Joining the trend of right-wing commentators calling the coronavirus no big deal, former White House deputy assistant Sebastian Gorka won’t stop telling his audience that the virus is “mass hysteria” created by the left.
“This year alone, for the record—tell your friends if they start getting hysterical saying ‘I can’t buy those medical surgical masks’—16,000 Americans have died of the flu. The flu. Is that a front-page story?” Gorka said on his “America First” podcast last Friday.
“Are they [Democrats] blaming that on the president? No, because they can’t, but 12 deaths from some new threat called coronavirus? Let’s politicize that. There is no gutter they will not sink into,” Gorka said. (At the time of the podcast’s recording, 12 people had died from coronavirus; the number has since risen to 38 and continues to rise.)
Gorka had Dr. Marc Siegel, a regular Fox News contributor, on his podcast last Wednesday to affirm his claims that the fear was overblown and attack Democrats for shifting the blame of the virus’s outbreak on to Trump.
“How is this president responsible for this virus? It came from China, didn’t it?” said Siegel, who also called the World Health Organization (WHO) “a bunch of alarmists” on a recent Fox News panel.
On Monday, Gorka blamed the virus’s spread on Democrats and “lying hacks and propagandists,” in mainstream media, including Jake Tapper and Anderson Cooper.
“We’re not sick as a nation, but you should be sickened by what the media is trying to do to you,” Gorka said.
More than 100 countries have been affected by the coronavirus. Globally, more than 4,000 people have died from it, including more than 800 people in Italy alone. On Wednesday, WHO Director-General announced that “concerned both by the alarming levels of spread and severity,” and by the alarming levels of inaction,” the organization had designated the virus a pandemic.
Gorka gave a speech at this year’s Conservative Political Action Conference where an attendee has been confirmed to have been sick with the coronavirus. Gorka’s speech, titled “How Socialism Kills Today,” was a harangue against socialized medicine as it exists in Hungary.
