Fact checker blasts Jim Jordan for ‘absurd’ claim that ‘real America’ is ‘over COVID’

Although COVID-19 has killed more than 5.2 million people worldwide — according to Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore — Rep. Jim Jordan of Ohio continues to downplay the pandemic’s severity and claim that “real America” needn’t worry about the pandemic. But CNN’s Phil Mattingly, slamming Jordan in a biting commentary, stressed that what Jordan considers “real America” is seeing the United States’ worst COVID-19 infection rates.

On December 2, Jordan tweeted, “Real America is done with #COVID19. The only people who don’t understand that are Fauci and Biden.” By “real America,” the far-right MAGA Republican obviously means red states — and those states, Mattingly stressed, are suffering the most from COVID-19.

Mattingly explained, “Right now, the U.S. is averaging more than 100,000 new COVID cases every day. That’s the highest level in two months. Is that what being done with COVID looks like?”

The CNN host went on to show some U.S. maps demonstrating how dangerous the pandemic continues to be, and he emphasized that most COVID-19 deaths at this point are among the unvaccinated — who are more likely to be in red states than blue states.

“Since the vaccines became widely available,” Mattingly told CNN viewers, “the risk of dying from COVID is 50% higher in red states than in blue states. Even on the most base, cynical level, you would think these Republican politicians would want to keep their constituents, their voters alive. But instead, there are seemingly weekly absurdities like this from Georgia Republican Marjorie Taylor Greene.”

The “absurdity” that Mattingly was referring to was a December 4 tweet in which Rep. Greene, another far-right MAGA wingnut, posted, “Every single year more than 600,000 people in the US die from cancer. The country has never once shut down.”

Mattingly explained, “Cancer, of course, is not contagious. That is not just apples to apples; that is apples to doorknobs or lightbulbs, or pretty much any other object. That is definitively not an apple.”