Potential for Pandemonium?
World health bulletin
Two years ago, in one of those Radio Free Pizza dispatches that we imagine certain readers either cherish or regret having survived, we considered the coronavirus pandemic not merely as a public-health emergency, but as a crisis of narrative authority. The question, as we understood it then, was not only whether the official story had been true, or whether the response had been justified, or whether various public-health bureaucrats, pharmaceutical executives, corporate-media personalities, and supranational functionaries had behaved with the wisdom and benevolence they so often attributed to themselves. Obviously they had not. The deeper question was how quickly a population could be trained to accept an emergency as a totalizing explanation for life: for movement restrictions, censorship, mandates, social division, institutional obedience, and the sudden moral reclassification of dissent as a danger to the species.
In that dispatch, we also considered the stranger question of “predictive programming,” or what might be called prophetic entertainment: the recurring phenomenon by which mass media appears, whether by design, coincidence, archetypal resonance, or retrospective pattern-seeking, to anticipate the crises through which we later live. That discussion moved through Utopia (2013), The Lone Gunmen (2001), pandemic simulations, vaccine narratives, and the broader problem of how fiction and reality now seem to chase each other around the same haunted carousel. Our point was not simply that television sometimes “predicts” the future. Our point was that modern publics increasingly experience the future through images, storylines, and symbolic templates already supplied to them in advance.
That problem has not gone away, but has instead become only more obvious since the official end of the 2020–’23 public health emergency. The next emergency does not need to arrive as another coronavirus pandemic in order to activate the same machinery: it only needs uncertainty, international mobility, anxious publics, public-health coordination, media amplification, and some pathogen or other moving through the world with enough ambiguity to let institutions begin narrating the situation before ordinary people know what to make of it. In other words, the next emergency arrives pre-narrated.
Which brings us, naturally enough, to this month’s hantavirus outbreak aboard a cruise ship. May 2026 reports from the BBC and PBS described an international effort to trace passengers and close contacts after an outbreak of the Andes strain of hantavirus aboard the Dutch cruise ship MV Hondius. The vessel had departed Ushuaia, Argentina, on 1 April with roughly 150 passengers and crew from more than twenty countries, made stops including St. Helena, and was continuing toward Spain’s Canary Islands when the outbreak came under international scrutiny. By 8 May, five cases had been confirmed, including three deaths, while more than 140 people still aboard approached Tenerife for medical assessment, quarantine, or repatriation.
Uncertainty defined the situation: investigators had not confirmed where the outbreak began, though Argentine officials were examining whether a Dutch couple may have contracted the virus during a pre-cruise bird-watching trip. Nor was it fully clear how many people had been exposed, since dozens disembarked at St. Helena on 24 April, before hantavirus was confirmed in a ship passenger on 4 May, and some had already traveled onward to other countries. Authorities in at least twelve countries—including the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, Germany, the Netherlands, Switzerland, and Singapore—were monitoring exposed passengers or contacts, while South African and Dutch officials worked to trace those who may have encountered a Dutch woman who later died after leaving the ship.
The World Health Organization (WHO) emphasized that the outbreak was not the beginning of a COVID-like pandemic, describing the general public risk as low because hantavirus usually spreads through exposure to contaminated rodent droppings rather than casual person-to-person contact. The Andes strain, however, is unusual because some scientists believe it can spread between people in rare cases, and symptoms may appear one to eight weeks after exposure. As a result, the incident produced a striking image of post-COVID emergency governance: dispersed travelers, delayed confirmation, incomplete contact tracing, medically equipped repatriation flights, anxious local residents, and public-health agencies attempting to impose order on a biological event already moving across borders.
Soon after the hantavirus outbreak emerged, a New York Post article from 13 May reported how social-media users had begun pointing to The X-Files and The Simpsons as supposed examples of entertainment “predicting” the hantavirus outbreak aboard the MV Hondius. (For our purposes, parallels to The X-Files are more interesting—given that the aforementioned The Lone Gunmen, depicting events remarkably similar to those 11 September 2001 just six months prior, was an X-Files spinoff—though of course The Simpsons has had a well-documented predictive capacity.) In The X-Files’ 1998 film, a whistleblower tells Agent Mulder that an apparent hantavirus outbreak had actually served as a cover story for something else, calling it a “silent weapon in a quiet war.” Online observers naturally connected that scene to the recent outbreak.
An article on Bored Panda offered a more detailed account of the film, explaining that hantavirus functioned as a central plot device in a larger story of alien colonization, government secrecy, and biological cover-up, with deaths connected to a mysterious substance discovered in a cave are publicly explained as a hantavirus outbreak. The aforementioned whistleblower explains to Mulder the supposed outbreak was in fact a government deception concealing “the systematic release of an indiscriminate organism” by men who had been preparing a planned Armageddon for decades. Some commenters also folded the comparison into broader UFO discourse—which we discussed in a February bulletin—especially after former congressman Matt Gaetz claimed on a podcast that he had once been briefed about alleged “hybrid breeding programs” involving captured aliens and humans. That’s particularly interesting when one learns, as The Daily Star mentioned, that the hantavirus outbreak in the film was “a cover-up for alien-human hybrid experiments.”
For our purposes, these articles’ significance lies less in whether The X-Files “predicted” anything than in how quickly a real outbreak became absorbed into an older mythology of hidden pathogens, biological cover stories, state secrecy, alien disclosure, and emergency management. The X-Files comparison shows the same symbolic mechanism discussed in our earlier dispatch on predictive programming and the coronavirus pandemic: once an outbreak appears, the public does not interpret it only through epidemiology or official statements, but through the entertainment archive, where fictional emergencies have already supplied recognizable patterns of suspicion, dread, and institutional distrust. Some reporters might frame these comparisons mostly as internet coincidence-hunting, but to our analysis, their significance is more structural: once a real outbreak enters public consciousness, audiences immediately search the archive of mass entertainment for prior images that appear to have anticipated it.
But others don’t look to entertainment for evidence of predictions, but instead to the pharmaceutical industry—including our beloved Dr. John Campbell, who discussed the industry’s initiatives against hantavirus on 10 May.
Here, Campbell agrees (for once) with the WHO, arguing that hantavirus is unlikely to become a broader pandemic—with the Andes strain spreading poorly between people and generally requiring close contact with someone already visibly and severely ill—and characterizes the individual risk to the public as negligible, with infection far more likely to occur through exposure to rodent urine, droppings, blood, or contaminated dust than through casual contact with passengers from the cruise ship. At the same time, Campbell notes the unusual amount of attention generated by the outbreak, especially given two claims raised by viewers that Campbell managed to verify: that Moderna has been developing an mRNA-based hantavirus vaccine since at least 2024 in collaboration with Korea University’s Vaccine Innovation Center, which provided hantavirus antigen sequence information while Moderna produced mRNA materials under its mRNA Access Program, and that “hantavirus pulmonary infection” appears among the adverse events of special interest listed in Pfizer’s cumulative post-authorization safety report for its BNT162b2 COVID-19 vaccine through 28 February 2021.
Campbell also connects that work to WHO pathogen-prioritization efforts, noting that Hantaviridae appears as a high-priority pathogen family in WHO’s 2024 prioritization framework, discussed in relation to the “Disease X” preparedness concept.
Naturally, he asks why an mRNA vaccine would be developed for a disease with low human-to-human transmissibility and whether the public-health rationale, target population, and economic incentives make sense. While the appearance of hantavirus infection on Pfizer’s post-authorization adverse-event report, pointing out that “hantavirus pulmonary infection” appears on a long list of adverse events of special interest, Campbell repeatedly cautions that this listing does not establish causality and may reflect only temporal association, but argues that its presence is nonetheless noteworthy in the context of renewed attention to hantavirus and mRNA vaccine development. The broader conclusion is that the cruise-ship outbreak itself will probably “fizzle out,” but that public distrust has become the central issue: people no longer assume international organizations, pharmaceutical companies, or public-health institutions are acting transparently, especially after COVID-19.
But hantavirus wasn’t the only viral outbreak of the past month: within days of the cruise-ship story entering the public imagination, the WHO had also elevated an ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Uganda into the category of international concern. The strain in question was not the more familiar Zaire ebolavirus, for which vaccine tools exist, but Bundibugyo virus, a rarer species of ebola for which there is, as of this writing, no approved vaccine or specific treatment.
According to a 20 May BBC report, the WHO warned that a vaccine specifically targeting the Bundibugyo species of Ebola could take six to nine months to become available, even as the outbreak’s suspected death toll continued to rise. WHO adviser Dr. Vasee Moorthy said two possible candidate vaccines were being developed, but neither had yet gone through clinical trials. One candidate was described as the most promising because it would be equivalent to the existing ebola vaccine used against the Zaire species, while another, based on the same platform as the AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccine, was still being manufactured and lacked animal data to support its effectiveness. Moorthy said doses of the second candidate might be available for clinical trial within two to three months, but emphasized that considerable uncertainty remained.
WHO chief Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said there had been roughly 600 suspected Ebola cases and 139 suspected deaths, with 51 confirmed cases in the Democratic Republic of Congo and two confirmed cases in Uganda, both involving travelers from DR Congo. Although Bundibugyo is generally considered less deadly than some other ebola species, its rarity means fewer medical tools exist to stop it: there is no approved vaccine, no targeted drug treatment, and only experimental countermeasures in development. The BBC also noted that early ebola symptoms can resemble malaria or typhoid, both common in the country, making detection more difficult. Health facilities in eastern DR Congo were reportedly overwhelmed with suspected cases, with local workers warning of inadequate protective equipment despite some supplies beginning to arrive.
The aforementioned Campbell offered his own analysis of the proposed Bundibugyo ebola vaccine in a video posted just yesterday.
Here, Campbell describes the leading Bundibugyo vaccine candidate as an Oxford-style chimpanzee adenovirus, or ChAd, viral-vector vaccine being developed in connection with Oxford University and the Serum Institute of India. He compares the platform to the Oxford/AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccine, noting that both use a genetically modified adenovirus vector rather than a traditional antigen-based approach. In this model, the injected vector delivers genetic instructions into the body’s cells, which then manufacture the target viral antigen themselves.
Campbell explains that, for the Bundibugyo ebola candidate, the intended target would be an ebola glycoprotein. He contrasts this with mRNA vaccines, which use lipid nanoparticles to deliver RNA instructions, while viral-vector vaccines use a modified virus to deliver DNA instructions. In either case, he argues, the important point is that the vaccinated person’s own cells are made to produce a viral antigen. Accordingly, Campbell naturally expresses concern that if those antigens are displayed on cell surfaces, the immune system may attack the cells producing them, raising the possibility of immune-mediated harm, and therefore connects these concerns to broader criticism of the Oxford/AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccine platform, which he reminds us produced serious adverse reactions.
At the same time, Campbell distinguishes Bundibugyo ebola from COVID-19 in terms of risk-benefit analysis. He noted that Bundibugyo ebola can have an estimated fatality rate of roughly 30%, making the local danger substantial, even if the virus is unlikely to produce a global pandemic because it spreads mainly through close person-to-person contact. For that reason, Campbell doesn’t dismiss the need for a vaccine response, but said he would have preferred a more traditional antigen-based vaccine rather than another genetically modified viral-vector platform. He echoes the BBC in reporting that the vaccine could potentially be ready for efficacy assessment within two to three months, while also emphasizing that the outbreak was likely to remain a severe regional crisis rather than a worldwide pandemic.
In the cases of both hantavirus and ebola, then, we don’t seem to be watching the beginning of the next pandemic, at least not if one takes the WHO, Campbell, and the available epidemiology at face value—and at least not yet. With only thirteen confirmed cases as of 26 May, hantavirus appears unlikely to become a global threat, and Bundibugyo ebola, however deadly in the affected region, spreads through close contact rather than the sort of casual respiratory transmission that defined COVID-19. Neither outbreak, in other words, presently looks like the next coronavirus. But that may be exactly why they are useful to consider. The machinery of emergency narration does not require a COVID-level event in order to reveal itself: sometimes it reveals itself in smaller crises, before the full apparatus of fear, censorship, coercion, and moral theater has been fully mobilized.
Accordingly, we ask, who narrates the emergency? In the official stories, the answer remains obvious: the WHO, the U.S. Center for Disease Control, national health ministries, pharmaceutical corporations, approved journalists, and credentialed experts with conference lanyards. Yet the popular imagination recalls storylines from The X-Files and The Simpsons, and, more recently, of how institutions used the coronavirus pandemic to reorder ordinary life, suppress dissent, sanctify emergency pharmaceutical products, police speech, and demand obedience while congratulating themselves for their supposed compassion. Thus, they forfeited the right to feign surprise when the public receives news of later outbreaks with suspicion.
In this sense, then, the next pandemic—whether hantavirus, ebola, or another “Disease X” (perhaps one spreading during this summer’s World Cup, as MedPage Today warned about ebola)—has already arrived with a script. Before the pathogen is fully understood, the roles have already been assigned: the authorities will ask for trust; the skeptics will ask who benefits; the press will warn about misinformation; the pharmaceutical companies will announce their products; and the public will remember mandates, censorship, injury, profit, and lies.
Whether these outbreaks fizzle out, remain regional, or develop into something more serious, the symbolic pattern is already visible. Because if the pandemic years taught us anything, it’s that biological events don’t remain merely biological once they enter the modern media ecosystem, which has the habit of displaying symptoms long before the first patient. For now, we’re told, hantavirus probably won’t become a global pandemic, and Bundibugyo ebola will likely remain a severe regional crisis rather than a worldwide threat. But if either story develops, you can count on us here at Radio Free Pizza to diagnose the narrative.