Ted Nugent, who once dismissed COVID-19, sickened by virus
(NewsNation Now) — Rocker Ted Nugent is revealing he was in agony after testing positive for coronavirus — months after he said the virus was “not a real pandemic.”
“I thought I was dying,” Nugent says in a Facebook live video posted Monday. “I literally could hardly crawl out of bed the last few days,” adding: “So I was officially tested positive for COVID-19 today.”
In the video shot at his Michigan ranch, the “Cat Scratch Fever” singer repeatedly uses racist slurs to refer to COVID-19 and reiterates his previous stance that he wouldn’t be getting the vaccine because he claims wrongly that “nobody knows what’s in it.”
Nugent, a supporter of ex-President Donald Trump, previously called the pandemic a scam and has railed against public health restrictions. He has repeated a narrative pushed by some conservative media and disputed by health experts that suggests the official death count from the coronavirus is inflated.
The seven-day national average of cases remains over 60,000 new coronavirus cases per day, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.