Congrats To Rightwing Pundit Dennis Prager, Who Wanted To Get COVID And Now Has It After Hugging ‘Thousands’ Of People

We’re closing in on our second year of the pandemic era, and it’s been a wild ride for conservatives. First they, led by then-president Donald J. Trump, tried to ignore it. Then they downplayed it. Then they attacked all the life-saving measures (masks, vaccines) that could bring it to an end. (Some even told their followers to harass people wearing masks.) How could they ever top opposing an actual cure to a highly contagious disease? One far right pundit seems to have come up with a solution: Get COVID on purpose. That’ll own the libs.

As per The Daily Beast, conservative radio host and commentator Dennis Prager — who’s 73 and who sometimes teams up with libertarian comic Adam Carolla, including on one of those right-wing documentaries that occasionally come out — revealed a couple things on Monday. One, he tested positive for COVID, and without a vaccine in his system. Two, it was all part of his master plan.

“It is infinitely preferable to have natural immunity than vaccine immunity and that is what I have hoped for the entire time,” Prager asserted on his show, which he recorded at home as he quarantines. “Hence… I have engaged with strangers, constantly hugging them, taking photos with them knowing that I was making myself very susceptible to getting COVID… [It is] what I wanted, in the hope I would achieve natural immunity and be taken care of by therapeutics. That is exactly what has happened.”

How did Prager ensure that he would catch a highly transmissible and fatal disease whose severity can be largely eliminated by taking a free and widely available vaccine? By hugging “strangers in the thousands, literally in the thousands, while not being inoculated.”

He then rattled off the army of sometimes questionable medication he’s been taking, including, yes, ivermectin, the horse medication that can be taken by humans but which is not proven to combat COVID. He’s also taking what has become known as “Zelenko Protocol, the cocktail of dodgy medications that includes the Trump-shilled hydrocloroquine (which is also not proven to combat COVID). He was also administered monoclonal antibodies, which is more expensive, more time-consuming, and less effective than, you know, taking one of the three COVID vaccines.

Prager told The Daily Beast he was “not comfortable getting an experimental vaccine produced with brand-new technology that had never before been deployed in humans on a mass scale without long-term safety data.” What he was comfortable doing, however, was taking medication that has only been approved for emergency use by the FDA (monoclonal antibodies) and a pile of other questionable medications that have been compiled by one Vladimir Zelenko, a family practitioner and conspiracy theorist.

“I certainly don’t gamble with my health,” Prager told his listeners. “But I so believe science and the science of ivermectin, not the lies of The New York Times.” (Again, the “science of ivermectin” is that it doesn’t treat COVID, even according to the company that produces it, partly as a dewormer for farm animals.)

Anyway, hope listening to conspiracy theorists and not doctors was worth it. Prager told the Beast that after testing positive, he experienced “a great deal of chills. Also he and his wife have both lost their taste of smell.

Prager’s decision to put his life in danger was seen by some as the next step in COVID denial.

Others reminded him that monoclonal antibody treatment is more “experimental” than FDA-approved vaccines.

Some call this out as a nefarious rightwing plan.

https://twitter.com/SethAbramson/status/1450189233185083396

And others pointed out that Prager is endangering the lives of all of his gullible listeners, who may not be able to afford the army of medication that he (and Joe Rogan) put into their bodies.

(Via The Daily Beast)