Kellyanne Conway Tells Fox News 'This is COVID-19 Not COVID-1, Folks'

Source: JIM WATSON / Getty

It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that the coronavirus is named ‘COVID-19‘ because it first emerged in 2019–but that’s just a little too much critical thinking for Donald Chump’s right-hand con artist, Kellyanne Conway.

On Wednesday, during an appearance on Fox News, the White House counselor suggested there were 18 other coronaviruses before what we’re going through right now. “This is COVID-19 not COVID-1, folks,” she said, implying that the World Health Organization did a bad job at warning the world about the virus. “You would think that people charged with the World Health Organization facts and figures would be on top of that. This is just a pause right now,” she continued.

COVID-19 is not the 19th coronavirus discovered by the the World Health Organization, but is named that because it first emerged at the tail end of 2019. “Following WHO best practices for naming of new human infectious diseases, which were developed in consultation and collaboration with the World Organization for Animal Health (OIE) and the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), WHO has named the disease COVID-19, short for ‘coronavirus disease 2019,'” WHO wrote in its Situation Report on February 11.

What’s even more disheartening, though, is the fact that it’s almost impossible to tell whether Kellyanne Conway is really that stupid, or if she’s deliberately trying to rile up the Fox News viewers with fake information–which happens every single day, anyhow.

She told reporters at the White House something different after her appearance on Fox News, saying, “It’s called COVID-19; not COVID-20.” So, she was either informed of her mistake and self-corrected, or she intentionally misled Fox News viewers by giving them a quick quotable. “It originated in 2019 even though the WHO called it a global pandemic sometime in March of 2020. So they knew for a while and they dragged their feet it looks like,” Conway told reporters.

Kellyanne was dragged for her Fox News quote, and rightfully so, which obviously manifested itself into a bunch of jokes on Twitter. Check those out down below.