Jake Paul baselessly calls COVID-19 ‘a hoax,’ denies he said it

Just in case you were wondering what Jake Paul’s thoughts on COVID-19 were, it’s exactly what you think they are.

We’re still in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic, which has seen at least 62 million known cases and well over one million deaths. The United States in particular has the most cases and most deaths. And yet, there are still some who believe none of this is real and that this deadly virus is all a hoax.

For example: Jake Paul (1-0, 1 KO), who is fighting Nate Robinson on Saturday’s Mike Tyson vs. Roy Jones Jr co-main event.

Yes, this popular social media influencer and YouTube star recently did an interview with The Daily Beast’s Marlow Stern, and among the topics discussed was the fact that Paul hosted maskless parties at his California home at a time when that’s absolutely not something that anyone should be doing. Paul laid his ignorance cards down on the table for the world to see, and this is only an excerpt of the entire conversation.

I gotta say, I saw all this stuff over the summer and it did piss me off a little bit. You were hosting these giant maskless parties at your home in Calabasas as COVID cases were spiking in the state, and it drew a bunch of neighbor complaints and condemnation from the mayor. And when Insider asked you about it in late July, you said, “I personally am not the type of person who’s gonna sit around and not live my life.” Do you regret those comments, and are you still living by that mentality?

Yeah, I mean… it’s time for us to open up. Obviously it’s a controversial subject, but it’s time for our nation to open up and go back to normal.

You really think that?

Yeah. A hundred percent. There are people losing jobs, there are small businesses who are going bankrupt, there are millions of people who are unemployed right now, people are turning to alcohol and drugs to cope with everything that’s going on. This is the most detrimental thing to our society. COVID cases are at less than 1 percent, and I think the disease is a hoax.

You think the disease is a hoax? It’s killed about 260,000 people so far this year.

Ugh. Yeah, and so has the flu.

No. The flu has only killed a fraction of that, and we also have a vaccine for the flu.

OK.

I can assure you it gets worse from there, including easily disprovable lines about how “98 percent of news is fake” and that wearing masks don’t do anything to stop the spread of the virus. Even more ridiculous is that in the same interview he goes onto say “obviously, the coronavirus has killed people” which means by his logic, a hoax virus has killed people.

Here’s one more doozy:

[...] A hundred percent of our nation is shut down due to the 1 percent who’s at risk, so that’s what I meant about how COVID doesn’t make sense to me. It doesn’t add up. There’s something more behind it that the government’s not telling us, and to me it just sucks, because so many kids’ lives are being affected by this because we’re worried about the 1 percent who are gonna die. And it sucks. I don’t want those people to die, and nobody wants them to die, but it is the process of life. And shit happens, so… I don’t know.

Even ignoring the gross morbidity of just accepting a 1% mortality rate when that’s a large amount of people just for the United States, as well as looking at this virus in a binary life/death situation, the entire country is not shut down. There is no national lockdown and even at a state level there are literally sporting events going on right now with fans in attendance. Many non-essential stores and businesses are still open even if not accepting full capacity.

Plot twist! Paul then did an interview with The Verge and claimed that Stern took his quotes out of context.

“So this guy, this reporter, he misquoted me,” Paul said. “He took what I said out of context, and I told him that.”

And then when he was asked by The Verge if he believed COVID was fake, he pulled a 180 and said the indisputably correct answer, which is that it’s real.

“No, no. COVID is very, very real,” he insisted. “COVID is very real, like, it’s killed so many people. It’s killed people I know. It’s killed someone very, very close to me. So that’s what I’m saying. I don’t even know where that came from.”

Heh. What happened to his false equivalence to the flu and

Well after Jake lobbed his bullshit grenade in Stern’s direction by claiming he misquoted him and that he didn’t say these things, lo and behold there is audio of the interview that Stern uploaded for everyone to hear. I don’t know about you, but my ears tell me that this is fully transcribed and Paul was lying his ass off.

Anyway, if you want a rooting interest in this gong show then lemme tell you about Seattle’s own Nate Robinson. The former Washington Huskies star spent a decade in the NBA, is a three-time Slam Dunk Contest champion who once blocked 7’6” Yao Ming at the rim. He’s a mere 5’9” and 180 lbs playing a game where you can still be undersized at point guard at 6’1”. There’s no knowledge of Robinson ever doing or saying as many shitty things in his life as Jake Paul has managed in a year.