September 3, 2020

By Joan McCarter

Daily Kos

Maybe Joni Ernst got some backlash from Team Trump for "running on local issues" and trying to avoid the Trump racist conspiracy theory trap. To prove her bizarro bona fides, she decided to go QAnon and accuse Iowa's medical community of falsifying COVID-19 data for the money.

Ernst told a gathering of about 100 supporters that she's “so skeptical” of the official death count from coronavirus. “They’re thinking there may be 10,000 or less deaths that were actually singularly COVID-19,” Ernst said. “I’m just really curious. It would be interesting to know that.” Uh-huh. "They're" thinking. They being the whack-job QAnon proponents who've found a side-line from Democratic pedophiliac pizza parlors in COVID-19 trutherism. She went even beyond that, though, to skate up to the line of accusing Iowa's medical community of fraud. “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 questioned the crowd. That'll sure boost her standing with Iowa's front-line medical community, which is right now dealing with the nation's second-highest rate of virus spread.

Ernst walked it back a tiny bit in follow up with a reporter, saying she had “heard the same thing on the news,” but wasn’t wasn't sure it was true. But she had no problem speculating about it with her supporters, who will tell all their friends their senator says doctors can't be trusted and that really, coronavirus is not running rampant through Iowa's population. That's ever so helpful.

This happened Monday, the day after a tweet pushing the same conspiracy theory elevated with a Trump retweet was removed by Twitter. It repeated the QAnon theory that the CDC had "quietly" admitted that "only 6%" of people listed as coronavirus deaths "actually died from COVID," because "the other 94% had 2-3 other serious illnesses." Which is of course not what the CDC said. The fact that otherwise entirely healthy people, with no underlying conditions, are dying from the virus should be the takeaway from that CDC report.

So all the Republican hand-wringing about QAnon being on the ballot and about to invade the House? Too late. It's already in the Senate.

Posted with permission