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In addition to recently voicing his support for Donald Trump, Jorge Masvidal has voiced his opinions on COVID-19 and QAnon.
UFC welterweight Jorge Masvidal does most of his talking inside the Octagon, but ‘Gamebred’ has recently opened up about his COVID-19 doubts and use of QAnon hashtags on Twitter.
Talking recently on Dan Le Batard’s podcast “South Beach Sessions”, Masivdal opened up about his doubts over the mainstream media and the sudden declaration of COVID-19 as a pandemic back in March.
“Not everything you can believe in the media. Right before coronavirus officially hit, I was on the way to Australia. I got on the (World Health Organization website) to check what’s going on. This organization is getting, literally, billions of dollars, and at this time, this is like a week before they declared it a pandemic, they were saying it wasn’t a pandemic. It was safe to travel, and it was even safe to travel to Australia. Shortly when I got back, there were thousands of cases of corona in Australia.” (Transcription via MMA Junkie)
Masvidal (35-14) recently fought at UFC 251 earlier this month, losing a unanimous decision to Kamaru Usman. The Miami native said its a “lie” that coronavirus is killing people in his home state as the current death rates are “dropping”.
“Why am I gonna be lazy with my own future? I went to the WHO, I went to numerous other places, and they said, ‘No, this is not a pandemic. It’s OK to travel to these places.’ Literally a week later when I got back, the whole world shut down. They were saying all this other crazy stuff about a mask doesn’t do anything, then a mask does do (something). Now all of a sudden we’re supposed to believe that corona’s killing everybody in Florida. That’s a lie. The death rates are dropping.”
COVID-19 has killed over 5,600 people in Florida (per Florida Health). 1,300 of those deaths have occurred in Miami-Dade County, where there have been nearly 100,000 cases. Yesterday Florida reported 173 deaths from COVID-19, that was record one-day increase in COVID-19 deaths for the state.
QAnon came into the attention of the MMA world when a UFC cutman was spotted wearing symbols associated with the conspiracy theory in June. In May, Masvidal shared a false quote about Kurt Cobain predicting Donald Trump’s presidency along with the hashtag “QAnon”.
“Do I agree with everything that’s on this website? No,” Masvidal said of QAnon. “And why I did that was just to spark talk.
“I’m not affiliating myself with QAnon. Like I said, I was provoking thought there. Like, ‘Hey, this is some crazy stuff. What’s going on here? Check this out.’ That’s it. I’m not telling nobody to believe that word for word. All I’m telling everybody, anybody listening to me, do your own research, man. Do your own homework. That’s it. That’s all I’m saying.”
Masvidal also recently discusses his support of U.S president Trump, stating “‘he’s actually helping out my people”.