Republican California Rep. Devin Nunes accused the “media and the left” of “putting the country into a panic” over the coronavirus pandemic.
Appearing on Saturday night’s “Watters World,” Nunes drew from his own experience coming down with H1N1 to urge Americans to “remain calm.”
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“A lot of people are panicking,” Nunes told Fox News host Jesse Watters. “One guy sneezed. Someone has a runny nose.” The California congressman noted that most of this will be because of the oncoming Spring and the fact that people “have a lot of allergies.”
Other than making sure those who are “elderly with preexisting conditions of any kind, any underlying health concern” are “kept in isolation as best as possible” and given medical care if their temperature rises, Nunes said that the “main issue is for us in the United States is just to remain calm.”
Watters played a clip of former Vice President Joe Biden saying he wouldn’t “go anywhere in confined places” during the 2009 H1N1 epidemic, which killed 17,000.
“So as someone who actually did come down with H1N1,” Nunes said. “I had it for about two weeks. It was a pretty bad flu. I know what it was like back then. But I also remember that nobody was panicking. I didn’t have to self-quarantine. They told me to stay away from people. They told me to keep my temperature down.”
“What the media and the left are doing here is they’re putting the country into a panic, and it’s for no reason,” Nunes said. “I’m not saying that this isn’t a serious health concern. We need to take it serious.” (RELATED: Supply Chain Expert Tells Tucker What Coming Shortages Americans Should Know About, And It’s Not Toilet Paper)
Nunes contended that the social distancing policies would likely work and get America “though this fairly quickly.”
“Now with that said, the more people that test, the more cases that we’re probably going to have that will come back positive,” he warned. “But by and large, most people are going to get over this very, very quickly.”