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Anti-Muslim Republican Laura Loomer says she is in ‘a lot of pain’ from Covid, months after saying she hoped she’d get it

‘Can’t even begin to explain how brutal the body aches and nausea that come with COVID are. I am in so much pain’

Gustaf Kilander
Washington, DC
Friday 17 September 2021 17:39 BST
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Related video: Loomer vs. Webster: The fringe fight Florida Republicans have been courting for years

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Far-right Republican Laura Loomer has said that she’s in “a lot of pain” from Covid-19, just months after saying she hoped she’d get it.

In December, the anti-Muslim and anti-vaccine conservative wrote on Parler that she hoped that she would be infected with Covid-19 just so that she would be able to “prove to people I’ve had bouts of food poisoning that are more serious and life-threatening than a hyped-up virus”.

“Have you ever eaten bad fajitas? That will kill you faster than Covid,” she wrote at the time.

On Thursday, Ms Loomer posted on Gettr, a social media platform created by Trump allies following the former president’s Twitter ban, that she had tested positive for Covid-19.

“Yesterday I was feeling ill,” she wrote. “I had a fever, chills, a runny nose, sore throat, nausea and severe body aches that made my whole body feel like I got hit by a bus, and after sleeping for a few hours, my symptoms started to remind me of how I felt when I had a bad case of the flu a few years ago. So I took a COVID test and it came back POSITIVE.”

She went on to bash Covid vaccines and spread the baseless conspiracy theory that the vaccine is “unsafe and ineffective”.

She added that she instead has started taking medicines boosted by anti-vaccine conspiracy theorists that have not been proven to deal with Covid-19, such as Hydroxychloroquine, which the FDA says has “not been shown to be safe and effective for treating or preventing Covid-19”.

Ms Loomer also said she’s received the Regeneron antibody treatment, which has been used by former President Donald Trump.

Late on Thursday, she wrote on her Telegram channel: “Just pray for me please. Can’t even begin to explain how brutal the body aches and nausea that come with COVID are. I am in so much pain.”

But she still went on to post more vaccine conspiracy theories, stating that the government “doesn’t want you to know what [the vaccine] really does,” even as she was suffering from the largely preventable disease.

Ms Loomer, who has been boosted by Mr Trump, lost a race for a US House seat in Florida in 2020 and has been banned from most social networks, and apps like Uber and Lyft, for aggressive Islamophobia.

She was removed from a cryptocurrency conference in Florida in June after she heckled Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey about her ban from the social media platform.

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