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The original “Wheel of Fortune” host knows how to spin.
Chuck Woolery, who also once hosted “Love Connection” and now leads the conservative podcast “Blunt Force Truth,” accused everyone from the CDC to the Democratic Party of lying about the novel coronavirus that causes COVID-19 in a pair of tweets on Sunday night — which were later retweeted by President Trump.
“The most outrageous lies are the ones about Covid 19. Everyone is lying. The CDC, Media, Democrats, our Doctors, not all but most, that we are told to trust,” Woolery wrote in a Twitter TWTR, +0.70% post. He speculated that coronavirus coverage has been spun to slow down economic recovery in order to influence the U.S. presidential election in November.
In a follow-up tweet, he added that there is “scientific evidence” that schools should reopen this fall. U.S. Education Secretary Betsy DeVos also pushed for reopening schools over the weekend, despite coronavirus cases surging in states like Florida.
President Trump retweeted both posts, which have been shared tens of thousands of times on Twitter and drawn thousands of comments, leading Woolery’s name and some of the game shows that he had stints on to trend on Monday morning. Trump also retweeted an April 11 post from Woolery’s “Blunt Force Truth” co-host Mark Young questioning the expertise of Dr. Anthony Fauci, one of the nation’s leading authorities on infectious diseases. “So based on Dr. Fauci and the Democrats, I will need an ID card to go shopping but not to vote?” reads Young’s tweet.
A White House official also told NBC News on Sunday that “several White House officials are concerned about the number of times Dr. Fauci has been wrong on things,” such as his March guidance that “people should not be walking around wearing masks.” Guidance on facial coverings has been adjusted, of course, as more evidence has revealed that wearing masks significantly slows the spread of COVID-19. In fact, wearing face masks between April and May averted 230,000 coronavirus cases, according to one study. The president even wore a mask in public for the first time during the pandemic on Saturday, covering up while visiting a military hospital.
More than 3.3 million coronavirus cases had been confirmed in the U.S. as of Monday morning, with Florida counting a record of over 15,000 new cases on Sunday. More than 135,205 Americans have died from the coronavirus, and the death toll is rising again after it had started to flatten in mid-to-late April.
