Hantavirus scare ramps up
Key Markets report for Thursday, 7 May 2026
Tuesday’s Substack glitch was in fact Google Drive glitch: just a good-to-know note, what I thought was a Substack glitch on Tuesday was most probably a Google Drive glitch; the server Substack “couldn’t connect to” was the Google server. While sending the reports yesterday, I received notifications that certain individual subscribers would not be able to open some linked documents due to “permitting issues.” Except, the notifications were obviously erroneous, referring to documents I did not link and subscribers who weren’t on the distribution list - clearly a bug of some sort. This was only a reminder that advanced technologies aren’t flawless and will misbehave from time to time. Longer term subscribers will appreciate that software quality is one of the themes I periodically write about. Having spent many years in software development, I tend to be more opinionated than average, since software malfunction could directly impact what we do at I-System Trend Following.
An odd outbreak
Over the last few days the media stepped on the fearmongering accelerator over a new potential pandemic, this time caused by Andes hantavirus, the only strain of hantavirus that can spread from human to human, which incubates for up to six weeks (let’s see where this story goes through mid-June) and which supposedly has a fatality rate of up to 50%. The outbreak apparently occurred on the cruise ship MV Hondius. Here’s the timeline:
April 1 - MV Hondius departs Argentina for a polar expedition cruise
April 6 - first passenger collapses with fever and pneumonia
April 26 - his wife dies mid-flight to Johannesburg
May 2 - a German national dies onboard
May 7 - the ship sails toward Spain with no country willing to let it dock
The toll thus far: 3 dead, 8 infected. The vessel is now apparently stuck near Cape Verde (Cabo Verde) islands, off the coast of Western Africa. The terrible, horrible contagion could thankfully be isolated, since the outbreak occurred on a ship in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, but mysteriously somehow, some of the passengers managed to travel to Switzerland, others to the Netherlands, and apparently nobody knows who else might be carrying the frightful hantavirus or where they went. This morning, the media reported that it was spotted in Singapore.
The media broadcast frightful images of masked people in protective gear evacuating three of the passengers. To drive the emotional impact home, Jake Rosmarin, a passenger on MV Hondius recorded an emotional video conveying the fear and anxiety he’s experiencing onboard. The mainstream media ran with the story, but in the social media, the video largely flopped, buried by reactions and comments. A typical comment: “I really wanted to feel bad for the guy, its an awful situation, but the constant looking to the right to find the script makes it really hard.”
Too many coincidences
In addition to Rosmarin’s overacting and appearing like he was reading off cue cards, the suspicion that he was a crisis actor was reinforced by the fact that his sister, Rachel Rosmarin, who has a master's degree in Public Health, works in Emergency Management and Disaster Recovery. That may be a coincidence, but there are just too many coincidences to the whole hantavirus scare.
Pandemic exercises Polaris I and Polaris II — the world’s biggest pandemic war games took place in April 2025 and April 2026. This year, the scenario involved a crew of researchers embarking on an expedition to the arctic (just like MV Hontius) and getting infected by some pathogen that emerged from the permafrost (due to global warming, of course). WHO declares that global cooperation isn’t optional - it is essential.
Cabo Verde islands established a close cooperation with the World Health Organization and Bill Gates’ Global Fund. On 31 March this year, they signed a 2026-2027 “Work Plan” with the World Health Organization. WHO’s Ann Lindstrand visited the hospital in Praia, Cabo Verde on 14 April this year. Of course, none of that may be unusual or suspicious, but the next coincidence definitely is.
In the summer of 2024, Moderna partnered with the Korea University Vaccine Innovation Center to develop an mRNA-based hantavirus vaccine, and they were not the only ones. Big pharma and the U.S. Department of Defence have been working on 13 different hantavirus vaccines.
Five years ago, in May 2021, Bill Gates’ GAVI Vaccine Alliance published an article titled, “The Next Pandemic: Hantavirus?”
A pandemic was definitely on the cards
In September last year, European Commission President, the crooked and dishonourable Ursula von der Leyen warned in her State of the Union speech to the EU parliament that “We are on the brink, if not even at the start of another global health crisis.” She did not elaborate what kind of a crisis she was talking about, and nothing at all happened after her speech, leaving the impression that she was only giving away the mindset in the ruling circles that a new health emergency was being considered.
On 21 November I published TrendCompass artice titled, “Are new & improved lockdowns coming?” as it appeared that the ruling establishment was actively preparing for the next pandemic. At the time, the Right and Honourable Baroness Heather Hallett DBE’s published a 1,531-page COVID-19 inquiry advocating for “stringent restrictions,” and implementing of the countermeasures sooner and more decisively.
New lockdowns can only mean one thing
Six days after my report, Reuters announced that, “Bird flu virus could risk pandemic worse than COVID 19 if it mutates…” In the end, nothing came of the bird flu, but now we have the hantavirus and if this one catches on, and we get new lockdowns, masking, social distancing and a new vaccines marketing campaign, that can only mean one thing: that the banking system urgently needs a massive new bailout, which I elaborated in “The viruses are coming, the viruses are coming” in December last year, and which could be consistent with yesterday’s post about the empire’s loss of collateral and financial flows from the Middle East.
It will be interesting to see whether the media and the public health authorities will be able to ramp up the fear factor over the hantavirus sufficiently to compel the population’s compliance with their countermeasures. Over the last few years, we had several abortive scares like the bird flu, monkey pox and the Marburg virus, but who knows, perhaps the fourth time’s the charm?
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Today’s trading signals
With yesterday’s closing prices we have the following changes for the Key Markets portfolio:
