Hillary Clinton Falsely Claims to Jimmy Fallon That Trump Called Coronavirus Outbreak a 'Hoax'

Appearing Wednesday on The Tonight Show with host Jimmy Fallon, twice-failed presidential candidate Hillary Clinton falsely claimed that President Donald Trump referred to the recent coronavirus outbreak in the United States as a “hoax.”

“I wish I could say I was surprised,” Clinton told Fallon when asked if she has so far been puzzled by the administration’s response to the spread of the deadly illness. “This is something that you can’t just insult or pretend is a hoax, despite how [President Trump’s] trying.”

“You really have to listen to people who actually know something,” she continued. “There’s a terrible shortage of testing kits. They need to make sure state and local health departments, governors, mayors, and others, have what they need with hospitalization. There’s a lot of work to be done and if he will keep quit it a hoax and actually let do their job, I think it will work out better.”

Clinton is the latest to inaccurately accused President Trump of calling the coronavirus a “hoax.” Politico was among the first corporate media outlets to allege that the president made such at his reelection rally in South Carolina in an article entitled, “Trump rallies his base to treat coronavirus as a ‘hoax.’”

“President Donald Trump on Friday night tried to cast the global outbreak of the coronavirus as a liberal conspiracy intended to undermine his first term, lumping it alongside impeachment and the Mueller investigation,” wrote reporters Nancy Cook and Matthew Choi. However, President Trump had indeed described the Democrats’ criticism regarding his handling of the coronavirus a “hoax” — not illness itself.

“‘Hoax’ referring to the action that they take to try and pin this on somebody, because we’ve done such a good job. The hoax is on them, not — I’m not talking about what’s happening here; I’m talking what they’re doing. That’s the hoax,” the president clarified at a recent White House briefing.

Despite Clinton’s assertions that the Trump administration is mishandling of the response to the outbreak, some experts have praised its actions as swift.

Dr. Marc Siegel, professor of medicine at New York University, argued that the administration has addressed earlier emerging contagion better than the previous administrations.

“I’ve been handling these emerging contagions for about 20 years now, and I have to tell you, I’ve never seen one handled better,” said Dr. Siegel told SiriusXM’s Breitbart News Sunday.