US Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene continued her campaign of spreading misinformation related to Covid-19 after being suspended from Twitter this week.
During an interview with a pro-Trump online broadcasting network called “Real America’s Voice”, Ms Greene falsely claimed that news reports were overhyping a surge of Covid-19 in many states, particularly those where rates of unvaccinated Americans remain high.
While bashing the news media, Ms Greene specifically claimed that hospitals were not facing a steep rise in Covid patients that threatened to overwhelm their facilities, a trend that has made headlines in recent weeks and an assertion that is easily proven false by the real-life situation on the ground in Florida, where more and more hospitals are being forced to cancel elective surgeries as their facilities reach capacity.
"So while the news tries to tell us the hospitals are slam-packed with COVID, that's just not the case," she said. "Everybody needs to get back down to common sense and remember that, you know, we're human, we can't live forever, we're going to catch all kinds of diseases and illnesses and other viruses, and we get hurt sometimes."
Statements from local Florida official also sharply contradicted Ms Greene’s false claims.
"There is a capacity issue at our local hospitals dealing with this new surge in COVID-19," Brevard County fire chief Mark Schollmeyer told CBS News. "Crowding in the ERs has caused us to hold the wall and wait for our patients to offload before we run the next call."
More than 15,000 Floridians are hospitalized across the state with Covid-19, an all-time record that has shown no sign of stopping its rise so far.
Bizarrely, just seconds earlier in the same interview, Ms Greene claimed correctly that Covid-19 was “raging across the country”; it remains unclear what she meant by that, if she does not believe the disease is causing alarming numbers of hospitalizations.
A spokesperson for the Georgia congresswoman, whose state borders Florida where the Covid-19 outbreak is the worst in the nation, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The congresswoman remains under a seven-day ban from Twitter for spreading similar misinformation on that platform; should she receive another strike from the social media company, she will join her political ally, former President Donald Trump, in being permanently banned from the site.
