The man who stood before cameras in Nebraska to reassure Americans about the risk of hantavirus spent his career fitting penile implants and hosting a podcast that claimed the Covid-19 pandemic was engineered to steal an election.
As the Trump administration scrambled to manage a potential hantavirus outbreak linked to a cruise ship in the Canary Islands, it deployed Dr. Brian Christine, the assistant secretary for health at the Department of Health and Human Services, to lead a public briefing at the University of Nebraska Medical Center on 11 May 2026.
