Jon Stewart dons a hazmat suit and exposes himself to the media's hantavirus panic

For those who have missed the coverage, tonight’s Daily Show dealt with the hantavirus, a disease found in rat feces and urine, which made headlines across the country when an outbreak occurred on a cruise ship earlier this month. After those passengers disembarked, many fairly wondered if it could lead to another pandemic. Doctors and disease experts say no. However, the media, trained on two or three years of COVID reports, took it as an opportunity to frame the outbreak as an immediate public health concern. Despite being told repeatedly that it’s not another COVID, anchors on CNN, News Nation, and CBS continued to produce panicked segments about the virus, even interrupting Mother’s Day niceties to do so, and totally disregarding the expertise of the people they turned to for answers. 

But though Stewart is prone to conspiracy theories, he used the freakout as a vehicle for a little media criticism, wagging his finger at outlets trying to stoke fear to boost ratings and noticing the speed with which anchors went from hearing it’s not a threat to treating it like one. After a week of panicked coverage and stories explaining why the virus isn’t a concern, Stewart had one salient question for the reporters: “How badly do you want to work from home?”