Sean JamesMay 11th, 2026, 12:56 pm

Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said the American public doesn’t need to worry about the Hantavirus outbreak because the U.S. government is on top of it.

“We have this under control and we’re not worried about it,” Kennedy said on Monday.

His answer came after a reporter asked about the virus during a meeting in the Oval Office that included President Donald Trump and Dr. Mehmet Oz.

“What do you say [to] infectious disease experts who say the country may not be prepared for something like the hantavirus, because of all the agencies and staffing cuts?” the reporter asked.

Dr. Oz said it was “just not true” to say the government was not handling the outbreak well. Kennedy then spoke a moment later, saying his team has been proactively tackling the outbreak since “day one.”

Kennedy said he has been speaking to the University of Nebraska about the outbreak and sent airplanes to the Canary Islands to evacuate 17 patients who were infected. He said 16 of those people are in Nebraska, where one of them is symptomatic and in a bio lab; another person is in a bio lab in Atlanta. “Others are being tested and supervised,” Kennedy said, before saying the outbreak was under control.

His answer came after 94 people from 19 countries were evacuated from a cruise ship near the Spanish island of Tenerife on Sunday due to the virus outbreak.

Kennedy said the HHS also issued an alert as soon as they were aware of the outbreak. “I saw the alert too, give me a break. They acted very, very quickly,” Trump said.

The president then said it “looks like it’s just a disease that we’ve had around in a very small way for a long time. Not a good one to catch, because it’s a very severe disease if you catch it. But it’s very hard to catch.”

Watch above via Fox News.

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