This seems like a typical situation that we see in the West arising from: (1) the legacy of heedless 19th-century attitudes toward the environment and (2) unrealistic expectations about human interaction with the environment.
A hundred years ago, people did all kinds of things to cherished natural resources that they'd never do today. San Francisco dammed Hetch Hetchy, Yosemite's twin that was reputed to be even more beautiful than Yosemite. Until ca. 1950, people intentionally fed bears in Yosemite Valley for entertainment, and sent burning logs over Yosemite Falls at night for people down in the valley to watch. They put permanent steps and cables on the back of Half Dome, which is something that just isn't a normal thing to do on a peak in the Sierra. And they developed the hell out of Yosemite Valley, turning it from a natural cathedral into an asphalt parking lot with big-city-style smog problems in the summer high season. All of these things have had negative consequences. A bunch of people have died on Half Dome, so they've had to start rationing access. Bear-human interactions, which are very, very seldom an issue in the undeveloped backcountry, are a huge problem in specific places, especially Yosemite Valley. And now we have hantavirus, which doesn't seem to be a big problem either in the city or in the backcountry.
People also have unrealistic expectations about how they can live alongside the environment. People build houses in beautiful forests, refuse to clear defensible space around their houses because they like the trees, and then yelp to the government to put out forest fires so their houses don't burn down. The result is that we build up tinder for decades, and then get huge, catastrophic fires that, unlike the many smaller fires that would naturally occur, have negative environmental effects. An example was the huge Station Fire in the San Gabriels a few years back. Various opportunistic species have taken over in the disturbed habitat. One of the worst of these is purple poodle bush, which is sort of like poison oak except ten times worse -- it gets microscopic needles under your skin like little syringes injecting you with the irritating chemical. The stuff is ordinarily pretty rare (thank God), but in the burned areas it's taking over like crazy.
It's not realistic to imagine that you can have a natural environment in Yosemite Valley with the population density they're trying to support. Why is it a surprise if they get disease-carrying rodents? If it was undeveloped backcountry, you wouldn't have a big enough supply of garbage to feed such a high density of mice. If it was a city, you could exterminate the mice. You can't do any of that in an environment that's basically a high-density suburb that you're pretending is a wilderness.
The guvmint-based solution is to scale back the density of development in Yosemite Valley radically, and also to stop allowing people to drive private cars into the valley.
As an individual, there are a couple of positive things you can do: (1) Instead of driving your car into Yosemite Valley, take the YARTS bus from a nearby town like Mariposa. (2) If you live in the Bay Area, please show a little originality by not doing the same stuff that everybody else does. The two things that people want to do are (a) climbing Half Dome as a day hike and (b) overnight backpacking in Little Yosemite. These areas are heavily overimpacted. Try something else. The Sierra is a big place.
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