Rush Limbaugh is back in the news again, this time while airing some controversial theories about the coronavirus. "It looks like the coronavirus is being weaponized as yet another element to bring down Donald Trump," Limbaugh said during his Monday radio show, per HuffPost. "Now, I want to tell you the truth about the coronavirus," he added. "Yeah, I’m dead right on this. The coronavirus is the common cold, folks." Limbaugh pointed out that only a small fraction of people who contract the illness die. "The survival rate of this is 98%," he said. "You have to read very deeply to find that number, that 2 percent of the people get the coronavirus die. That’s less than the flu, folks.” He's right about the survival stat, notes the Washington Post, which adds that, unlike the flu, the very new coronavirus has no vaccine and relatively little is known about it.
Still, Limbaugh sees an anti-Trump agenda behind much of the media coverage. “It’s really being hyped as a deadly Andromeda strain or Ebola pandemic that, 'Oh, my God, is going to wipe out the nation. It’s going to wipe out the population of the world,'" he said. The idea, he added, is to spread the idea that "Trump and capitalism are destroying America and destroying the world." It wasn't the only controversial virus theory he espoused. Limbaugh also raised a widely debunked claim about the origin of the coronovirus. He alleged that "ChiComs," or Chinese Communists, were trying to "weaponize" the virus in a lab, "and it got out." (Limbaugh was recently diagnosed with advanced lung cancer, and he also received a high honor from Trump.)