#nautical notions

[victusinveritas]

Foggy Harbor in Salem, MA. Photo by Alana Rooke-Hall.

[victusinveritas]

From Joohn Choe:

The 2020 COVID-19 pandemic broke reality such that dismissal of epidemiology has become a purity test that signals tribal allegiance for American conservatives generally, and Trump supporters in particular. This can be seen in the way that MAGA influencers are processing the May 2026 hantavirus outbreak aboard the MV Hondius.

More below with pretty (disturbing) screencaps.

BACKGROUND

The MV Hondius is a Dutch-flagged Oceanwide Expeditions cruise ship for polar expeditions with 196 passenger capacity, IMO 9818709, MMSI 244327000, callsign PCEP. As of time of writing, May 8 2026, according to MarineTraffic, it is off the coast of the non-self-governing territory known as Western Sahara.

The Hondius departed Ushuaia on April 1, with the index case - a Dutch citizen who'd done a four-month bird-watching trip across Chile, Uruguay, and Argentina, including a stop at a landfill where exposure was suspected - presenting symptoms, and then dying aboard the ship on April 11.

As of May 8 the count is six confirmed and roughly twelve suspected cases with three deaths, and contact tracing has spread to South Africa, Singapore, the Netherlands, Germany, Spain, the UK, and the US, with about 146 passengers and crew still aboard heading for Tenerife (per redundant triplicate sourcing from NPR, CNN, and the WHO Disease Outbreak News).

The pathogen is confirmed as Andes virus, which is the only hantavirus with documented human-to-human transmission (CDC) and which causes hantavirus pulmonary syndrome (HPS) with a roughly 40 to 50 percent case fatality rate (PubMed, NCBI/PMC).

The WHO calls global epidemic risk low; the CDC has activated its EOC at Level 3, the lowest tier (ABC News live blog, CDC press statement). Argentine epidemiologists have documented at least one prior super-spreader cluster from 2018-2019 (The New England Journal of Medicine) where a single introduction cascaded to 34 infections. This is the reason for the attention.

AMERICAN CONSERVATIVE POLITICAL REACTION

COVID denialism, distrust of science and public health communications generally and pseudoscientific beliefs have 'hardened' into a signal of tribal allegiance for American conservatives.

This is attributable to a range of factors including racial disparities between the impact of COVID; for instance, in a University of Georgia study in 2022 white populations became markedly less likely to support non-pharmaceutical interventions when informed of COVID's disproportional impact on communities of color. A Royal Society study in 2022 found that political allegiance had a strong effect on how seriously people took the virus, and this was remarkably resistant to even Trump's diagnosis and - notably, non-ivermectin - treatment for COVID. Population-level psychological effects predisposing vast swathes of the American public towards irrational, poorly-evidenced beliefs are another persuasive theory with a strong evidence in a 2022 study summarizing antecedents of COVID conspiracy theory beliefs.

The effect of this, in 2026, is that denial of science is a tribal signal for MAGA and any new pathogen, no matter what it is, now functions as a loyalty test where the politically correct answer is a rehearsed, preset, preemptive dismissal, regardless of underlying epidemiology.

The cost function is asymmetric inside the coalition: being wrong about the danger (a pathogen turns out worse than dismissed) is treated as cheaper than being wrong about safety (endorsing measures that turn out unnecessary) because the latter is what they believe broke the right's political position in 2020.

To this point, consider the below from a right-wing Facebook meme page. It's Dr. Drew Pinsky interviewing Katy Talento, who was the lead health advisor on Trump's first-term Domestic Policy Council and is now a self-described "recovering epidemiologist," naturopathic doctor, and CEO of AllBetter Health - basically, a fixture in the MAHA (Make America Healthy Again) ecosystem.

While not as alarmist as the remainder of the content, this is nonetheless notably wrong.

-- "It's not a respiratory virus. Stop it." - incorrect, Andes virus causes hantavirus pulmonary syndrome, which CDC defines explicitly as a "severe respiratory disease"; Mayo Clinic describes pulmonary edema, respiratory failure, and cardiogenic shock; the clinical literature characterizes HPS as "diffuse, bilateral interstitial pulmonary infiltrates and compromised respiratory function" (NCBI/PMC). Drew may have meant "not a respiratory-route virus" (i.e., primarily zoonotic via airborne rodent excrement particles, rather than aerosolized droplets between people). Andes virus can spread person to person, however, and the clinical syndrome is a lung disease, so the claim as delivered is just plain false on both possible readings.

-- "Odds of getting hit by lightning are higher." This is defensible for an American with no Hondius contact but provably, mathematically wrong for the 146 still aboard the Hondius, the 30+ who disembarked at St. Helena, the contacts on the April 25 Johannesburg-bound flight where one passenger deteriorated mid-flight (NPR), or the woman in Spain's Alicante province who's already tested positive after taking that flight (ABC News).

This is the same wack-ass hyperbole that got Pinsky in trouble in 2020. Pinsky used nearly the exact same rhetorical device in February 2020: he said the chances of dying from COVID "lower than being hit by an asteroid" and then apologized in April 2020, saying "my early comments equating coronavirus with influenza were wrong... I got it wrong."

This is not an isolated pattern; this is from an hour before time of writing on Facebook.

Again, this is notably wrong: no national or international health authority has proposed lockdowns. The WHO is explicitly assessing global epidemic risk as low as is the CDC. We're literally talking one cruise ship and a bunch of ports of call that aren't even in America.

Then there's the MAGA groups.

Irrespective of whether or not you're even an anti-vaxxer at all, the problem with warning people "Don't take the vaccine" is that there is no commercially available hantavirus vaccine in the US or EU, and, absent a historic effort like Operation Warp speed, there is none on the horizon for literally decades. A team at University of Bath is reported to be using mRNA tech to develop one, though, despite having been used in Trump's own Operation Warp Speed, MAGA still appear to treat resistance to mRNA vaccines as a political article of faith.

It's fearmongering about something that doesn't exist which would have taken the writer of this preternaturally ignorant meme less than five seconds to Google in order to ascertain.

That is how automatic the anti-epidemiology reaction is with MAGAs. The tell is how the rhetoric repeats.

"Herd immunity is the only way out", here, is the repeating rhetorical tell, it's a straight-up category error. Hantaviruses don't sustain respiratory chains in human populations the way SARS-CoV-2 does.

Though Andes virus human-to-human transmission does happen, it's rare - the 34-case Argentinian super-spreader event was over the course of two years where people basically went around like normal. Transmission requires close, often household-level contact (CDC, Argentina 2014 cluster sequencing paper).

"Herd immunity" is borrowed COVID vocabulary, awkwardly stapled onto a pathogen to which it doesn't apply.

Even for MAGA - even for "TRUE Black American woman" Joey Mannarino - this is remarkably stupid.

WHAT THIS MEANS

These posts aren't responses to hantavirus; they're responses to the memory of March 2020 triggered by the keyword "outbreak". Mannarino's tweet says the quiet part out loud: "I don't care one bit anymore. You killed that with your COVID propaganda."

A few overlapping mechanisms operate here:

-- Response stereotypy. The script is: no lockdowns, no vaccines, it's nothing, the media is panicking, Trump will protect us, herd immunity, blah blah, turn the TV off. It's a "sausage" of 2020-2021 political rhetoric that gets deployed against any disease threat whether or not the premises map, which, for hantavirus, they pretty obviously don't. The template precedes the threat at some level.

-- The validator economy. Talento, on the Dr. Drew Pinsky show, is the same archetypal pairing as the 2020-era mainstreaming of dissent: a former government health official plus a celebrity doctor, framed as brave truth-tellers against an "exaggerated" mainstream press. The fact that Pinsky is recycling his own apologized-for hyperbole - the risk of getting hit by an asteroid, the risk of being hit by lightning - suggests either that he learned nothing from the apology or, more likely, that he's decided the apology was the mistake. Talento's MAHA-bullshit positioning (see her Daily Caller op-ed) makes her a perfect validator: just credentialed enough to dismiss the credentialed, dissident enough to be cheered for it.

-- The lockdown ghost. Allen textually screaming "NO LOCK DOWNS NO MATTER WHAT HAPPENS, ALIENS, HANTAVIRUS, NOTHING" is the MAGA coalition pre-committing to opposing any future public health measure regardless of justification. From a decision-theory standpoint, it's basically surrendering their judgment authority over future pandemics in advance and announcing their plans to disrupt the rest of society, which, (why would you tell me that, thanks I guess?) is a strategic liability dressed up as defiance; this is the kind of thing that gets trotted out next time an epidemic happens to prove how stupid you were, that's why you don't say things like that. The fact that such statements "poll" well inside the MAGA coalition right now signals tribal fidelity based on a kind of self-inflicted cultural trauma around non-pharmaceutical interventions of the COVID pandemic.

-- The "you killed that" framing. Mannarino treats lack of trust in public health communications as a kind of sunk cost that can't be recovered, which is convenient because it absolves the speaker of any need to evaluate new evidence on its merits going forward. The effect is a kind of tribalistic, dismiss-by-default paradigm for any new outbreak.

To be clear: while the hantavirus cluster is real, the WHO and CDC risk assessment for the general public is, real talk, low for a reason, and the lockdown panic these posts are pre-empting isn't on any policy table literally anywhere.

What we're seeing here is really the playbook that MAGA will run the next time a pandemic hits, and if Trump or someone like him is in power when - not if - that happens, it's going to be bad.

And it's a bit of a liberal trope to be sure but given that the primary means that American society offers its citizens to reform massive error is elections it really does drive home the importance of voting, because otherwise this kind of idiocy becomes policy, as it is becoming right now all over the country.

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[victusinveritas]

Shipwreck Archives on Facebook:

A destroyer that fought for both sides now rests almost untouched on the seafloor

USS Stewart (DD-224) lies about 3,500 feet down off the coast of northern California inside Cordell Bank National Marine Sanctuary. The wreck was located in August 2024 using high resolution sonar and later confirmed with ROV footage. The hull is still largely intact and resting nearly upright on the seabed, which is unusual for a destroyer of her age. Survey teams described the preservation as exceptional, making her one of the best surviving examples of a U.S. Navy “four stacker” destroyer. The site matches historical records of where she was intentionally sunk after the war, and modern mapping has now given a clear view of her full outline on the ocean floor.

Her story is what makes her stand out. During World War II, she was part of the Asiatic Fleet and was damaged in combat in early 1942 before being abandoned in Java. The Imperial Japanese Navy later raised and repaired her, putting her back into service as Patrol Boat No. 102. Allied pilots then began reporting sightings of what looked like an American destroyer operating under Japanese control, giving rise to the “ghost ship of the Pacific” nickname. After the war, she was found in Japan, returned to U.S. control, and brought back across the Pacific. Instead of being preserved, she was used as a target ship and deliberately sunk off California after taking heavy fire, ending a career that had seen her serve on both sides of the conflict.

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