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Lisa Booth
This is an iHeart podcast.
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Guaranteed human for 250 years, America has been a bastion of freedom. And as we look ahead to the next 250, we're reminded that freedom is ours to defend. Today, Alliance Defending Freedom stands in courtrooms across the country to protect those freedoms we cherish life, free speech, religious freedom, parental rights. These freedoms are at the core of who we are as a nation and they must be preserved. ADF is approaching a critical fiscal year end fundraising deadline. Your support today helps ADF defend these freedoms so they may endure for many years to come. Every dollar you give will be doubled thanks to a special matching grant while funds last. Visit joinadf.com Lisa or text Lisa to 83848 to give today sponsored by Alliance
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Lisa Booth
Welcome to the Truth with Lisa Booth,
Co-host or Announcer
where we get to the heart of
Lisa Booth
the issues that matter to you today. We're talking about the hantavirus, but I
Co-host or Announcer
want to be clear that I'm not covering it to spread fear. If you remember, I never got the COVID vaccine.
Lisa Booth
I was always against lockdowns as well. Really, from the beginning, I challenged the status quo.
Co-host or Announcer
So I'm not doing this, not covering it to make you scared. If anything, I'm covering it because it's not as scary as the way the media is portraying it. Yes, there's a very high fatality rate, about 40%, but it's not very transmissible. And that's the key difference between Covid and this. So yes, we're watching an outbreak. Yes, we're covering it globally. Yes, it's something to pay attention to, but it's not something to fear. So we're going to have my friend
Lisa Booth
and colleague, Dr. Mark Siegel on the show, and what we're going to do
Co-host or Announcer
is walk through how it got started, the origins of it, the sort of symptoms that people have, will also talk a little bit about the fatality rate, but most importantly that it's not very transmissible and also that there's not key concerns that it's going to mutate into something that is more transmissible. So the good news is, obviously it's
Lisa Booth
sad that we've lost lives, but it's
Co-host or Announcer
not something you should fear. However, we're going to learn more about it.
Lisa Booth
Stay tuned for Dr. Mark Siegel.
Co-host or Announcer
Not only is he my colleague at
Lisa Booth
Fox News, but he's also the author
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of Miracles Among Us. Colorado is trying to silence free speech again. Estate law forces businesses there to use customers preferred pronouns even if they're biologically incorrect. With the help of Alliance Defending Freedom, a Christian bookstore and a sports apparel company are challenging the law, but a court recently ruled against them. They appealed the ruling and with ADF's help, they'll continue fighting another attempt by Colorado to skirt the First Amendment. Learn more about how you can support free speech by texting Lisa to 83848 or go to joinadf.com Lisa sponsored by Alliance Defending Freedom.
Ben Ferguson
Hey, it's Ben Ferguson and I want you to pause what you're doing for just one minute And I want you to hear about Alejandra. She lives in a remote community with very few resources and little to no health care. So when Alejandra gets sick, her parents have no real options. No doctors in their community and no money for real medical care. By the third day, her body was shutting down. She woke up just long enough to tell her mom, I can't take the pain anymore. I can't keep going. Her parents drove hours to find a doctor who tried everything. But she needed a private hospital and that was impossible for her family to afford. And that is when Compassion International stepped in. Now, through Compassion, Alejandra was treated. And against all odds, she survived. She lived because someone just like you took action. Right now, unfortunately, there are children just like Alejandra who won't survive unless someone like you steps in. Compassion International partners with local churches, providing children with the support that they need. Critical medical care plus food, education, and the hope of the gospel, all in Jesus name. So help a child just like Alejandra. Today you can visit compassion.com that's compassion.com
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Lisa Booth
Well, Dr. Mark Siegel, it's great to have you on the show. You're a friend and colleague. You've been on before. We really appreciate you making the time.
Dr. Mark Siegel
Always great to be with you, Lisa, and on TV too.
Lisa Booth
Thank you. Well, so there's the, the hantavirus is going around, obviously there's this cruise ship and then now we're dealing with passengers that went elsewhere around the world and just concerns about the spread of it. You've been following the story from the beginning, also speaking to some of the key doctors who have been seeing some of these patients. Walk us through. I know you've recently learned some new information. Why don't you tell us first and foremost what you've recently learned, and then we'll kind of move from there.
Dr. Mark Siegel
I can give you a better timetable than I could before. Even when I went to Nebraska and I interviewed everybody there, the people that were the head of the quarantine unit, Dr. Brett Major, who flew you and I talked about the other day, who flew over there and got on the State Department authorized 747 that was gutted and filled with medical facilities to bring people back was very dramatic, returned to the United States, very well handled by the State Department, by hhs, by a group called Phoenix, from Georgia, from the doctor, by the doctors from Nebraska. That was a really good piece of this. And, you know, that was the part where the 16, or actually the 18American passengers were brought back, and then two of them were sent to Emory. Fifteen were put into quarantine unit in Nebraska, and the other one was Dr. Kornfeld was. Was put in the biocontainment unit. And he's the person I interviewed yesterday. Kornfeld is really fascinating. He's an oncologist from Oregon, and he's semi retired. And he went on this trip, Lisa, because he's a big bird watcher and he's one of the top amateur bird watchers in the world. And he says that this MV Hondius goes all over near Antarctica and goes to little islands, you know, using tiny boats to get onto the rubber boats to see birds that you couldn't otherwise see. So there's one group that's looking for penguins, only species of penguins they've never seen. And another group is mapping out territory. That group, Both of those two groups got off the boat on April 24th in St. Helena. And the reason that that's significant and very disturbing to me is because the first person that got sick and died was all the way back on April 11, and then his wife literally got off the boat in Helena and was getting on a commercial flight, and then she ends up dying, too. And they still don't know what this is. And they only figured out what this was on May 2nd when a British guy got taken off the boat and was brought at Ascension island and then went over to Johannesburg, where they're very good at identifying viruses. And they said, hey, he's sick on a ventilator in the icu. And what he has is hantavirus. So the ship is still floating around at that point. And Dr. Kornfeld took over as the ship's doctor on May 1st. Get this. Because the other, the real doctor, the general practitioner, got sick also. And they didn't figure out on the boat that this was Andy's strain of hantavirus that can go human to human occasionally or with close contact. Until the second case, the woman that ended up in Johannesburg, and she died tragically was also found to be hantavirus. So then they put two and two together, and they said, at least two people on this boat have gotten hantavirus. How did they get it? They must have spread it among each other. But here's my point. This went all the way from April 6, when the first guy got it, these bird watchers that had brought it on the boat with them, all the way until May 4th until they figure out what's going on. That really bothers me. There's a lot of close contact going on at that point on the ship. There's people getting off the ship on April 24th that are flying all over the world now since May 4th. I think that the various countries involved, including the United States and the CDC and the European Union health doctors and the Dutch doctors and the World Health Organization, I think they've done a really good job tracking it since then. But the genie is out of the bottle. Very difficult to spread this stuff. I'm still not that concerned about it, but I don't like how long it took to identify what it was, you know?
Lisa Booth
So, okay, so the Andes strain of it, as you mentioned, can go human to human. Is that rare? So. So, you know, these birdwatchers who went to this area, this landfill on the outskirts in Argentina, Is it rare for them to catch Andy's virus from rodent droppings there? Or is that abnormal to you at all? Or is that. You know, obviously we don't hear much about this until recently. So is that. Is the Andes virus typically the one that people get? Or. You know what I mean? Like, I guess, walk us through that. Is that okay?
Dr. Mark Siegel
So the virus, the Andes virus, is not the one that people usually get, which is one of the reasons that nobody thought this was contagious. First of all, they didn't know what the first guy died from at all. And even when they found out it was Andy's, that it was Honda, they didn't think it was the Andy strain. You mentioned that landfill. Let me talk about that for a minute. The boat left from a place In Argentina, where the day before they all went to a landfill. And I said to him, you know, what are you doing in a landfill looking at birds? And he said, you know that there's actually some special birds at the landfill. But Dr. Kornfeld didn't feel that that's where it came from, not that landfill, because that was too close to when the first case happened. It was too close. It was weeks before. It's the Dutch couple that was roaming around in the Andes mountains of Argentina and South America that brought it on the boat, not from that Argentina landfill.
Lisa Booth
Okay, got it. That makes sense then. So you had mentioned, okay, so the incubation period is a long time before you can start seeing symptoms and start getting sick. How difficult does that make to sort of diagnose this, to keep, you know, for contact tracing purposes as well? What sort of challenges does that long incubation period, you know, what sort of challenges does that present for doctors in this.
Dr. Mark Siegel
Well, that's a brilliant question because the. That's what we're faced with right now, that I just told you. The reason I went into such detail and told you that scenario, because your listeners can imagine that people were contacting other people and they were going on planes. And it's very hard to go back in time and track that because it is up to four, up to four weeks, up to six weeks with the Andy strain, eight weeks with Honda, but anti strain, six weeks. Most of the time though, it's within the first two weeks. So that makes it a little bit easier. That's why I agree with Kornfeld who says, you know, at this point, you know, it being May 18th and this boat left on April 1st, and the people who brought it on the boat had gotten it weeks before. At this point, we're almost out of the woods at this point, even with the spread. I talked about, the contacts I talked about that I'm disturbed about. We're still just seeing isolated cases. The case in Canada, I'm not minimizing that, but I don't think we're going to see a large outbreak from this. I think the amount of time that has passed. And also back in 2019 and 1819 in Argentina, something very similar happened with a super spreader event. And 34 people ended up getting it and 11 died, but they ended up containing it with the same kind of quarantine measures they're doing now. Now they have their eye on the
Lisa Booth
ball, you know, and we're. The benefit of this is that it's not very transmissible and my understanding of it, and you would know best. So correct me if I'm wrong, doctor, but my understanding is that because they were on a cruise ship, that what allowed it, you have to be in, like, very close quarters for an extended period of time, right? And so that's sort of like what allowed it to spread. Talk about the transmissibility of this.
Dr. Mark Siegel
Lisa, you're really right on it. You should have heard about this from Kornfeld, because he said they were all hanging out in the same three rooms, and even after the guy died, they were going up and having dinner together. And it wasn't until they figured out it was Andy's that he, he, he cracked the closet and he found some protective equipment and he handed it out. But he said, and what I really like about Dr. Kornfeld is he said the key here wasn't even all of these protocols and everything that you're reading about or hearing about. It was kindness. It was that he went around room to room at personal risk, checking in on everyone once he took over his ship stock. I said, weren't you afraid? He said, I was trained not to be afraid. And as an oncologist, I've dealt with this all my career of people that are facing very risky situations, situations. And I think, because I wrote a book about this, not my recent book, but an earlier one, that calming fears also decreases the spread of virus because people take more precautions. If they're panicked, they're not going to. So to your point about close contact, once they realized what they were dealing with, they started isolating people in their rooms, and they were much more cautious. But there was a lot of contact previous to that, which just shows you how difficult this is to transmit, you
Lisa Booth
know, and part of when we saw, with COVID we saw a bunch of different strains, but that was because it was so transmissible.
Co-host or Announcer
Right?
Lisa Booth
And so the likelihood of this, the Andes virus, or, you know, this, this mutating into something more transmissible is probably slim because it's not very transmissible. Is that correct? Or, you know, what sort of concerns do you have that this could mutate?
Dr. Mark Siegel
They've completely sequenced this virus. Now. It's the same virus that's been around for decades. It has not mutated, and that's great news. The only thing, and you and I talked about this on TV the other day, is that the more virus that's around, the more chances a virus has to mutate. Viruses are changing genetic material all the time, but if there's only a small number, you're very unlikely to see a major event. And so unless it gets into an immunocompromised host, which is where we think the Omicron strain of COVID came from. But you're not gonna see it in this small number of virus particles. And I don't think you're gonna see it here. And again, they just sequenced it totally and it hasn't changed at all.
Co-host or Announcer
Quick break. If you like what you're hearing, please share on social media or send it to your family and friends. Alliance Defending Freedom stands in courtrooms across the country to defend the freedoms our nation has cherished for 250 years. Life, free speech, religious freedom, parental rights. These freedoms aren't inherited. They belong to those who fight for them. ADF is approaching a critical fiscal year end fundraising deadline. Your support helps ADF protect and defend these freedoms so they may endure for years to come. Every dollar you give will be doubled while matching funds last visit joinadf.com Lisa or you can text Lisa to 83848 to give today. Sponsored by Alliance Defending Freedom.
Ben Ferguson
Hey, it's Ben Ferguson and I want you to pause what you're doing for just one minute and I want you to hear about Alejandra. She lives in a remote community with very few resources and little to no health care. So when Alejandra gets sick, her parents have no real options, no doctors in their community and no money for real medical care. By the third day, her body was shutting down. She woke up and just long enough to tell her mom, I can't take the pain anymore. I can't keep going. Her parents drove hours to find a doctor who tried everything. But she needed a private hospital and that was impossible for her family to afford. And that is when Compassion International stepped in. Now, through Compassion, Alejandra was treated. And against all odds, she survived. She lived because someone just like you took action. Right now, unfortunately, there are children just like Alejandra who won't survive unless someone like you steps in. Compassion International partners with local churches providing children with the support that they need. Critical medical care plus food, education and the hope of the gospel, all in Jesus name. So help a child just like Alejandra. Today you can visit compassion.com that's compassion.com Combat sports fans.
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Lisa Booth
and I'm asking this not out of necessarily concern because as you just pointed out, it seems hopefully that the worst is behind us in terms of this becoming, you know, a bigger global event. Like what we saw during COVID But what are like the symptoms? Kind of walk us through what happens to the body. What does it do to you? You know, these poor people who died sort of. What, what happens with it?
Dr. Mark Siegel
Well, it's, it's a, it causes the, with viruses, it's always about how the virus is interacting with the immune system. And what it does in rodents is that it overwhelms the lungs before the immune system can block it. In humans, the immune system generally blocks it, but so most people with a hantavirus end up with kind of a typical flu syndrome, which is what you see with any virus. Flu like virus, it's an RNA virus. So it's similar to the flu actually. You get muscle aches, you get joint aches, you get high fevers, you get GI symptoms, diarrhea. But with the Andy strain, that thing I said about the lungs, more of the time the lungs start developing an inflammation and then you can get the hunter pulmonary syndrome, where you get very short of breath. That's what those three people on the cruise ship ended up dying from. That pulmonary manifestation. In this strain, it's more common. So you got a double whammy going. One it's more transmissible and two, it's more likely to cause a complication, but it's not that transmissible. It takes close contact. Except the rare exception is, is, is a super spreader like you saw in the 2018 case. I don't know if the, if the guy who brought it on the ship this time and again, these were two bird watchers that were all over the Andes Mountains before they, the ship left on April 1st. I don't know if he was a super spreader or he just got really sick and spread it because when you're in the middle of the worst part of the illness, you spread more virus.
Lisa Booth
Now, can it be treated in any way? I know the fatality rate can be up to 40%. What can doctors do? Can they, can they treat it at all?
Dr. Mark Siegel
On this boat you couldn't do much because all he had was intravenous and an ekg. And you know, he, he, he, he, he couldn't do much monitoring, keep the temperature down, give Tylenol. But if you're in a major facility, you have ventilators and you have ICU equipment and, you know, then you have much more of a chance of surviving from it. Much more. And then there's some experimental drugs out there. They're using one for Ebola that seems to have use for this. And there's also monoclonal antibodies that the army's working on and there's vaccines as well in development. But again, I want to emphasize I am not expecting, I mean, everybody's watching this closely, but with the amount of time that's passed, we're not going to see more than a few more isolated cases. We may very well see more cases, but they're not going to, there's not going to be a big outbreak here.
Lisa Booth
Yeah. And if we don't have a big outbreak, I don't really see much sense in anyone getting vaccinated for it.
Dr. Mark Siegel
By the way, I agree with that. Unless they're one of these, you don't know this, but that's another thing I've written about, which is fear drives a lot of the public health responses. And that's when you start seeing superimposed restrictions and biases and, and mandates that we were, that we were against.
Lisa Booth
I, I gotta tell you, I never knew birdwalking watching was such a dangerous sport. I, I mean, I guess it makes sense, but I just, I didn't realize that, you know, you're, you're projecting yourself to crazy stuff.
Dr. Mark Siegel
You know, we're also going to, they're going to the parts of the world where you see birds you can't otherwise see, and they're absolutely obsessed on it. There's literally. He says, there's literally penguin watchers, and that's all they do is go around looking at rare penguin species.
Lisa Booth
Me, respectfully, I would be so bored. But, you know, to each their own, I guess. You know, there's also this Ebola outbreak in the continent of Africa right now. You've got something like 300 suspected cases and 88 suspected deaths, primarily in Congo, but also in neighboring Uganda. You know, I feel like, because Covid and because we saw so much fear, I feel like there's like, a heightened reporting on this and people paying closer attention. I mean, haven't some of these things like Ebola outbreaks or you had mentioned 2018 for the hantavirus. I mean, haven't a lot of these. These things just happened over the course of time? Do you think we're just paying closer attention to these things now after, you know, so much fear was driven during COVID Or. Or is this, I guess, give us your perspective on.
Co-host or Announcer
Are we covering these things different than
Lisa Booth
we would have before because of COVID
Dr. Mark Siegel
Boy, that question could. Could have lasted the whole podcast. First of all, first of all, there's a political agenda here, which is that whether they know it or not, the mainstream media is trying to make it feel like we're more vulnerable than before because of the cuts, because of the cuts in global health coming out of the United States. That's because the midterms are coming up. That's number one. Number two, you are spot on that because of COVID we have a vulnerability or almost we flinch when we hear about a new virus or even an old virus, thinking that this is going to be the next Covid. We have a bar to go by, oh, another Covid. But things like the 1918 flu or Covid only happen about once out of 100 years. It doesn't mean it couldn't happen again in six years, but it's just extremely unlikely. So fear drives this. Ebola is not new. We've been dealing with Ebola outbreaks for a while now, and this is consistent with what we see, and it's exactly that part of the world. The problem is that the particular strain we're seeing in Congo and Uganda isn't one that we have treatments or vaccines for. So, you know, and a lot of the time it spreads because of people not being aware of infectious disease precautions. You're not getting Ebola through the air. You're getting it through Close contact with secretions. And so there's cultural differences that feed that. So I'm not worried about this spreading here any more than I am based on plane flight that unfortunately we're totally attached to all other parts of the world. But 80 people have died from that Ebola outbreak. And again, it's a strain we don't usually see, so that has our eyes. But it's not that it's a mutated strain. It's one that we know about, but it isn't the one that we've been. It's not the Zaire strain. It's not one that we've been targeting.
Lisa Booth
So how concerned are you about that spreading globally?
Dr. Mark Siegel
It's restricted. I feel the same. It's not going to cause a global pandemic or a global outbreak for the same reason that the hantavirus won't. The Andy strain is very, very difficult to transmit human to human, and so is Ebola. So I'm not concerned about it, especially if, if we take the right interventions to try to control it. If we isolate people that are sick. The problem is that it's not that easy to do in Africa.
Lisa Booth
Yeah, well, and also their, their, you know, healthcare system is respectfully just not at the same level as ours is here in the United States.
Dr. Mark Siegel
And in the middle of wars. They're in the middle of wars and strife. That makes it even worse. So if there's, if there's wars going on, it's even harder to control a virus, you know.
Lisa Booth
And before we go, do you think that we have learned anything from COVID as a society in the sense of, you know, my fear is that there really hasn't been acknowledgement of failures in a way that there should have been with just allowing fear to sort of drive our response and the coverage and all of it. And so I worry that if we were to ever have, you know, a pandemic again, have we learned enough from it? And, you know, sort of taking a beat and looking at the data and, you know, I'm like, do you think we've learned enough from it?
Dr. Mark Siegel
No. It deteriorated into a real political battle. And it was very. We didn't learn, you know, what the most important thing we did during COVID that no one talks about at all is we learned rapid testing, and we didn't know how to do that before. So now we can actually figure out the extent of something which we didn't know how to do before. So in the lack of knowing how far Covid had spread, everybody was fear mongering. And again, I wrote a book on fear. I know that fear is the worst, is much more contagious than any virus is. So that's what we were facing. And I think that that will happen again. I think we're seeing that with Honda now that it's being, it's being so aggressive, so hyped, you know, that's why I'm talking about it. That's why you're talking about it. We're trying to put perspective on it. And I don't think, I don't think we've learned what we should have learned, which is how to see things in perspective.
Lisa Booth
Now. One of my biggest frustrations during COVID was, I think it was around April 2020 when we started seeing the seroprevalence studies from Stanford and from Miami did one as well as in New York City, I believe it was. And they found that we were missing cases by up to like 65 fold, which meant the fatality rate was significantly less than what we were being told at the time. And we did not make the proper adjustments to our strategy. And our response to Covid after that,
Dr. Mark Siegel
by the way, by the way, that is 100% right. You know what I did in my office practice that almost nobody else did? I screened everybody for antibodies to Covid because I wanted to know who had had it because it gave them immunity. If they had had it, it gave them immunity. The United States would not count prior COVID infections as causing immunity. That was a disgrace.
Lisa Booth
Was a disgrace. Well, Dr. Mark Siegel, appreciate it. Always, always great catching up with you. Look forward to seeing you soon. Around the building and everyone. Go out and get your new book, the Miracles Among Us. Appreciate the time. Dr. Siegel, thank you so much.
Dr. Mark Siegel
Always great to be on with you. Thank you for having me.
Lisa Booth
Appreciate Dr. Mark Siegel for joining the show. Appreciate you guys at home for listening every Tuesday and Thursday, but you can
Co-host or Announcer
listen throughout the week.
Lisa Booth
Also want to thank John Cassio, my producer, for putting the show together.
Co-host or Announcer
Until next time, combat sports fans.
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Date: May 19, 2026
Podcast: The Clay Travis and Buck Sexton Show / The Truth with Lisa Boothe
Host: Lisa Boothe
Guest: Dr. Marc Siegel
In this episode of "The Truth with Lisa Boothe," Lisa dives into the recent headlines about a global hantavirus outbreak, focusing particularly on the Andes strain. Lisa is joined by Dr. Marc Siegel—physician, Fox News colleague, and author—to break down the facts around hantavirus: its origins, symptoms, fatality rate, transmission profile, and whether there is reason for concern. The conversation aims to cut through media panic, drawing clear lines between hantavirus and COVID-19 in terms of danger and contagiousness.
(07:21 - 12:09)
(12:09 - 13:53)
(13:53 - 15:47)
(15:47 - 18:41)
(22:15 - 24:20)
(24:20 - 25:22)
(26:17 - 29:52)
(30:12 - 32:45)
"Yes, there's a very high fatality rate, about 40%, but it's not very transmissible. And that's the key difference between Covid and this."
— Lisa Boothe (03:00)
"The first person that got sick and died was all the way back on April 11, and then his wife literally got off the boat in Helena and was getting on a commercial flight, and then she ends up dying, too. And they still don't know what this is."
— Dr. Siegel (09:01)
"It's the Dutch couple that was roaming around in the Andes mountains of Argentina and South America that brought it on the boat, not from that Argentina landfill."
— Dr. Siegel (13:38)
"There was a lot of contact previous to that, which just shows you how difficult this is to transmit."
— Dr. Siegel (17:27)
"They've completely sequenced this virus now. It's the same virus that's been around for decades. It has not mutated, and that's great news."
— Dr. Siegel (17:57)
"I wrote a book on fear. I know that fear is the worst, is much more contagious than any virus is."
— Dr. Siegel (30:59)
"The United States would not count prior COVID infections as causing immunity. That was a disgrace."
— Dr. Siegel (32:20)
This summary captures both the detailed scientific discussion and the broader reflections on health communication, meant to inform and reassure audiences about the real risks—and limits—of the current hantavirus outbreak.