Anti-vaccine evangelical Christian pastor Rick Wiles, who believes that vaccines are used to commit "genocide," has been hospitalized with Covid.
His website, TruNews, announced over the weekend that he had contracted coronavirus and was taken to a hospital where he had been given oxygen, reported Independent.
This comes less than a month after Wiles, also a right-wing Christian talk show host, said that he would never get vaccinated. “I am not going to be vaccinated,” he said.
“I’m going to be one of the survivors. I’m going to survive the genocide...The only good thing that will come out of this is a lot of stupid people will be killed off. If the vaccine wipes out a lot of stupid people, well, we’ll have a better world," he added.
TruNews suspended its broadcast last week, and announced that it was “experiencing a sudden cluster of flu and Covid among some employees and their relatives."
On Sunday, the outlet said that Wiles had been hospitalized.
TruNews said that Lauren Witzke, a Republican Senate candidate in Delaware in 2020, will co-host his nightly TV programme for the next two weeks. In the past, TruNews has supported conspiracy theorists considered to be racist, antisemitic, homophobic and Islamophobic.
The outlet has called former President Barack Obama a “demon from hell” several times. Wiles has said that Obama “spiritually sodomized the nation."
Meanwhile, the World Bank president said on Tuesday that it was essential that the US frees up excess Covid-19 vaccine doses for Latin America, reported Reuters. "These next few weeks are vital that in particular the US frees up excess (vaccines) to go to programs that exist," said World Bank President David Malpass.
"We're ready to take them tomorrow in the three countries that I mentioned and by two weeks from now in more countries within Latin America," he said, referring to Ecuador, El Salvador and Honduras, which are looking for 220 million vaccine doses.
This comes amidst World Health Organization raising concern about high infection rates in Latin America where death toll from Covid-19 has crossed one million. WHO emergency expert Mike Ryan said that the situation in the region was "starting to turn in the wrong direction."
