Anything to impress the bosses, right?
That could have been Candace Owens’ motivation when parroted Donald Trump and took to Twitter to try to downplay the threat from the same coronavirus that is responsible for a surging number of deaths worldwide. The former liberal Democrat abruptly-turned-staunch Republican who in the past has sympathized with Adolf Hitler and insisted she never had ”race problems” despite documented proof to the contrary decided to weigh in on the growing public health crisis that is the coronavirus.
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Owens, who is neither a medical doctor nor a college graduate, has somehow decided that the “mass hysteria” over the coronavirus — which has killed more than 4,000 people in just a couple of months’ time — is “unreal.” Chances are that her amateur and false prognosis would fall on deaf ears if she tried to tell the same thing to the family members of those more than 4,000 people who have died from the coronavirus.
Her apparent rationale for deciding the global health crisis was being blown out of proportion was that elderly people with pre-existing conditions die anyway, from the flu or otherwise. Her message was loud and clear: Why fret over what she sees as the inevitable?
Owens also mocked what she called “the mass global mental breakdown that [coronavirus] inspired” and predicted that one day society won’t remember the coronavirus as being so dire, seemingly implying that the increasing number of deaths of “80 year olds” who “are dying at a high rate from a flu” was just part for the course.
Owens, clearly unqualified on the matter, is the same person who once falsely claimed that HPV (human papillomavirus) is not contagious. In fact, HPV is the most common sexually transmitted infection.
Of course, the obvious flaw in Owens’ misguided reasoning is that there is an existing vaccine for the flu that many people take as a precautionary measure to ward it off. Meanwhile, there is not one for the coronavirus, which continues to infect people at an exponential rate. Yes, the CDC has estimated that there have been anywhere from 20,000 to 52,000 in the past 12 months — numbers that in all likelihood won’t nearly be matched by those caused by the coronavirus. But, sadly, those are deaths that were expected and factored into a flu-related mortality rate that is probably pretty steady year-in and year-out. In that context, to shrug off the coronavirus shows Owens has more sympathy for the leader of Nazi Germany than she does for those dying through no fault of their own.
In addition, the fact that the coronavirus came along so quickly and spread even quicker should rightfully be cause for alarm instead of a cue for anyone to downplay the true threat it poses to public health across the globe and especially in the U.S. Still, Owens and Trump have offered similar takes in apparent misguided efforts to quell fears — efforts that have backfired as Vice President Mike Pence, a man who failed in his response to HIV-related public health crises while governor of Indiana, is charged with leading the fight against coronavirus.
It also cannot be ignored that Owens has previously been exposed as a con artist who time and time again follows the money, casting doubt on the true inspiration behind her tweets on Tuesday that were spreading fake news. Just a few weeks removed from her joining fellow young, conservative Black folks to worship Trump at the White House in the name of Black History Month, Owens may have an ulterior motive at play — like pleasing Trump.
She is the same person who once said Hitler only wanted to make Germany “great again.” That gem of a comment came months before Owens, who has said racism doesn’t exist, publicly denied ever experiencing “race issues” despite enlisting in 2007 the help of the NAACP to win a lawsuit where she claimed she was racially harassed.
The convenient and hate-filled hypocrisy hardly ends there, making Owens a flawed source to offer any commentary on public health issues — or, really, anything else — that are nearing pandemic levels and killing people.
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