Far-right YouTuber James Corbett declares COVID-19 Italy death toll figures ‘artificially inflated’
James Corbett posted a video to YouTube on March 31, 2020, claiming Italy’s death toll figures are ‘artificially inflated.’
Corbett, one of the many far-right figures that inhabits YouTube without redress, bills his ‘open source intelligence news,’ as divorced from the Right and Left “paradigm.”
The “About” section of his website purports that his “news” service reports on important issues, such as “9/11 Truth and false flag terror, to the Big Brother police state, eugenics, geopolitics, the central banking fraud and more.”
Corbett fielded a question from “Tom” in Scotland, asking if ‘there is any foul play going on?’
“The Italian death toll figures could have been artificially inflated by up to eighty-eight percent, if true,” Corbett replied.
“This would mean the total number of Italians who have actually died of COVID-19 could be as low as 700, which would bring Italy, currently a statistical outlier, in terms of COVID-19 fatalities well in line with the rest of the world,” Corbett said. “It means thousands of deaths currently widely attributed to COVID-19 are being used to justify the introduction of measures, according to medical martial law, may not have died of COVID-19 at all — but of their serious, chronic comorbidity cancer, heart disease, etc. This statistic is not a secret or in any way controversial.”
He confidently declared his information had to be true: “It was in The Telegraph, after all, but people seem to be ignoring it.”
Corbett seems to be taking a page from online conspiracy theorists’ playbook, by foolishly arguing “that only the death toll for the tiny fraction of cases without underlying conditions should be considered, a frame subsequently adopted by some right-wing media figures.”
The Wall Street Journal reported that “many people who die from the virus don’t make it to the hospital and are never tested,” meaning they never make it into the final count.
Nonetheless, these people with underlying health conditions like “cancer, heart disease, etc.” wouldn’t have died as hastily as they did, or at all — if there was no COVID-19 outbreak.
Media Matters reported in mid-March that Corbett claimed coronavirus and climate change is a hoax, saying “scaremonger” stories are being spread by “globalist-backed” agendas that let “governments crack down on the public in various ways.”
Towards the end of the video, Corbett said, “I don’t trust any of the numbers,” then qualified his statement. “It doesn’t necessarily… again, it doesn’t mean it’s all a hoax. It doesn’t mean that nothing’s happening. It doesn’t mean that there are millions of people who are secretly dying that we’re not hearing about, but both of those are possibilities.”