Conservative commentator Rush Limbaugh said he thinks the coronavirus is being sensationalized to hurt President Trump.
As the stock market falls amid the spread of the virus, Limbaugh claimed that the outbreak was being used to “bring down” Trump, dismissing the virus’s symptoms on Monday.
“Folks, this coronavirus thing, I want to try to put this in perspective for you. It looks like the coronavirus is being weaponized as yet another element to bring down Donald Trump. Now, I want to tell you the truth about the coronavirus … The coronavirus is the common cold, folks,” he claimed.
“The survival rate of this is 98%! You have to read very deeply to find that number. Two percent of the people that get the coronavirus die. That’s less than the flu, folks. That is a far lower death statistic than any form of influenza, which is an annual thing that everybody gets shots for. There’s nothing unusual about the coronavirus. In fact, coronavirus is not something new. There are all kinds of viruses that have that name,” the radio host continued.
Limbaugh then warned his listeners not to “let [their] guard down” because any infection would be “miserable” before saying, “I’m telling you, the [Chinese communists] are trying to weaponize this thing.”
As of Feb. 17, over 71,000 people were infected with the virus, including 70,548 in China, and the illness killed approximately 1,770 Chinese natives. Additionally, the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention found that the 2019 coronavirus is about 20 times more deadly than the common flu. The outbreak has also long surpassed the 2003 SARS death toll.
Limbaugh has a history of making unfounded claims on his radio show, according to PolitiFact. In the summer of 2019, he claimed someone within the Obama “regime” decided to get rid of the citizenship question on the 2020 census. And, in February 2019, he said that climate change was “nothing but a bunch of computer models that attempt to tell us what’s going to happen in 50 years or 30,” a statement scientists disagreed with.
