I’d be inclined to laugh off the hantavirus issue if it weren’t for the fact that, by one of those cruel twists of fate, it has landed in the hands of the most incompetent and idiotic government in the entire Western world: the government of Spain. Outside my country, people have no idea of the destructive capacity of President Pedro Sánchez. Grass never grows where he walks. If he has the choice between 50 brilliant ideas and one bad, dangerous, suicidal, destructive idea, he will always choose the bad one. And, of course, he has never told a single truth in his life. Sometimes I suspect his name isn’t even Pedro Sánchez, that he wasn’t born in Madrid, and that he isn’t really an economist at all, but rather Emily Whitaker, an elderly woman from Kansas City with a fondness for origami and whiskey.
In case you haven’t heard, there’s a hantavirus outbreak aboard a Dutch cruise ship that departed from Argentina, with three deaths already on board and nearly a dozen infections. The MV Hondius attempted to evacuate passengers in Cape Verde, but the authorities refused. Then the World Health Organization (incomprehensibly still in existence after the disaster of the pandemic) appeared and ordered that the passengers be disembarked in Spain, in the Canary Islands. Closer to Cape Verde than Spain are countries such as Liberia, Sierra Leone, The Gambia, Senegal, and Mauritania. But the WHO decided the ship should head to Spain and be treated there, and although the Spanish government was entirely sovereign in deciding whether to accept or reject the recommendations of that fool Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, it embraced them gladly, once again confirming that nobody hates Spaniards more than Pedro Sánchez.
When the regional authorities in the Canary Islands refused to accept the ship, the government decided to transfer all the patients to Madrid, in the heart of the Iberian Peninsula, to a military hospital under the authority of the Ministry of Defense. The maneuver is doubly perverse: on the one hand, it dumps an extremely serious problem onto Madrid, a region governed by the political right, and on the other, the regional president has no power to refuse because the hospital in question falls under the jurisdiction of the central government.
In the middle of the crisis, the Spanish Dr. Fauci, Fernando Simón, resurfaced to reassure the public that there was nothing to worry about, claiming hantavirus could only be contracted if you started drinking rat urine. Naturally, less than 24 hours later, headlines were already disproving the first deception: the MV Hondius strain is reportedly the most contagious among humans. It’s horrifying to realize we’ve already lived through this nightmare once before. The moment Spaniards saw Fernando Simón back on television, they began placing bulk orders for toilet paper. I’m ordering beer.
And yes, fine, hantavirus is not coronavirus, and it shouldn’t be nearly as alarming, but in the hands of the Spanish government, any catastrophe becomes possible. Domestically, the explanation for why Sánchez rushed to take charge of the situation before anyone even asked him to (remember, the ship was still 900 miles from Spanish territory) is that the health crisis would conveniently push out of the headlines the trial currently underway, in which several of his ministers and close associates are expected to be convicted amid corruption scandals involving the purchase of medical masks, orgies with prostitutes during the pandemic lockdown, and the appointment of prostitutes to public office. Could Sánchez really endanger Spain and Europe with the risk of a major hantavirus outbreak simply because it might benefit him politically by shifting the public conversation? Of course he could. You could only doubt it if you didn’t truly know the man.
Still, there’s one aspect of this entire affair that I don’t want to overlook. The expedition run by Oceanwide Expeditions is a luxury trip costing about $32,000, packed with extreme nature experiences. In other words, a living hell. It now appears confirmed that the first two victims, two Dutch tourists, boarded the ship after spending a month traveling across Patagonia in a camper van, including a possible visit to the horrifying Ushuaia landfill, which is crawling with rats. It’s still unclear why they went there, whether to watch birds or stare at garbage, but according to my own research, there is an environmental organization dedicated to organizing landfill clean-up activities in Ushuaia for locals and tourists (especially cruise passengers).
It would be fascinating if the irresponsible attempt by a group of wealthy tourists to wash away their environmental guilt had involved handling garbage in one of the world’s most hantavirus-prone areas, ultimately triggering a deadly outbreak with unpredictable consequences. And if you still think that sounds implausible, I can assure you that even after news of the hantavirus outbreak became public, the environmental group has continued organizing its clean-up excursions in Ushuaia as if nothing had happened, with the cheerful participation of tourists deeply concerned about the environment, as anyone can verify from their social media accounts — which I have no intention of promoting here.
Sometimes I think that, sharing a planet with so many idiots, the real miracle is that we’re still alive.
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Image licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 de.
