Boston ER Doc's Substack Breaks Hantavirus Cruise Scoop
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- Jeremy Faust works as an emergency department physician at Boston's Brigham and Women's Hospital, where on a recent Wednesday evening in May he oversaw a team of doctors, students, and physician assistants while tending to more than two dozen patients.
- Faust runs the Inside Medicine Substack newsletter, which has nearly 85,000 subscribers, and recently broke a 'scoop' about the MV Hondius, a cruise ship hit by a hantavirus outbreak while docked off Cape Verde.
- His scoop revealed that 26 passengers aboard the MV Hondius had disembarked much earlier than previously known — a detail that raises the possibility those travelers could spread the rare virus in the United States.
- The STAT+ profile frames Faust as a 'loud and unafraid' voice in the Trump era, positioning him as a doctor-commentary figure who built a large independent audience outside traditional health media channels.
Why it matters: Faust's 85,000-subscriber Substack demonstrates how individual physicians can build media platforms that rival traditional health journalism, while his Hondius scoop surfaces a concrete public health concern: 26 passengers potentially carrying hantavirus — a rare virus — may have entered the US earlier than authorities had disclosed.
