US filmmaker Michael Moore says Trump calling coronavirus a ‘hoax’ is ‘dangerous’

NEW YORK, Mar 01 (APP):Oscar-winning documentary filmmaker Michael Moore has suggested that President Donald Trump was worse than the coronavirus because while science could cure the illness, Trump created a “false ignorance” by spreading misinformation.

On Friday, Trump lashed out at the American news media and Democrats, saying they are unfairly criticizing his response to the coronavirus. “This is their new hoax,” the president said.

On Saturday, health officials said a man in the US state of Washington in his 50s became the United States’ first fatality from the coronavirus. The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention also said there were at least 71 confirmed or presumptive positive coronavirus cases in the United States.

Nevertheless, Trump later on the same day told Americans that there was “no need to panic,” defending calling the crisis a “hoax.”

“If you have the president telling people it’s a hoax — that there’s nothing to worry about, that it will disappear as he said yesterday, and it’ll be a miracle … which is more dangerous? The virus or a president who says that,” Moore, the Hollywood filmmaker, told MSNBC News, a major television network.

“Because at least if we were honest and knew everything about the virus, and the facts were all out there, science could start to deal with it,” Moore added.

“Whatever innoculation, whatever we need to come up with, whatever we need to invent, we can start that process. But the fact that we have only a few hundred test kits in this place or that place — that there’s no effort at all ongoing right now to deal with the shot or whatever we need to get if we need to get it.”

“To pretend that it doesn’t exist and to tell people out in Tuscaloosa or Detroit that there’s nothing to worry about — and if he’s wrong and if the World Health Organization is saying it’s now at the highest risk level, what do you call that man who tells his people that there’s nothing to worry about and not only that — but that it’s made up by the Democrats and the media,” he said.