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Hantavirus made me reconsider the World Health Organization. Trump should too.

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by Marc Siegel, opinion contributor - 05/12/26 12:30 PM ET

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by Marc Siegel, opinion contributor - 05/12/26 12:30 PM ET

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Passengers are disembarked from the hantavirus-stricken cruise ship MV Hondius at the port of Granadilla in Tenerife, Canary Islands, Spain, Sunday, May 10, 2026. (AP Photo/Manu Fernandez)

The World Health Assembly, the main decision making body of the World Health Organization, is meeting this year in Geneva starting next Monday. This meeting may represent the last chance for the U.S. to reverse course and remain a member of the WHO.

The organization’s superb handling of the ongoing hantavirus outbreak is the main reason I believe the U.S. should stay. WHO has taken the lead since May 2, when it received confirmation that a passenger on a Dutch-flagged cruise ship which departed from Argentina on April 1 tested positive for the infection.

Back at the beginning of the COVID-19 outbreak in 2020, I was a big critic of the WHO. I felt they were too close to China and it clouded their vision at a time the emerging pandemic had already spread beyond China into Europe.

But things have changed since then, and I have changed my mind, as I would urge President Trump to do now. Viruses don’t obey borders, as the hantavirus outbreak is showing. Even as we quarantine passengers and investigate their contacts in the U.S. in Texas, New Jersey, Georgia, California, Virginia, Arizona and Nebraska, we are relying on information being obtained and distributed by the WHO.

I personally have been in direct contact with Dr. Maria Von Kerkhove, an extremely knowledgeable American infectious disease epidemiologist and the interim director of WHO’s Department and Pandemic Management. She has personally been reassuring the world that the hantavirus outbreak is not a risk on the level of a COVID and she has been providing extremely useful scientific information to back that statement up.

She has told me “WHO is developing step-by-step operational guidance for the safe and respectful disembarkation and onward travel of passengers and crew when they arrive.” She said a WHO expert onboard the ship in Cabo Verde is working with officials from the Netherlands and the European Centre for Disease Prevention. “They are conducting a medical assessment of everyone on board and gathering information to assess their risk of infection.”

Von Kerkhove supports the assumption that the Andes strain of hantavirus confirmed by the National institute for Communicable Diseases of South Africa and Geneva University Hospitals was due to a Dutch couple’s exposure to infected rodents before boarding the ship.

“From then, the exposure is most likely to have been from person-to-person,” Von Kerkhove told me. She also said that the WHO has received no information that the virus has in any way changed or mutated, which is quite reassuring.

Keep in mind that the Andes strain of hantavirus has been previously studied and found to be very difficult to spread human to human, with spread to approximately one percent of household contacts and 17 percent of sexual contacts. This is likely what we are dealing with now.

Given the incubation period of the disease is one to six weeks, Von Kerkhove says that we could still see some more cases in the coming days. Nevertheless, the risk to the public remains quite low. She adds that early, high quality supportive care for those with infection also saves lives. The U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases is working on monoclonal antibodies against the virus.

“WHO’s rapid, multi-national response to the hantavirus cases demonstrates the organization’s critical importance to keeping the world safe, and of the need for global collaboration for global health security. Solidarity is the best immunity,” Von Kerkhove told me.

I agree with this statement and believe that we need the WHO’s eyes and ears to help keep Americans better protected against emerging infectious diseases. I have met with their leaders in recent months, and I believe that their acknowledgement of the U.S. as a crucial global health ambassador is far more central than it was before.

Marc Siegel MD is a professor of medicine and medical director of Doctor Radio at NYU Langone Health.

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