Former CDC Director says hantavirus is 'not the next pandemic'

Added: 2026-05-16

[00:00:00]This particular strain of the hantavirus uh is quite lethal. Now, that is not to say this is the next pandemic.

[00:00:09]Hantavirus is not set up to cause a pandemic the way say COVID was at this point. And there's nothing to suggest that it is on the way to doing that.

[00:00:18]However, there's a much more important lesson here, which is that we in this country and around the world are much less safe because the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has been hollowed out. We have left the World Health Organization, and we are vulnerable to threats because we don't have these basic defenses. It would be as if our missile and ground defenses were down because we felt like, you know, we didn't have to worry about anything happening in the rest of the world. And this outbreak shows that an infection anywhere can spread to dozens of places almost overnight.