Doctor Exposes The TRUTH Behind Britain’s New Hantavirus Panic | Dr Clare Craig

Added: 2026-05-11

[00:00:00]Um, we'll come back to that though, uh, in a moment with Alan Cook. First, Dr. Claire Craig is here, uh, on this new, uh, it says here scary virus. Um, the front page of The Times says that the army parachuted medical staff onto a remote Atlantic island in an unprecedented mission yesterday to treat a British man who became ill with hantavirus after traveling on a cruise ship. It now turns out that, um, a bunch of people are going to be flown into Manchester, I think, today. Uh, British, uh, uh, passengers from the ship flown back to the UK, 22 of them, landed last night. Uh, they're all going to be at the Arrowe Park Hospital in Merseyside kept in isolation for 6 weeks.

[00:00:36]Some people, um, Dr. Claire Craig is here. Dr. Claire, very good morning to you. Um, Good morning, Mike. Some people have said to me, you know, there seems to be an awful lot of a scaremongering going on about this new virus. Um, and are we falling into that trap where everybody's going to go, "Ooh, um, you've got to be really careful you don't catch this rat virus because it could kill you." Um, what's the what's the truth? What's going on with it?

[00:00:58]Um, that's absolutely the right thing to say, Mike. It's It's slightly odd how people are trying to whip up fear about this thing. And how public health officials, whose role should be to calm things down and to give people confidence that they know how to deal with these sorts of things. And instead of doing that, they're trying to whip up fear. So, Deborah Birx yesterday, who was the US, um, lead on the coronavirus task force, um, right at the beginning of 2020, she was talking about asymptomatic spread, how we might all be, you know, um, sharing this thing with each other in a way that was dangerous, that we shouldn't trace these things with symptoms, we should do it with testing. We need to start PCR testing. It was a real repeat of 2020 in a very, very odd way. And it's particularly odd, um, when you understand the big differences between this virus and respiratory viruses. This is not a respiratory virus. This is a virus which lives among rats. They share it, um, it spreads with feces, urine, saliva between rats. Mm. And the rats don't particularly die of it. And so there's a sort of reservoir of it in that population. And when humans sometimes inhale dust from the feces or the urine, they can get sick and they can die. Um, but when they're sick, they're not replicating loads of virus.

[00:02:15]They're not coughing out loads of virus.

[00:02:17]They're not really doing stuff that puts other people at risk. What happened is for a very short time, it can be emitted in saliva, but ultimately it goes inside the body and it destroys the vessels and that's how people die of it.

[00:02:33]But you can't catch it in that way. It doesn't make sense about catching it.

[00:02:37]And so I've looked quite deeply into how it um, into the it's sort of evidence base for human-to-human transmission.

[00:02:44]Mhm. And it's difficult, this stuff, but I think your listeners are completely going to understand the challenge. If you've got what appears to be an outbreak um, in a community, then you've got um, you know, you could potentially say, "Well, this person got it on this day and this person got it on that day."

[00:03:01]But if you want to understand where it came from, you need to have a very good understanding of the incubation period, so the time between exposure and illness.

[00:03:10]And for this particular virus, there is an enormous range. So it's between 7 days at one end and 2 months at the other.

[00:03:20]So if you've got that huge range of just, you know, people exposed at the same time being sick at very, very different times, it becomes almost impossible to say, "Well, where did it come from for this particular person?"

[00:03:30]Right. Um, and there was one study that was done in Argentina where they claimed that they had proven human-to-human transmission. They said it was definite in three people out of 476. These were all contacts in a household of other people who'd been infected. But for these, what they didn't do at the beginning of the study is say, "Well, look, if we're looking at household contacts, these clearly are people in an environment where they might also have been exposed. We ought to have a number to say, well, that's a coincidence.

[00:03:59]Yeah, there's going to be a small number where it just happens to be a coincidence where it looks like transmission, but they were exposed similarly in the same environment at another time. They never put a number on it. So, they just say that those three were real.

[00:04:11]Um and there has been since a case or two where they they followed through the genetics and they said, "Look, it looked exactly the same. It must have been human to human transmission." So, we'll give them that. Okay, we'll give them that. But these cases presumably were saliva transmission with um the the rate between spouses was way higher than between other family contacts because that's how you the only way you could transmit it.

[00:04:35]Um you know, it was through saliva or through sexual intercourse or something like that. Um so, all of this like theatrics where they're pretending it can spread through the air and dressing up in masks and stuff is just theatrics. And when you look at it closely, you see people like Tedros Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, who is the WHO general director, who was in the Tenerife when these people have got off the boat. And he's there chatting, doing the photo op in front of the bus.

[00:05:03]And the bus is full of everybody in PPE and it looks like some kind of horror film. And he's just stood chatting to everyone in front of it because it's not spread like that. No. So, this particular outbreak, it would appear, presumably, was because there were were there rats literally rats on the ship which had caused um or was there something on the ship that had been infected by the rats in some way? What had How do you think it worked? That's That is an important question to ask.

[00:05:28]And you know, we all know rats get on ships. And And I don't blame the ships or the staff on a ship for that because it's a very tricky problem and they do do things to try and prevent it. They They have spikes on the ropes that go to the jetty to stop the rats climbing up the ropes. But you know, nothing nothing's perfect. [laughter] And so yeah, you do get rats on ships still. And like the first That should be the first assumption is if there's a lot of people have been infected with a virus that rats transmit, then that should be the first assumption. And like I'm not trying to blame the people on the ship when I'm saying this at all.

[00:06:03]I'm just saying isn't it odd that nobody said that that's likely as a cause. They just don't say that. They just jump to humans are spreading it to each other.

[00:06:11]Really? You know that for? So that's a slightly odd assumption to jump to. The other assumption they jump to, and you know that they have proven it now apparently, but the first thing that you should think when there's an outbreak in a ship of people with pneumonia that die very rapidly and at high rate is Legionnaires' disease, which is the air conditioning bacteria that that that's, you know, really problematic and it kills people and and it it kills people every year and and it's difficult to sort of keep on top of and I'm again I'm not blaming that anyone for failing to, but it's, you know, that that should be the first question. And if you look at what they've said about testing, they said they've done lots of respiratory virus testing for pneumonia and they've done the blood test. It needs to be a blood test for hantavirus because it's not coming out anywhere else.

[00:06:55]Um they've never mentioned the urine test that you need to do for Legionnaires'. So that's slightly odd, too. Um yeah, so it the whole thing's been treated in an odd way and the fact that it is Argentina and that, you know, Milei is not a popular person with the globalists and that Tedros is getting sort of a chance to tell him off for leaving the WHO is interesting to me.

[00:07:15]Mhm.

[00:07:16]Well, they tried all this with the monkey pox, didn't they? You remember that? Was that last year or the year before? I can't remember when everyone was going, "Oh my god, there's this is new terrible killer disease called monkey pox." It was like actually, one, it's really not. Two, it's not really going anywhere. Three, it affects a very small number of people who have to act in a particular way in order to get it with particular people. Right? I mean, they just love this kind of, you know, let's frighten the hell out of everybody, but I I people are buying it anymore, are they?

[00:07:42]I don't know. I mean there there's a lot of people that aren't buying it. Um thankfully thankfully thankfully, but but you know, the media still love it cuz it still sells. And there are other people who still they just seem to be desperate for fear. And of course um as C.S. Lewis would say, fear is the parent of cruelty. Now, if you and I or anyone we loved was on that cruise ship and clearly in a place where they were likely to be exposed to this deadly thing, the first thing we'd want to do is get them off the cruise ship, isn't it? Yeah. And and everyone seems to be hating on these people for leaving the cruise ship. You know, like this is cruel. You know, this this is cruel to be making them stay on it. Um and and they're not they can't spread it. Even if they're infected, they're not spreading it to anyone. Just get them, you know, get them out and get them somewhere safe and just be a bit kinder.

[00:08:29]Yeah, well, why? I mean, the poor people have now having you know, having lived through the rat virus and now having to land in Manchester. You know, it's even worse for them, you know. See, they've added burdens there. For heaven's sake, telling everyone what a great promise this is going to make, you know, even though Manchester is actually falling into the pits of despair.

[00:08:48]Um yeah, well, I just hope that that the people in Manchester can just be properly reassured by someone whose job it is to reassure. I don't know why these people they never manage to do the the calming people down job anymore, do they? They're always whipping up fear.

[00:09:02]It's really really sad. And you know, I've got young children who who actually are fine on this subject, but their friends aren't. They they're being caught up in this hysteria already.

[00:09:11]Yeah. And um it's just wrong to scare people.

[00:09:15]Because at the end of the day, there are at any given time presumably loads of viruses going around, um many of which we will never hear about or see anything on or will not be infected by, but we live in a biological kind of experiment, don't we? You know, that's at the end of the day what Earth is. It's full of germs, it's full of bacteria, it's full of you know, life, different kinds of things emerging every single day, new species emerging, old species dying, you know, it's an it's a live planet. So, you of course there's going to be diseases. And the best thing we can do is be resistant to it by being reasonably healthy and not wearing a bleeding mask every time you go out.

[00:09:56]Um yeah, so the idea that you can control the, you know, diseases in the way that they sort of pretend is a is a joke. And hantavirus causes um up to 100,000 cases every year in China and North Korea. So, you know, if you want to get people scared, 100,000 is quite big number. You could get the whole world scared of it on the back of 100,000 even though it happens every year, couldn't you? And and in Argentina, um they're sort of between 60 and 100 a year. Um it goes higher when there's been a lot of rain and there's more rodents around and lower in between. Um but, you know, there were 82 in the last season that they counted.

[00:10:32]And there were 14 deaths. So, there you know, this is nothing unprecedented about this except who these people were rather than rather than that they exist.

[00:10:40]Yes. No, exactly right. Well, Dr. Claire, it's always great to talk to you and good to get a voice of sanity and reason um on the subject, which is always always welcome.

[00:10:50]Um great having me on. Thank you. Thank you.

[00:10:52]>> Pleasure Dr. Claire Craig talking an awful lot of sense there.