‘SO SKEPTICAL’

GOP Sen. Joni Ernst Pushes Conspiracy Theory About COVID Death Count

“These health-care providers and others are reimbursed at a higher rate if COVID is tied to it, so what do you think they’re doing?” she asked.

At an event Tuesday, Sen. Joni Ernst (R-IA) pushed a debunked conspiracy theory that just 6 percent of people reported dead from the new coronavirus in the U.S. actually died from the disease. “They’re thinking there may be 10,000 or less deaths that were actually singularly COVID-19. I’m just really curious. It would be interesting to know that,” she told attendees in Black Hawk County, adding that she was “so skeptical” of the official figure of more than 180,000 deaths. She went so far as to accuse doctors and nurses of inflating the figure for increased compensation: “These health-care providers and others are reimbursed at a higher rate if COVID is tied to it, so what do you think they’re doing?” The baseless conspiracy theory, embraced by QAnon and right-wing media figures for months, has made its way to the White House—President Donald Trump has retweeted tweets pushing the idea of a false fatality count that Twitter later removed. Her remarks come on the same day that Anthony Fauci told Good Morning America of the victims of COVID-19 that “a certain percentage of them had nothing else but just COVID. That does not mean that someone who has hypertension or diabetes who dies of COVID didn’t die of COVID-19. They did... It’s not 9,000 deaths from COVID-19, it’s 180-plus thousand deaths.” Frontline health-care workers across the country are extremely vulnerable to coronavirus exposure, and thousands have died after treating infectious patients in unsafe conditions.