in force” memos to 1,000 CDC employees but over half of those notices were rescinded after officials said they were delivered in “error.”
The chaotic firings and re-hirings came weeks after top CDC officials resigned en masse including Director Susan Monarez and National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases Director Demetre Daskalakis, among others.
Their firings prompted warnings from public health experts that Trump, Kennedy and other administration officials were endangering the lives of Americans by politicizing public health and crippling its institutions.
“Think about what it’s like to be at CDC,” wrote Daskalakis, before his resignation in August. “It’s like living with an abusive partner that attacks and then takes back some of the abuse. That doesn’t make the partner less abusive. … CDC damage is done. Rescinded firings or not. U.S. health security is compromised.”
Among the staff re-hired were the “disease detectives” at the Epidemic Intelligence Service; leadership at the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases; scientists working on responses to measles and Ebola outbreaks; and the team that compiles the Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, according to a federal workers union.
Employees who received “incorrect” notifications that they were being fired “were never separated from the agency and have all been notified that they are not subject to the reduction in force,” an HHS official said in a statement to The Independent last year.
With reporting from The Associated Press
