Rock musician and pandemic denialist Ted Nugent has contracted COVID-19 after a year of denying the pandemic is “real” and calling it a “scam.” The artist took to Facebook Live Monday to make an announcement, one that he led up to with a warning: “Everybody told me that I should not announce this.”
The singer said he could barely crawl out of bed and that he “officially tested positive for COVID-19” Monday following a “pain-in-the-ass” last few days.
“I have had flu symptoms for the last ten days,” Nugent said. “I thought I was dying. Just a clusterfuck. I was tested positive today. I got the Chinese shit. I’ve got a stuffed-up head, body aches.”
It’s a surprising— or not-so surprising— revelation from a man who has been questioning health officials and calling COVID a hoax for the last year. Just last month, the vocal Trump supporter questioned the official U.S. death toll of 500,000, alleging that officials fudged numbers and that people who were “run over by a tandem gravel truck doing a four-wheel drift” and “stabbed to death” were likely added to that toll.
“They claim five hundred thousand people have died from COVID-19,” Nugent said on Facebook. “Bullshit. I believe that medical examiners in all 50 states have gone, ‘I put down on the death certificate that he died of asphyxiation, but they made me put COVID.”
Nugent has also come out questioning COVID vaccines and arguing that Americans “don’t know what’s in it,” so it seems he hasn’t gotten his jab quite yet, either.
