Jake Tapper RAGES at Trump for Claiming ‘Don’t Be Afraid of Covid’: ‘There Are Children Who Don’t Have Parents Now!’

CNN’s Jake Tapper offered an incensed rebuttal to Donald Trump‘s cavalier dismissal of the coronavirus which just put him in the hospital for three days and required a cocktail of experimental drugs to treat as well as having killed — so far —as many Americans as roughly 70 9/11 terror attacks.

At the start of his Monday afternoon show, Tapper railed against Trump for tweeting out his discharge from Walter Reed hospital, while claiming that Americans had no reason to be afraid of a viral pandemic that had infected millions of their fellow citizens and taken the same number of lives as the population of Des Moines, IA in the past seven months.

“I want to take a second here. President Trump wrote on Twitter: ‘Don’t be afraid of Covid. Don’t let it dominate your life.’ Almost 210,000 Americans dead from this disease,” Tapper noted to CNN chief medical correspondent, Dr. Sanjay Gupta. “Hundreds of thousands, if not millions of Americans mourning them. 7.4 million Americans have contracted the disease. Many of them are going to have health problems for the rest of their life. For President Trump who gets the best medical care: ‘Don’t let it dominate your life.’ There are children who don’t have parents now because of this virus! Don’t let it dominate your life?!”

Gupta, also clearly stunned by Trump’s reckless statement, called is “so disrespectful.”

“I’m not sure if I can speak about this in some sort of cogent way here. I know people who right now, family members who have lost people and they watch our programming and it’s incredibly disrespectful, obviously not true in the sense he knows how serious it is, and how serious it is since the beginning of February,” Gupta said. “Not to mention, ‘don’t be afraid of it” encourages this completely dangerous non-scientific approach of herd immunity. What do you mean ‘don’t be afraid of it?’ Also, are you advocating people get infected? Nothing to be afraid of. We know if that’s the policy, the approach, 2 million people could die. Hospitals would become overwhelmed. It would responding to a comment like that, it’s gross. It really is.”

Tapper then pointed out that numerous public health officials, including Dr. Anthony Fauci, have said that tens of thousands of deaths could’ve been avoided if the federal government had acted sooner and followed the guidelines more closely.

“Of course it’s preventable,” Tapper insisted. “Dr. Fauci acknowledged it back in April or May when I interviewed him. If they had acted sooner, if they had acted more effectively and if the businesses hadn’t been reopened before they were should have reopened or states hadn’t been pressured. If testing was up to snuff. I could go on and on.”

But anybody out there who’s lost somebody to the virus or is grappling with it or has somebody in their life who is grappling with it because I know young, healthy people who had this virus, who are still not fully recovered and may never be because of the damage to their lungs. I just want the to know there are plenty of us out here who understand that it’s okay to be afraid of Covid,” Tapper continued. “It’s ok that it’s dominating your life because it has dominated your life! And the idea that the President of the United States is out there, because he feels fine, maybe it’s because of a steroid I don’t know, saying this, is so disrespectful to you and I just want you to know you’re not alone if you’re out there, just shocked that this kind of callous indifference would be relayed by the person who is actually charged with protecting you from this virus.”

Watch the video above, via CNN.