After a week-long hiatus, Seth Meyers had a lot to catch up on Monday night, including the new revelations about Donald Trump testing positive for COVID before his debate with Joe Biden and, of course, the emergence of the Omicron variant.

“The Omicron variant sounds like a paperback I read at my grandma’s house because there was shit else to do,” the Late Night host joked. “I thought scientists were supposed to be mild-mannered, analytical types that don’t want you to panic. I get that they’re just going by the Greek alphabet, but the Greek alphabet is very scary.”

And yet while Omicron is “already here,” Meyers noted that Republicans and Fox News hosts alike are “dismissing it as some sort of liberal hoax.” In particular, he zeroed in on Fox & Friends Weekend host and Trump confidant Pete Hegseth, who said “you can count on a new variant” every time there’s an election.

“Are you out of your fucking mind?!” Meyers asked him. “You think anyone wants this pandemic to keep going? You think that’s good for Democrats politically? Everyone is miserable! No one wants this thing to keep going. We all desperately want life to go back to normal.”

The difference between the two political parties, he added, is that while Democrats have “a bunch of proposals” for how to get out from under COVID-19, the GOP “either thinks it’s a hoax” or, in Trump’s case, “actively tries to spread it to as many people as possible.”

For more, listen and subscribe to The Last Laugh podcast.