Medical Expert Dr. Ashish Jha Denies Hantavirus Is the Next Pandemic

Added: 2026-05-10

[00:00:02]What's the deal with hantavirus and the spread potential spread for this? This is not going to be a pandemic. That's not how this virus is going to behave, but let me tell you guys a little bit what's happening. I'm worried about the people on the cruise ship. I think a lot of them probably end up getting infected. I hope more people don't die, [clears throat] but I'm obviously worried about that. Um the people who got off the cruise ship and went off all over the place, they got to be monitored. They just We just got to make sure that they don't end up developing symptoms. If they develop symptoms, they need to isolate. I don't think they need to isolate before they develop symptoms because this virus doesn't spread that easily, and it only spreads after people develop symptoms. That's the key part.

[00:00:39]So, this is not going to become a global outbreak, but we do have to pay attention and do our job. They say that this is a disease spread through intimate contact when it's human to human, but if it's multiple people on this ship, um I'm starting to think what kind of intimate contact if person A who has no connection to person, you know, X, um they both end up getting it. So, it's not feeling as intimate as it's being sold. Everything we know about this virus says it's hard to spread. And that generally means, yes, intimate contact, obviously, that that's one. The problem with cruise ships is you get like people packed into close quarters for long periods of time, right? So, maybe you're sitting with somebody for 4 hours watching shows or doing other things.

[00:01:26]That may That's probably enough. So, you're not going to get it passing somebody in a grocery store. You're not going to get it uh kind of through casual contact.

[00:01:34]>> The part that scared me about it, Doctor, was the fact that it's an 8-week incubation period. But you're saying that if you don't have symptoms, you're fine.

[00:01:43]So, even if you're within that 8 weeks, but if the person has no symptoms, you're fine to be next to them for 3 hours, say. When we have looked at like past outbreaks of this virus, um first of all, most of the time it doesn't spread human to human, but when it does, the person who spread it had symptoms at that time. We've not seen any evidence so far that anybody without symptoms has spread this virus. And if you understand how the virus works, that makes sense that this one is probably going to be one where you have to have symptoms. So, if somebody's feeling fine, no fever, no headache, do generally doing great, they don't need to be isolated. I remember back in COVID when everybody kind of was looking at COVID one way, and then all of a sudden out of the blue another strain came along that nobody had anticipated, but it just morphed. And um what's to say that doesn't happen here? So, what you're describing may be with the existing strain, but we saw this morph with COVID. Why wouldn't it morph here?

[00:02:42]People have done the genetic analysis on this strain, the one that's causing the outbreak right now. It looks just like the previous strains. I can't make promises for the future, right? I can't tell you this will not morph, but this is not a virus that tends to morph so much. Remember COVID, we knew nothing about it cuz it was a brand new virus. We had never dealt with it. Hantavirus been around for like at least we've known about it for five, six decades, 50, 60 years. And we have not seen it do the kind of morphing that we saw with COVID. So, I'm cautiously optimistic it's not going to do that. So far it's not showing any evidence that it's going to do that. Obviously, I can't like 100% guarantee it'll never do that, but I'm pretty confident it's not it's probably not going to happen. It's unlikely to happen. Let's put it that way.