Fearporn and the New PREP Act Declaration

Let's get real

Over the last several weeks, headlines and social media influencers have been whipping themselves into a frenzy over the Andes strain hantavirus outbreak tied to the M/V Hondius cruise ship. A handful of infected passengers, concerns about secondary spread, and suddenly the internet is acting like we are five minutes away from “COVID 2.0: Rodent Boogaloo.”

Now comes the latest source of panic from the health freedom movement: HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has issued a PREP Act declaration tied to the outbreak, and the usual suspects immediately began screaming that dictatorship is imminent.

The fear is that this PREP Act Declaration is paving the way for a new mRNA vaccine. That Secretary Kennedy has been coopted by evil forces.

Slow down.

This PREP Act declaration does not mention vaccines at all. What it actually does is create liability protections surrounding the investigational use of favipiravir, an antiviral drug that has shown potential activity against RNA viruses.

So - it's hard to read the outrage on Twitter, without getting annoyed… cause…

Kennedy just doesn’t need this kind of outrage from our side directed at him over this.

It is unfortunate that the meme claiming this PREP Act was secretly about a new mRNA vaccine spread virally, without people actually reading the document.

(RWM edit) - Later, Jeffrey Tucker clarified with the following post after reading this Substack.

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The Backstory

First, let’s talk about what the PREP Act actually is, because most of the people hyperventilating online clearly have not read it. The Public Readiness and Emergency Preparedness Act was passed in 2005 during the Bush administration as part of the post-9/11 biodefense era. Dick Cheney’s “1% Doctrine” years gave us a sprawling security architecture built around the assumption that if there was even a 1% chance of a catastrophic biological threat, the federal government should prepare for it as if it were certain. That mentality helped create everything from stockpile programs to emergency countermeasure frameworks to liability shields for pharmaceutical products. There is no question that the PREP Act is an abomination that Congress needs either to heavily modify or rescind. But that is an essay for a different day.

The PREP Act is essentially a legal mechanism that allows the federal government to provide liability protection for designated medical countermeasures during a declared emergency or credible threat. In plain English, it protects companies, hospitals, physicians, and distributors from being sued into oblivion if they deploy approved or investigational treatments during an emergency response.

It was heavily used during COVID, which understandably leaves many Americans deeply suspicious whenever they hear the phrase “PREP Act declaration.” Given what this country went through, that skepticism is earned.

But here is the important point. Not every PREP Act declaration is the same thing as declaring medical martial law.

If you actually read the new declaration, what Kennedy issued is remarkably narrow. It is specifically tied to the Andes virus outbreak associated with the M/V Hondius incident and close contacts linked to that chain of transmission.

The declaration does not authorize lockdowns. It does not authorize mask mandates. It does not suspend civil liberties. It does not create a vaccine mandate. It does not authorize the development of a vaccine. It does not declare a national public health emergency. There are no FEMA camps hiding behind the shrubbery waiting to abduct your Labrador retriever.

What it actually does is far more mundane. It creates liability protection surrounding the investigational use of favipiravir, an antiviral drug that has shown potential activity against RNA viruses and is now being positioned as a possible treatment option for Andes virus-associated hantavirus pulmonary syndrome. The declaration explicitly acknowledges that there are currently no FDA approved vaccines and no FDA approved antiviral drugs for this condition. In other words, the government is trying to create enough legal clarity that doctors can attempt treatment without every institution involved immediately summoning a battalion of corporate attorneys billing $900 an hour to explain why nobody should touch the patient.

Andes virus is also not your standard North American hantavirus. Most hantavirus infections in the Americas are associated with rodent exposure and are not considered readily transmissible between humans. Andes virus has long been treated differently because evidence exists for limited person-to-person spread under conditions of close contact. That is precisely why this outbreak attracted so much attention. The administration would have been condemned as negligent if it ignored the event entirely, particularly after years of being told by the public health establishment that governments must “act early.”

So now Kennedy is caught in the familiar Washington funhouse mirror. If government does nothing, it is accused of incompetence. If it creates a narrow legal framework for investigational treatment during a contained outbreak, critics immediately scream that fascism has arrived wearing an HHS badge and carrying a clipboard.

Ironically, this declaration is far more restrained than many of the emergency actions Americans witnessed during COVID. Kennedy is just using the tools at his disposal to initiate antiviral therapy. Which most likely to be given to very few people, as the RO for endemic hantaviruses in the USA is zero. It is contracted by handling rodents or their waste.

There is no massive nationwide deployment campaign here. No attempt to regulate every aspect of private life. No endless stream of contradictory “expert guidance” about whether your Thanksgiving turkey is a bioterror threat or whether you are allowed to entertain in your own home.

This is a limited liability framework attached to a specific outbreak involving a virus that, unlike most hantaviruses, actually does raise legitimate concerns about close-contact transmission - in the specific case of the Andes strain and a small, close-quartered ship.

Reasonable people can absolutely debate whether the PREP Act itself grants too much liability protection. That is a fair argument. But if such authority exists on the books, this is actually one of the more rational and limited uses of it we have seen in years. Kennedy appears to be trying to thread a very difficult needle: allowing clinicians enough flexibility to respond to a potentially dangerous outbreak while avoiding the sprawling authoritarian excesses that destroyed public trust during COVID.

Frankly, compared to what Americans lived through in 2020 and 2021, this declaration barely rises above the level of bureaucratic housekeeping with lawyers attached. Which, in Washington, may actually count as progress.

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Post Script:

Sec. Kennedy’s Press office needs to do a whole lot better. They could have saved themselves a whole lot of negative press by stating just what this declaration is and isn’t. Why wasn’t it made clear that this PREP Act Declaration was limited in scope and focus? Clarity from a communications office should be a no-brainer. Isn’t this what they are trained to do?

A press office operating in 2026 should understand that an unexplained declaration doesn’t stay unexplained; the vacuum gets filled, and it gets filled by whatever is most shareable.