Why Ivermectin and Hydroxychloroquine Could Work for Hantavirus

 The World Health Organization just went on record to claim that ivermectin is “not an effective treatment for hantavirus,” fully dismissing the large body of research suggesting the opposite is likely true.

This is no surprise given that Bill Gates is now the WHO’s top funder and 13 hantavirus vaccines and gene therapies are under development:

This rapid dismissal of a safe, cheap, widely available drug follows a now-familiar pattern. When health authorities immediately reject repurposed medicines with plausible mechanisms and real-world data against RNA viruses in favor of experimental “vaccines”, it often means that the opposite the true. We see this out with the dilemma of a rodent infested ship with hantavirus in the Atlantic Ocean where the WHO has 147 passengers locked down without access to early treatment kits.

Let’s look at the evidence for ivermectin and chloroquine/hydroxychloroquine against hantavirus:

Ivermectin’s Strong Track Record Against RNA Viruses

Since the early 2010s, researchers have documented ivermectin’s broad-spectrum antiviral activity against a wide range of RNA viruses, including dengue, Zika, West Nile, yellow fever, chikungunya, influenza, HIV, and SARS-CoV-2. These antiviral effects are summarized across dozens of studies in a 2020 systematic review by Heidary et al.

The most compelling real-world evidence comes from its performance against COVID-19. The comprehensive real-time meta-analysis at https://c19early.org/i now includes 106 studies involving hundreds of thousands of patients. These studies consistently show strong benefits — particularly when used early or as prevention — with major reductions in mortality, hospitalization, and severe disease.

Crucially, hantaviruses are also RNA viruses — specifically negative-sense single-stranded RNA viruses. While they differ in structure and replication details from viruses like SARS-CoV-2, they still rely on host cell machinery and intracellular transport pathways that ivermectin is known to disrupt.

Mechanistically, ivermectin inhibits importin α/β nuclear transport, a pathway many RNA viruses exploit to shuttle viral proteins into the host cell nucleus to suppress antiviral responses. Hantavirus nucleocapsid (N) protein has been shown to interact with these same host pathways to interfere with immune signaling. By blocking this transport system, ivermectin may prevent the virus from disabling the host’s innate defenses.

In addition, ivermectin interferes with viral replication and assembly processes inside the cell, and exerts anti-inflammatory effects that could blunt the vascular leakage and lung injury characteristic of severe hantavirus disease.

This is the key point: ivermectin does not need to be “hantavirus-specific” to be effective. Its antiviral activity is largely host-directed — targeting conserved cellular mechanisms that many RNA viruses, including hantaviruses, depend on.

Given this combination — a shared RNA-virus biology, overlapping reliance on host pathways, and a well-documented antiviral mechanism — ivermectin likely exerts at least some degree of anti-hantavirus activity and warrants serious investigation, not dismissal.

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Compelling Evidence for Hydroxychloroquine

A 2021 peer-reviewed study in Frontiers in Cellular and Infection Microbiology directly evaluated chloroquine against multiple hantaviruses, including the Andes virus — the most clinically relevant strain and the one implicated in the recent cruise ship outbreak .

The key finding comes from the Andes virus model:

In the gold-standard Syrian hamster model of hantavirus pulmonary syndrome (which closely mimics severe human disease), chloroquine produced a striking survival benefit. When administered continuously before infection:

• 60% of treated animals survived to 26 days

• 100% of untreated controls died within ~14 days

Even when treatment was started after infection, survival improved and time to death was significantly delayed — demonstrating both prophylactic and therapeutic potential.

Supporting this, chloroquine also showed strong antiviral activity in vitro across multiple hantavirus species, inhibiting replication at concentrations far below toxic levels, with a favorable selectivity index.

Hydroxychloroquine, the safer and more commonly used human derivative, shares the same core mechanisms. It raises endosomal pH to block viral entry and uncoating, acts as a zinc ionophore that facilitates intracellular zinc accumulation (which can inhibit viral RNA polymerase activity), and exerts immunomodulatory effects that may reduce the vascular leakage and inflammation central to severe hantavirus disease.

Taken together, the data show a clear, consistent pattern: chloroquine-class drugs can directly inhibit hantavirus replication and meaningfully improve survival in a lethal Andes virus model — with hydroxychloroquine representing the more practical candidate for human use.

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Conclusion

Both drugs likely attack key steps in the hantavirus life cycle and the body’s harmful over-reaction to infection:

Hydroxychloroquine (and chloroquine):

• Raises the pH inside cell endosomes, blocking hantavirus entry and uncoating. Hantaviruses depend on acidic conditions in these compartments to release their genetic material.

• Acts as a zinc ionophore, facilitating the entry of zinc ions into cells. Once inside the cell, zinc potently inhibits the RNA-dependent RNA polymerase enzyme that hantaviruses require for replicating their genetic material (a mechanism well-documented against other RNA viruses).

• Helps modulate the immune system to reduce dangerous inflammation and vascular leakage that drive severe disease.

Ivermectin:

• Inhibits importin α/β nuclear transport proteins, disrupting the virus’s ability to hijack host cell machinery and suppress antiviral defenses.

• Interferes with viral replication and assembly.

• Reduces excessive inflammation that contributes to lung damage.

These mechanisms are complementary: hydroxychloroquine primarily blocks early viral entry, while ivermectin targets later intracellular replication and inflammation. For those interested in having these compounds on-hand in case of emergency, you can obtain some from TWC.

Specific, well-designed clinical trials for both hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin against hantavirus are needed. However, the science here is far stronger than the official “nothing to see here” narrative suggests.

Adding zinc, vitamin D, and vitamin C could compose a synergistic protocol:

Zinc amplifies hydroxychloroquine’s effectiveness as its natural ionophore partner, enabling high intracellular zinc concentrations that directly inhibit the viral RNA polymerase enzyme essential for hantavirus replication.

Vitamin D is a critical immune modulator that strengthens the body’s innate antiviral defenses, helps regulate inflammatory responses, and has been associated with better outcomes in severe respiratory viral infections.

Vitamin C, a potent antioxidant, supports immune cell function, reduces oxidative stress, protects blood vessels from damage, and helps counteract the cytokine storm and vascular leakage that are hallmarks of hantavirus pulmonary syndrome.

While the hantavirus outbreak is expected to remain quite small and limited, we can’t put anything past the pandemic profiteering cartel who’s high-containment biolabs remain fully operational.

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Nicolas Hulscher, MPH

Epidemiologist and Foundation Administrator, McCullough Foundation

https://www.thefocalpoints.com/p/why-ivermectin-and-hydroxychloroquine

How do violent leftists delude themselves into thinking they’re good?

 We all want to feel as though we’re on the side of good, on the side of the angels.  Most leftists — but not all — know that communists, socialists, and yes, even fascists are on the left.  So it’s probably hard for them to wrap their minds around the fact that they are on the same side of history as Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, Castro, etc.  How could they be “good” while following the purveyors of the worst evils of modern history?

This happens to be a critical current topic because of the “assassination culture” and “ideological possession” that have become so pervasive on the violent left in recent days.  Not to mention the fact that the “Nazi tattoo guy,” AKA Maine Senate candidate Graham Platner, is the New Face of the Democrat party and is a communist, mimicking the fact that in the article on Brown Bolshevism in the April 1939 issue, The Atlantic noted that “former communists ... made the best Nazis.”

Most political spectrum models show that moving left means more authoritarianism, oppression, and mass murder on an industrial scale, with numbers that boggle the mind and atrocities that overwhelm the sensibilities.  The left’s socialist national agenda is rife with the stepping stones to the same dead end: censorship, mass surveillance, authoritarian controls over people, and the deprivation of their means of self-defense.

Leftist-collectivist ideologies are really just “lite” versions of the authoritarian horror shows seen in the Soviet Union, the Warsaw Pact, and any other remaining socialist nations.

Looking back in time offers a clue to how they cope.

Back in the day, 100 years ago, in the 1920s and ’30s and the early days of the Bolshevik revolution in Russia, the left could fantasize about “remaking the world.” Leftists could try to ignore reports that socialists filled Soviet jails and that the only building going on was the construction of more prisons.  The justification was that they needed to break a few eggs to make an omelet.

They lucked out in that another national party of socialists was just as bad, and so began the lie that because they were the “non-Marxist” variant (as though that makes any difference), they were somehow, some way “far-right.”

Never mind that the national party of socialists expressly voiced opposition to the red front and reaction (far-right) in their co-national anthem:

Kam’raden die Rotfront und Reaktion erschossen

 

(Comrades shot by the Red Front and Reaction)

Marschier’n im Geist in unsern Reihen mit

 

(March in spirit with us in our ranks.)

One of the left’s prime condemnations of the Brown Bolsheviks of the Third Reich was that they persecuted their political rivals, just like the Red Bolsheviks of the Soviet Union.  

The sinister and violent left can salve its conscience with the simple expedient that the far left’s excesses are “balanced out” by the ridiculous idea that non-Marxist variants of socialism were somehow “right-wing” and a dire threat to “democracy.”

Never mind that many of us have been accumulating and documenting over the years the disturbing similarities between the Democrats and the Brown Bolsheviks of the Third Reich, to the point that we have more than 50 predominant traits between the two.

It’s time we finally rip the bandage off this pervasive leftist lie and stop coddling the violent left in its delusions.  Moving to the left side of the political spectrum means bigger, more authoritarian, and unlimited government.  If leftists can’t deal with that fact, then maybe they need a different set of values.

D Parker is an engineer, inventor, wordsmith, and student of history; former director of communications for a civil rights organization; and a longtime contributor to conservative websites.  Find him on Substack.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2026/05/how_do_violent_leftists_delude_themselves_into_thinking_they_re_good.html

Even Xavier Becerra's fellow Democrats think he's a running joke for California governor -Politico

 by Monica Showalter

It's one thing for your political opponents to think you're a twerpy tool, an incompetent excuse for an executive, and a dingbat candidate.

But when your fellow Democrats do, all it can be is truth observed.

That's what California Democrat gubernatorial frontrunner Xavier Becerra is looking at, according to a damning report from Politico:

“It’s like: ‘We need to figure out a candidate who can win!’ But then…him? Really?’” said one former Biden administration official. “It’s amazing.”

In the last several weeks, as former Rep. Eric Swalwell’s flameout catapulted Becerra to the front of a crowded June primary, Biden White House alumni have been marveling at his stroke of luck — and the growing possibility that a Cabinet official who was widely derided and deemed to have been in over his head could soon be the governor of the country’s largest state

Six former Biden administration officials, all of whom were granted anonymity to speak candidly about a former colleague, acknowledged the subject of Becerra’s unlikely rise has come to dominate their group chats and conversations. “It gets the biggest laugh every time we send around a poll,” the first former official said, describing the perception across the administration that the former HHS secretary was ineffective on the Covid response, a migrant health crisis at the border and other matters.

Well, then, maybe this guy isn't the best person for the job, is he? Democrats don't think so -- note the detail about their Journ-O-List type group chats, a high school-like relic from the aughts which they're still using to bite and snap at one another like Mean Girls and Becerra is their running joke.

The problem, though, is that it's all true. He really is a twerp and incompetent. He 'lost' at least 64,000 unaccompanied migrant children from Joe Biden's border surge as Health and Human Services secretary, and the number is only that low because the Trump administration put some effort into finding most of them.

During COVID, his failure skills were on display, too. Becerra was absent from his job most of the time, and the tens of thousands of government bureaucrats he supervised followed suit, running a department full of 90% empty buildings, with his department the worst one of them all. I wrote about that here.

A third problem, mentioned in the gubernatorial debate the other night, was his bad record of allowing billions in fraud and corruption to go on with the health service bureaucracies. A recent scandal had his chief of staff caught stealing money from Becerra's campaign kitty and he said he knew nothing, which at a minimum, speaks ill to his management skills. This sounds like Walz territory, if not something worse.

It's been known and sometimes come out in public since at least 2022, as this Fox News report indicates:

The administration was so rattled by the outpouring of concern that it launched a public campaign to reassure Becerra — and key Latino supporters — after The Washington Post reported last week that White House frustration with Becerra had grown so deep that aides have openly discussed replacing him. 

 

And over in flakeville, Gavin Newsom has told aides he believes Becerra is an idiot too.

 

He, uh, has declined to endorse him for public office:

 

Newsom declining to endorse Becerra, the former AG of the state.
Say everything without saying a word. I thought he night be saving his endorsement for a final two-week push.
⬇️⬇️⬇️ https://t.co/ztH7hx6uwt

— Susan Crabtree (@susancrabtree) May 8, 2026

According to the New York Post:

Gov Gavin Newsom conspicuously sidestepped a question about his former colleague Xavier Becerra— a longtime California Democrat who’s now the frontrunner to succeed him. Newsom was tight-lipped when asked about the gubernatorial favorite, who’s rapidly racked up endorsements and support in recent weeks — including from Newsom allies — despite reservations about his record in former President Joe Biden’s administration. “I’m focused on diapers,” Newsom said in response to the The Post’s question about Becerra, a longtime Democrat who was California attorney general for the first two years of Newsom’s term.

So now the Democrats are grossing out as to his governing skills, while some are actually feeding dirt about him to Becerra's Democrat rivals for the office. 

Sound like a resounding endorsement of his self-vaunted executive skills, as well as his army of illegals serving as his campaign foot soldiers? It sounds like incompetence cubed. Because when your own party thinks you're an idiot, and your rivals think you're an idiot, you can only be an idiot. That should lay the groundwork for more sniping and negative stories leaked out by those who knew him best as the race continues on. By the end of this, Becerra will be seen as the new Kamala Harris, parachuted in after frontrunner Eric Swalwell flamed out in the continuous Democrat pattern of picking nominees. This can only benefit the Republicans in the race as the election goes on, and give Republican voters ample cause for getting out the popcorn. Bring it on.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2026/05/even_xavier_becerra_s_fellow_democrats_think_he_s_a_running_joke_for_california_governor_politico.html

'AP: How Public Health Officials Are Contact Tracing for Hantavirus'

 Hantaviruses do not spread easily between people, which makes health officials confident the recent outbreak on a cruise ship that has killed three people will not turn into an epidemic.

But, still, they need to make sure. So health officials in several countries are contact tracing: trying to identify and follow people who may have come in contact with passengers who got sick or died.

Hantaviruses usually spread when people inhale contaminated residue of rodent droppings. While human cases are rare, small outbreaks have been documented around the world. But the Andes virus implicated in the cruise ship outbreak may be able to spread between people in rare cases. And viruses can change.

Scientists are trying to learn more about the virus as fast as they can, including whether it has mutated and how exactly it spreads.

The goal of contact tracing is to alert people who might have been exposed, keep tabs on them in case they come down with symptoms, and prevent them from spreading it to others.

The process isn't easy because people are social and mobile creatures who spend time with others, visit crowded places, and travel.

In the cruise ship outbreak, fewer than a dozen people are thought to have shown any symptoms, and there have been only five confirmed cases, but many more may have been exposed.

Dozens of Potentially Exposed Passengers Have Already Left the Ship

About 140 people remain on the cruise ship headed for the Canary Islands, where they will disembark, and none has been reported to be sick.

But authorities are trying to reach the dozens of people who left the ship about 2 weeks after a passenger died, but before authorities knew a hantavirus was the culprit. They were from at least 12 different countries, including from several states in the U.S. -- including Arizona, California, Georgia, and Texas, according to infectious disease experts and state public health officials.

Different Countries Take Different Approaches

Authorities in St. Helena -- the remote, volcanic British territory in the South Atlantic where passengers got off -- said they were monitoring a small number of people considered "higher-risk contacts." They were being told to isolate for 45 days, the St. Helena government said.

British health officials say two people who were passengers aboard the ship but flew home midway through the journey are self-isolating but do not have symptoms. The U.K. Health Security Agency said "a small number" of contacts of the two are also self-isolating but not showing symptoms.

Singaporean health authorities said they were monitoring two men who disembarked at St. Helena and flew to South Africa and then home. The two men, who arrived in Singapore at different times, were being tested for hantavirus and were isolated at the country's National Center for Infectious Diseases, officials said.

The U.S. government has released few details about its work on any contact tracing.

Texas officials on Thursday said public health workers there have reached the two people who left the ship April 24, who say they are not experiencing symptoms and did not have contact with a sick person while aboard. They promised to monitor themselves with daily temperature checks and contact public health officials at any sign of possible illness, officials said.

Arizona officials said they too are following a person who disembarked. They said they don't know exactly when the person arrived in Arizona. The CDC notified the state health agency on May 5, state officials said. That's when monitoring began and it will continue for 42 days.

Two Canadians who disembarked are in Ontario and have been advised to self-isolate since they returned home, the province's health minister says.

Scientists Are Trying to Understand the Andes Virus Better

Apart from tracking people, scientists are also trying to understand the germ. The Andes virus, a member of the hantavirus family found in South America, may be one of the rare hantaviruses that can spread between people. Officials in Argentina believe the first cases may have been contracted on a birdwatching trip in the southern city of Ushuaia.

Argentina's Health Ministry has yet to dispatch the team, but scientists from the state-funded Malbrán Institute planned to travel to Ushuaia "in the coming days," the ministry told the Associated Press.

Scientists are analyzing the virus's genetics to see whether it has changed in a way to make it more transmissible.

They are also trying to learn exactly how it spreads, said Jeanne Marrazzo, MD, MPH, chief executive officer of the Infectious Diseases Society of America. They believe people are mainly infectious when they have symptoms, and, if the virus spreads, it may be transmitted through small liquid particles that blow out of an infected person when they talk, cough, or sneeze.

https://www.medpagetoday.com/infectiousdisease/generalinfectiousdisease/121189

'An Epic Madness Burns In The Minds of Californians...'

  by James Howard Kunstler,

The California Death Trip

“History records no pity for parties that choose purity over competence, vengeance over vision, pathology over pragmatism. The long night is not coming. It is here. . . . ”

- LHGrey on X

The Pacific Palisades fire ignited on January 7, 2025, in the very last days of the “Joe Biden” fake presidency.

6,837 total buildings destroyed plus about 1,000 damaged.

The Altadena fire across town in Eaton Canyon was arguably worse: 9,418 buildings destroyed.

A Year After the LA Fires

Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass was in Ghana at the time to attend the inauguration of president John Dramani Mahama, part of a small U.S. presidential delegation sent by the “Biden” administration.

Deputy Mayor for Public Safety, Brian Williams, overseer of the Police and Fire Departments, was on administrative leave at the time due to an alleged bomb threat against City Hall that he reportedly made in September / October 2024. The FBI raided his house that December, and in 2025 he copped a plea deal (guilty) to making threats involving fire and explosives. So, he was out of action during the fires.

There you have the rectified essence of how the Democratic Party operates in America’s biggest state.

Is it not astonishing that Karen Bass is running for reelection? How could she possibly be forgiven?

A large number of people employed in the movie business got burned out of their homes in the fires, and then city and state regulatory nonsense prevented them from rebuilding — on top of insurance company hocus-pocus that left families financially wrecked.

Is it a surprise that the city’s flagship industry is dying now (film production down 32-percent on a five-year average)?

What is LA without Hollywood?

And yet the show-biz celebs are still coming out to pimp for Democratic Party politicians. This is the kind of thing that forces you to conclude that an epic madness burns as hotly through the minds of Californians as the fires that ripped through the canyons in 2025. I know from personal experience as a college theater major that actors can be exceptionally stupid, but that can’t wholly account for what we’re seeing.

Wednesday’s primary debates had these villains on florid display. Because LA’s ranked-choice mayoral primary race styles itself “non-partisan,” candidate Spencer Pratt (a registered Republican) was on-hand for the debate. When the subject of LA’s cataclysmic homelessness came up, drug addicts living (if you can call it that) in wretched, filthy encampments all over the public space of the city, Mayor Bass bragged that she’d significantly reduced the problem, which is obviously and mendaciously untrue. LA City Council member Nithya Raman, who labels herself “progressive,” bragged on putting the homeless into shelters (i.e., motel rooms at $100-K per person per year.)

Spencer Pratt attempted to inject a little reality into the discussion about putting the homeless into homes: “No matter how many beds you give these people, they are on super meth, they are on fentanyl. The DEA [Drug Enforcement Agency] statistic says 93-percent of this is a drug addiction problem. These people do not want a bed — they want fentanyl or super meth.”

Pratt is currently running third in the polls. In ranked-choice voting, the top two winners in the primary will face off in the November election. Currently Bass is polling in the lead and Nithya Raman is running second. If the numbers stay that way, the winner in November could finish Los Angeles off. Blade Runner, here we come.

But there’s still a chance that Spencer Pratt might place well in the June 2 primary just as Golden Tempo shot from dead last to win the Kentucky Derby last week.

The seductions of the Marxist race hustle have worn a little thin, even for Angelenos. Karen Bass looks increasingly ridiculous grinning about her abject failures, which Mr. Pratt lays out relentlessly in plain talk. His reality-testing seems to be getting some minds right, gaining real traction. Nithya Raman has the charisma of a mung bean.

The gubernatorial debate was equally edifying, especially the spectacle of Democratic Candidates Katie Porter’s and billionaire Tom Steyer’s rousing lack of self-awareness. Ms. Porter, renowned for dumping a pot of steaming mashed potatoes over her ex-husband’s head, and for her crotchety way with the (friendly) news media and her own staff, made the astounding statement that “the public servants we have are focused on doing their job, which is not cooperating with the federal immigration authorities.” That’s their job? Hmmmm. Mr. Steyer went further and said he would arrest ICE agents going about their business. You think . . .? (I would think that a Governor Steyer would find himself arrested by the feds for attempting such a stunt.)

The governor’s race is also a rank-choice contest. So, Republican Steve Hilton was on-hand to break the reality-optional spell that shrouded the stage like a poisonous miasma. After several Democrats made a show of deploring the grotesque homeless druggie encampments from Nob Hill to MacArthur Park, Mr. Hilton said “[They] talk as if we’re in some parallel universe where Democrats haven’t been running the state for the last sixteen years.” He shares the lead in the polls in the large field at 18-percent with Xavier Becerra, who was “Joe Biden’s” Secretary of Health and Human Services, meaning, he presided over the vaxx mandates and lockdowns of the Covid operation.

California is ground zero for the death dance of the Democratic Party. Symptoms are popping up all over the country, of course. Just this week, the FBI raided the headquarters of Virginia State Senator pro tempore L. Louise Lucas (D-Portsmouth) — and also raided the marijuana shop she co-owns next door to her HQ. The SCOTUS decision on Congressional redistricting has thrown many states’ Democratic Party outposts into a fugue of terror as they stand to lose as many as a dozen seats in Congress. DOJ prosecutions are underway against prominent Democrats in Maryland, Virginia, North Carolina, and Florida. Many of their heroes could go to prison. Panic has set in. The Democratic Party as we know it these days is not long for this world.

https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/epic-madness-burns-minds-californians

US To Revoke Passports Of People Who Owe 'Significant' Child Support

 by Jack Phillips via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

The Department of State announced on May 7 that it would revoke the U.S. passports of parents who are significantly behind on child support payments.

The department said it would work with the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) to revoke passports of individuals who owe “significant child support debt,” providing a link to the new guidance.

“Anyone owing child support debt should arrange payment now with the relevant state child support enforcement agency to prevent passport revocation,” the State Department said in a post on X.

“If outside the U.S. when their passport is revoked, individuals with significant debt will be eligible ONLY for a limited validity passport for direct return to the United States.”

In a statement, the department said the enforcement is designed to put “American families first through our passport process.”

Under the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996 (PRWORA), which was signed into law by President Bill Clinton in 1996, the government can deny or revoke passports for parents owing more than $2,500 in child support. As the State Department rejects or revokes a passport, it also must send the person a notice and provide the parent with a means to contact a relevant state child support agency, according to the law.

The State Department warned on its website that, under federal regulations, people who owe more than $2,500 in child support payments would be affected by the enforcement effort. Parents who owe more than that amount cannot be issued a new U.S. passport, it added.

Notices of passport revocations to passport holders will soon be sent out via email or to the mailing address associated with their most recent passport application, it said. The State Department did not provide a timetable and did not make mention of the PRWORA in its statements on Thursday.

Those who owe child support should contact the state to pay their debt, and can “be eligible for a new U.S. passport,” the department added. The state will then have to notify HHS to confirm that the individual has paid the debt and remove the person’s name from its records before sending that information to the State Department, a process that can take two to three weeks at minimum.

But the department cautioned that a passport that has already been revoked cannot be used to travel, even if the child support debt was paid off.

A passport holder who is abroad at the time of revocation will need to visit a U.S. embassy or consulate to obtain an emergency travel document that allows them to return to the United States, according to the State Department. They will also have to contact the state where the child support is owed to pay off the debt, it added.

“You are only eligible for a limited-validity passport for direct return to the United States until HHS verifies repayment of the debt,” the website said.

The agency did not say what would happen if the debt isn’t paid or if HHS cannot verify the repayment.

Until this week, only those who applied to renew their passports were subject to the penalty. Under the new policy, HHS will inform the State Department of all past-due payments of more than $2,500, and parents in that group with passports will have their documents revoked, the department said.

The State Department advised parents with child support debt to contact their state with any questions.

“We are expanding a commonsense practice that has been proven effective at getting those who owe child support to pay their debt,” Assistant Secretary of State for Consular Affairs Mora Namdar told media outlets on Thursday. “Once these parents resolve their debts, they can once again enjoy the privilege of a U.S. passport.”

The State Department did not immediately respond to an Epoch Times request for comment.

https://www.zerohedge.com/political/us-revoke-passports-people-who-owe-significant-child-support