Rush Limbaugh, a top backer of President Trump, suggested on his radio show Friday that health experts leading the U.S. government’s response to the coronavirus pandemic are part of the “deep state” and questioned their credentials.
Without mentioning names, the far-right commentator spoke skeptically of medical professionals at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the National Institutes of Health who are helming the Trump administration’s handling of the novel coronavirus, which has killed nearly 2,000 people across the country within the past several weeks.
“You know, we’ve talked about the deep state all these years since Trump was elected, the Trump-Russia collusion, the FBI — well, the deep state extends very deeply,” Limbaugh said. “And the American people did not elect a bunch of health experts that we don’t know. We didn’t elect a president to defer to a bunch of health experts that we don’t know.”
He made the remarks while calling into his long-running radio program, which he has not hosted for two weeks while seeking medical treatment for advanced lung cancer.
“And how do we know they’re even health experts? ‘Well, they wear white lab coats and they’ve been in the job for a while and they’re at the CDC and they’re at the NIH.’ Well, yeah, they’ve been there and they are there, but has there been any job assessment for them? They’re just assumed to be the best because they’re in government, but these are all kinds of things that I’ve been questioning.”
Limbaugh, 69, revealed last month that he had been diagnosed with lung cancer.
Trump subsequently invited him to attend the State of the Union address the next day, where he was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian award.
He caused significant controversy in the days afterward for repeatedly saying that the “coronavirus is the common cold” and accusing Democrats and the media of using the outbreak to “bring down” Trump.
Trump and his supports have been circulating rumors and misinformation about the virus since January, with a healthy dose of rabid conspiracy theorizing and racism-tinged paranoia to boot.
Right-wing influencers and QAnon supporters are now waging an information war against Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and top-ranking member of the White House’s Coronavirus Task Force.
They are falsely claiming that Fauci is working with Hillary Clinton and the deep state to cause an economic collapse and discredit Trump.
Followers of the QAnon conspiracy theory, a labyrinthine belief system that posits that Trump is waging a secret war against a global criminal organization, have spent much of the COVID-19 outbreak struggling to fit the disease into their narratives.
At first, they theorized the virus was a bioweapon created by former Microsoft CEO Bill Gates.
Then, following remarks last month from Limbaugh, a sizable contingent suggested that the virus was actually a deep state hoax meant to damage Trump politically.
On Tuesday, QAnon influencer Greg Rubini accused Fauci of making the novel coronavirus in 2015, receiving thousands of retweets.
The conspiracy theory has also been spreading on 4chan.
On the site’s /pol/ message board, anonymous users have posted dozens of huge threads about Fauci, implying he’s part of a global pedophile ring after surfacing a photo of him and singer Elton John, claiming Trump has secretly fired him, and accusing him of being part of a global Jewish cabal.