- The video discusses the prevalence of misinformation about COVID-19 and its impact.
- Examples of false claims include microwaving mail to kill the virus, garlic as a cure, and buying breast milk for protection.
- The video highlights protests against stay-at-home orders fueled by misinformation.
- The right-wing media sphere, including figures like Rush Limbaugh and Fox News, is criticized for spreading false information.
- Fox News initially downplayed the virus and later downplayed the death toll.
- The video emphasizes the danger and consequences of misinformation during a public health crisis.

- The current president is both the subject and target of misinformation
- He often parrots talking points from TV shows, such as Fox's Steve Hilton
- Trump's endorsement of hydroxychloroquine as a potential coronavirus treatment came from a misleading claim made on Tucker Carlson's show
- The feedback loop between Fox and Trump has politicized the issue of the drug's efficacy
- Fox presents simple solutions to complex problems, such as resuming baseball games with testing and PPE
- The skills required for producing TV and governing are different, and Trump seems to lack the understanding of this difference
- Right-wing media's misinformation has fueled protests against stay-at-home orders, which Trump has supported
- The majority of Americans are more concerned about restrictions being lifted too quickly than too slowly
- The author wants people to be able to return to work, but is frustrated by the misinformation and the impact it has on people's lives
- The fastest way for the crisis to be over is for everyone to remain united in the difficult task at hand.

- The fastest way to overcome the current situation is for everyone to stay united
- Trusted and well-informed leadership is needed, which is currently lacking
- The current leader is a compulsive liar who downplays the seriousness of the situation
- The media is irresponsible and contributes to the problem
- There is no easy solution to make the media disappear
- The speaker sarcastically tries to blow away right-wing media as a last resort, but it doesn't work

The video discusses the prevalence of COVID-19 misinformation and its impact, highlighting false claims and protests fueled by misinformation. The right-wing media sphere, including figures like Rush Limbaugh and Fox News, is criticized for spreading false information. The video emphasizes the danger of misinformation during a public health crisis and the lack of trusted leadership. The speaker sarcastically suggests getting rid of right-wing media as a solution, but acknowledges that it is not feasible.

As COVID-19 continues to dominate the news cycle, John Oliver looks at the various sources of misinformation about the disease - from televangelists and the right wing media, to President Trump himself.

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♪♪ Welcome to the show, which is still taking place in this blank void, TV's greatest celebration of whiteness since Frasier.

It's clearly been another brutal week with the occasional bright spot, like learning Judi Dench is apparently doing TikTok dances with her grandson over FaceTime.

♪ Juice, sauce, little bit of dressing ♪ Ice, wrist,

1, Judy Dench can hit the woe like a fucking pro.

And 3, life's getting pretty weird on Earth right now.

But sadly, we have to put all that aside and turn straight to our main story this week, various corn.

I thought we were gonna talk about something depressing, but instead, you know, wait a minute.

The fact is, COVID-19 is still dominating the news every day, and it's hard to keep up with all the information about it, to say nothing of the misinformation.

You need to microwave your mail to kill the COVID-19 virus.

Garlic does have some antimicrobial properties, but there is absolutely no evidence that it kills COVID-19.

Adults are now buying breast milk because some believe that it can protect them from COVID-19.

You should absolutely not be buying other people's breast milk to protect you from the coronavirus.

Not only will it not work, you're taking it away from the babies and the perverts who genuinely need it.

Now, unfortunately, bullshit regarding this virus is widespread and people are acting on it.

Just this week, we saw protests all over the country against stay-at-home orders.

And some of the attendees, like at Michigan's Operation Gridlock, seemed motivated by very questionable information.

What about concerns for safety in spreading this virus and potentially killing more people?

We're against these big corporates that, are trying to rack in all these dollars who created the disease and now want to make people pay for the cure.

The flu kills more people than this does.

Okay, what's worrying about that, other than absolutely everything, is that you may have even heard some of those arguments from people you're related to or people you love, which can incidentally be 2 very distinct groups.

Polls show that when asked about the death rate, 40 percent of Americans believe COVID-19 is less deadly or just as deadly as the flu, which it's not.

Comparing the coronavirus to the flu is like comparing Jeffrey Dahmer to OJ Simpson.

I'm not saying OJ is great, I'm just saying he wouldn't have even filled up Dahmer's vegetable drawer.

And bad information is not only frustrating, to the extent that it motivates people to ignore stay-at-home measures, it's both dangerous and could actually end up forcing us to stay at home for longer.

And if you're thinking, how can people possibly believe shit like that?

The bad information flying around about this virus, and the places that people are getting it from.

Because there are a lot of media bubbles out there, and getting a glimpse outside of the 1 that you're in can be eye-opening.

For example, if you're not a regular viewer of televangelist and humble private jet farmer, Kenneth Copeland, you might not know that he took care of COVID-19 weeks ago.

Okay, setting aside his crew of the 4 weeniest hype men of all time, spitting all over the place is not gonna cure anything, unless your plan is to give the coronavirus the coronavirus, in which case, best of luck to you.

Although, I do understand why Copeland is so determined to end this pandemic.

If I only had a few weeks until my tragically obvious hair dye started to fade, I'd be anxious that my colorists be allowed to leave their home too.

Especially if I'd already claimed on my actual website that my unnaturally dark hair at the age of 82 was simply the result of standing in the mirror and saying, glory to God, hair grow dark brown, thick be in the name of Jesus, bald spots, no.

My point is, there's a lot at stake here for Kenneth Copeland.

But the televangelist world is just 1 of the many bubbles.

There's also an ecosystem of conspiracy theories, like the false belief that the virus was caused by 5G networks, something that led people to set fire to cell towers in the U.K.

Although, not as ridiculous as the fact that those flaming towers almost certainly still offered better coverage than AT&T.

You thought a pandemic would bring us together?

Our feud must be an essential service, because it's still in business.

Seriously though, BD, I do hope you're safe and healthy.

I can't wait to talk to you as soon as this is over, and as soon as I can get more than 1 bar of service.

But here in the U.S., 1 of the biggest and most robust bubbles is the right-wing media sphere.

It's dominated by some enormously powerful individuals, not just on TV, but importantly, on conservative talk radio, where the most powerful host is undeniably Rush Limbaugh, a man with millions of listeners, a presidential medal of freedom, and almost certainly a room in his basement that his housekeeper isn't allowed to go into.

Even well into the outbreak, Limbaugh has been spouting some fabulously wrong information.

This coronavirus, it just, all of this panic is just not warranted.

This, I'm telling you, when I tell you, when I've told you that this virus is the common cold, When I said that, it was based on the number of cases, it's also based on the kind of virus this is.

No to you claiming COVID-19 got its name because it was the 19th coronavirus.

It's called that because it was first identified in 2019, you gigantic potato.

But also, no to the virus being the common cold, no to this being not uncommon, no to your gold microphone, No to your browser being open to the Drudge Report.

No to your logo that looks like 2 pairs of breasts are in a fight.

No to the mysterious can on your desk, which I can only assume is Pam original cooking spray.

But most of all, no to your stupid quarantine beard.

You look like if Santa was me-too'd, kicked out of the North Pole, and forced to move to a condo in Tampa with all linoleum floors.

The problem is, many in conservative media have found it easy to fold this virus into narratives that they've been carefully building up for decades.

Limbaugh has spent years pushing his 4 corners of deceit, which consist of government, academia, science, and the media, which unfortunately, happen to be the 4 most important groups to listen to during a public health crisis.

And I understand why he'd sow that doubt.

If you establish your show as the sole outlet worth trusting, that gives you a lot of power.

And he's not alone in utilizing that technique.

Fox News' recurrent pitch to its audience has been that it will tell you the true story that elites and the mainstream media are trying to hide.

And that's how some of their hosts played this virus initially, as a hysterical attack by the media to derail the president, with segments titled, Coronavirus Hysteria, liberal media hoax backfires, and Trump confronts the panic pushers.

And when people started dying, and the arguments became harder to sell, the network seemed to pivot from trying to downplay the warnings to downplaying the deaths.

To date, thankfully, 0 people in the United States of America have died from the coronavirus, 0.

We have 6 deaths from the coronavirus, 18,000 deaths from the flu.

Those numbers pale in comparison to the number of flu cases over this flu season.

An estimated 60,000 Americans will die from the coronavirus.

According to the CDC in 2018, 61,000 Americans died of the annual flu.

The fact of the matter is, we have people dying, 45,000 people a year die from automobile accidents, 480,000 from cigarettes, 360,000 a year from swimming pools, but we don't shut the country down for that.

A quick thing there, though, the annual U.S.

Death toll from swimming pools isn't actually 360,000.

They're not killing almost a Cleveland every year.

The total number of drownings, period, is around 4,000.

Also, if swimming pools were killing 360,000 people a year, and you could contract a swimming pool on a trip to the grocery store, we might want to think about shutting them down until we worked out what the fuck was going on.

And look, a lot of people underestimated the danger of this virus early on.

But Fox was still doing it, not just as the death toll mounted, but even as behind the scenes, their own company was suspending non-essential business travel, and encouraging employees to cancel all in-person meetings and summits, and conduct business via Skype or by phone.

Because, and this is true, they only pretend to believe these things on television for money.

And the problem is, our current president isn't just the subject of this misinformation, he is, as we all know, also the target of it.

Often pulling his talking points directly from what he sees.

Late last month, a popular conservative narrative became that it was time to reopen the economy, and Fox's Steve Hilton encapsulated it like this.

You know that famous phrase, the cure is worse than the disease?

That is exactly the territory we are hurtling towards.

Now, I'm pretty sure Trump saw that, because just a couple of hours after that segment aired, he tweeted, we cannot let the cure be worse than the problem itself.

And the next day, couldn't seem to stop saying it.

We cannot let the cure be worse than the problem itself.

We're not gonna let the cure be worse than the problem.

That's why I talk about the cure being worse than the problem.

We can't have the cure be worse than the problem.

When I say the cure, and the cure could be worse than...

That's what, I, we can't let that happen.

It's pretty depressing to see the president just parroting what he heard on TV the night before.

And if he's gonna do that, the very least he could do is pick a better show than Steve Hilton's The Next Revolution.

Why not go with Below Deck Sailing Yacht?

That way we get to hear the President of the United States tell us about how Adam the Chef is a tease, and how Madison needs to understand her role in the interior pecking order and start listening to her chief stew, because Jenna does not need to take her shit.

Yes, it wouldn't be helpful during a pandemic, but at least it wouldn't be actively harmful.

Even though Trump has access to the country's top experts, he's still getting advice from watching TV.

And not just on talking points, but on medicine.

It's a drug commonly used for conditions like rheumatoid arthritis and lupus.

And it got a huge boost in mid-March as a potential coronavirus treatment from Tucker Carlson's show.

Early evidence suggests that chloroquine, that's a cheap anti-malaria drug, may be effective in treating coronavirus.

Gregory Regano is an advisor to the Stanford University School of Medicine, and he joins us tonight.

A well-controlled, peer-reviewed study carried out by the most eminent infectious disease specialist in the world showed a 100% cure rate against coronavirus.

But I do know it's very unusual for a study of anything to produce results of 100%.

Oh, you're very much missing something, Tucker.

For starters, that man's role as an advisor to Stanford University was news to Stanford, who since clarified, Gregory Regano is not an advisor with their school of medicine, and no 1 at Stanford was involved in the study.

As for that 100 percent cure rate, you should know they obtained that by omitting 3 patients who were transferred to an ICU and 1 patient who died.

And it is very easy to have a 100 percent success rate if you just leave out any results that wasn't a success.

Nevertheless, the very next day, Trump publicly mentioned hydroxychloroquine for the first time, and has since brought it up constantly with varying degrees of recklessness.

You're the president, not a mean sophomore trying to pressure me into doing Adderall.

Also, in terms of what you have to lose, possibly quite a bit.

As doctors are warning, the drug can trigger arrhythmia, which can lead to a fatal heart attack in certain patients.

And that is not to say that this drug shouldn't be studied.

But the feedback loop between Fox and Trump has run way ahead of the science here.

In just 1 two-week period, Fox personalities and their guests made claims promoting hydroxychloroquine nearly 300 times, with Laura Ingram even visiting Trump at the White House earlier this month to advocate for the drug.

Thanks to this media frenzy, the efficacy of this drug, which should be a scientific issue, has become a political 1.

Anyone saying they want more comprehensive studies can be dismissed by the right as a Trump hater.

And if you argue that we shouldn't make decisions based on anecdotal evidence, Rush Limbaugh has a ready response.

It just means it hasn't been scientifically tested in mass numbers, but it means it's working.

Anecdotally, you arrived at work today, Rush.

But that alone doesn't mean that everyone arrived at work today, or even that most people arrived at work today.

There is a process for knowing whether a scientific claim is true, and it involves testing and observing results in a controlled setting, rather than yelling your thoughts confidently into C-3PO's penis.

And I know it is easy to write off Limbaugh as a right-wing blowhard, but the reality is, he draws over 15 million listeners a week, among the most loyal of whom is the president, who reportedly considers Limbaugh a real-time metric of how his decisions are playing with his supporters.

And all this time, existing patients with conditions like lupus, who have been taking hydroxychloroquine for years and now struggling to get it.

1 large healthcare provider even wrote to lupus patients telling them that due to a worldwide shortage, it won't refill their prescriptions, saying, thank you for the sacrifice you will be making.

And look, I'd like nothing more than if this was somehow a miracle cure, but I can't say it is.

And I can't say it isn't because it's still being tested and I'm not a fucking doctor.

It might, it could, it's too soon to say.

The problem is, might and could aren't really words that grab an audience.

That is why cable news often traffics in bright, primary colors and easy storylines.

Me telling you that we have to wait for results just isn't satisfying to hear or to watch.

And throughout this crisis, Fox has constantly presented simple solutions to complex problems.

Just watch Sean Hannity formulate a plan, seemingly in real time, for resuming baseball games by testing every person in attendance and having them wear PPE.

If it's my choice, and I have to wear gloves, a mask, okay, I'll wear it.

If everyone else is wearing it, we can suck it up for a couple of months until things have passed.

Probably can't eat popcorn because you have to keep your mask off the whole time, but you probably could eat a hot dog.

You take a, you open up your respirator, take a bite and you chew it under your mask.

I have to drink my beer if I'm at a game.

So if I have to use a straw and slip it in, I'll do that.

I would rather have my temperature taken, drink beer from a straw, eat a hot dog by going like this and chewing it in a mass and not go at all.

I mean, setting aside the pro-choice line, you're right, Sean, your body, your choice.

Obviously, you couldn't eat popcorn, but you could definitely get a hot dog in your mouth before the virus could sneak in there.

Anecdotally, I know a guy who ate a hot dog once and didn't get coronavirus, so that absolutely checks out.

And while that's almost incomprehensibly stupid, you can't deny it's good TV.

The issue is that the skills required to produce TV and to govern are very different.

And unfortunately, we have a president who doesn't seem to know the difference.

At the start of his presidency, he famously told top aides to think of each presidential day like an episode of a television show in which he vanquishes rivals.

So we have a network and a president who thrive on division, feeding on 1 another at a time when we desperately need a unified response to a public health crisis.

And all that brings us back to the protests that we discussed earlier.

Hundreds of people have taken to the streets this week, fueled by the kind of misinformation that is rampant in right-wing media.

The same right-wing media, which then eagerly covered the protests that they helped create, like this.

Protests popping up all across America as some fed up folks are demanding an end to stay-at-home orders.

They got in front of the governor's residence in St.

They referenced things like President Trump's statement that the cure cannot be worse than the disease.

Except, the cure can't be worse than the disease isn't Trump's statement.

You shouldn't be crediting him with that.

You should be charging him with copyright infringement.

And like clockwork, Trump, just a few minutes after that segment, highlighted groups like Liberate Minnesota, tweeted out, Liberate Minnesota, followed by Liberate Michigan, and then Liberate Virginia.

And all of this is legitimately dangerous.

Because watching coverage like that might convince Trump that there's a sizable portion of the population that wants to go back to work no matter the cost.

Sixty-six percent of Americans say they are more concerned restrictions will be lifted too quickly than too slowly.

And it's frankly remarkable that number is so high after weeks of this bullshit.

And look, I get Trump, Fox, and those protesters wanting all of this to be over.

I want people to be able to get back to work and to get some sense of normalcy restored.

But for what it's worth, I know people who've died from this.

I also know people who are taking hydroxychloroquine because they think it will give them immunity, and I know people with lupus who are down to their last few weeks of pills, and it makes me fucking furious.

Because the fact is, the fastest way for this to be over is for all of us to remain united in this very difficult task.

But the only way that happens is if we have trusted, well-informed leadership, which unfortunately, we don't.

Instead, we have a compulsive liar constantly listening to voices, telling him that this is nothing more than the common cold, with potentially a 100 percent cure available, and that there's already a great plan to restart baseball, even as there's a swimming pool killing spree that for some reason, nobody's talking about.

And while there are no easy solutions to make this irresponsible media magically disappear, I guess there's 1 trick we haven't tried yet.

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