Conservative radio host Rush Limbaugh compared the coronavirus to climate change and accused federal health officials and the national media of using a global pandemic to scare American citizens.
“It seems like every day we get some new scare tactic from some supposedly credible source,” Limbaugh said on his nationally syndicated program Thursday. “And what generally happens is after some reporting of what everybody would consider good news, in less than a day, a couple of stories come along, maybe three, that try to throw cold water on the good news and make it sound even worse than it was the day before — and that’s what this is.”
Limbaugh, who has in recent weeks accused Democrats of using the pandemic to cast President Trump in a negative light and achieve political goals, said the reaction from the Left reminds him of the early days of the climate change movement.
“So, they keep putting up roadblocks,” he said. “It’s just like what they do with this climate change stuff, folks. As every dire prediction fails to scare people enough, they come up with more. And some of it is now starting to get absolutely ridiculous in terms of common sense.”
Democrats have hammered Trump over his response to the virus, which they have characterized as inadequate and based on something other than science.
“The president’s denial at the beginning was deadly,” said House Speaker Nancy Pelosi in late March. “His delay in getting equipment to where it’s needed is deadly. … As the president fiddles, people are dying.”
Trump often refers to the virus as the “silent enemy” which has shut led to a policy of lockdowns causing economic hardship and taken more than 80,00 American lives.
During the pandemic’s early days, Limbaugh told his listeners Trump was the right person for the job of eradicating the virus from the American populace while the country’s economy afloat.
“The American people did not elect a bunch of health experts that we don’t know,” Limbaugh said on March 27. “We didn’t elect a president to defer to a bunch of health experts that we don’t know. And how do we know they’re even health experts? Well, they wear white lab coats, and they have been at the job for a while, and they are at the CDC, and they are at the NIH. Yeah, they have been there, and they are there, but have there been any job assessments for them?”
One of the health experts Trump has publicly broken with is Dr. Anthony Fauci, a leading member of the White House task force combating the coronavirus.
This week, Fauci warned a Senate committee that if local economies open up too quickly, they could see “needless suffering.”
On the issue of students and teachers returning to schools in the fall, Fauci said, “We better be careful.”
Trump said Fauci’s assessment was “not an acceptable answer.”
“I was surprised by his answer actually, because, you know, it’s just to me — it’s not an acceptable answer, especially when it comes to schools,” he said Wednesday.
Limbaugh, who has questioned Fauci’s loyalties to the president in the past, cast doubt on the warnings from public health officials.
“So, it’s nothing but a scare move. It’s a scare tactic, a series of them, and you are aware of the transformation this story, this cause of climate change has gone through,” he said. “I mean, it gets ridiculous sometimes, the predictions that are made, the warnings, the things that are going to kill us.”
