RUSH: Here’s Sharon in Columbus, Ohio. I’m glad you called. It’s great to have you here with us. Hi.

CALLER: Mega dittos, and many prayers for your swift recovery.

RUSH: Thank you very much. I appreciate that.

CALLER: I have been bothered very much by this worldwide response to the coronavirus, and I have a hypothesis. As everyone knows, there is a Level 4 biolab near the wet market in Wuhan where this supposedly started, and I suspect that the intelligence agencies around the world were told that this was a released bioweapon and that’s why (crosstalk).

RUSH: Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. You think that there are elements in our government who have been told that this was a purposeful released bioweapon? They —

CALLER: I’m not saying it’s purposefully released. It could have been accidentally released. I don’t know if they know. Very much like when Saddam said he had them, they believed Saddam had chemical weapons, and he did. But they were unusable. Perhaps there is intelligence that there is some bioweapons, there are bioweapons being made in Wuhan — and that, to me, explains the worldwide overreaction to something that is kind of a mild flu.

RUSH: Okay. So you think that they know a lot more about this than they’re telling us and that they got —

CALLER: I don’t know. I don’t know if this is accidental or purposeful.

RUSH: No, I get that. You think they know, and they can’t dare tell us because it would cause all kinds of panic, plus the problem is, the ChiComs are a bunch of liars and deceit-mongers. They’d deny it. So they can’t go public with it, so they have to protect us. You think it’s a benevolent thing they’re doing, actually?

CALLER: Yes, I think it is, because they don’t know what this is. And they don’t know what’s gonna happen in two weeks, in four weeks, in six weeks, and how this disease is going to react to people. And we can’t trust anything that’s coming out of China. So they’re erring on the side of caution, because… And everyone across the world, except a handful of countries… I believe that’s Sweden, Brazil, and maybe Belarus are the only countries that haven’t gone on lockdown. The intelligence agencies are saying, you know, covertly to their —

RUSH: Well, wait a minute, now. You know, there aren’t very many cases in Russia.

CALLER: Okay. Russia as well. I’ll add that in.

RUSH: Can’t find too many. You can’t find too many cases in Beijing or Shanghai. But would you listen to something with me?

CALLER: Sure.

RUSH: ‘Cause I have an audio sound bite here from CNN, sound bite number 8 on the roster. Every time I use a word on this program, the media purposely mistranslates it for people to impugn me, to criticize me, to ridicule me and to try to do harm to my credibility. Every time I use the word, they purposely…

Maybe they don’t. Maybe they’re too stupid to know that they misrepresent what I’m saying — and I grabbed it. This will explain itself without me having to set it up. It happened last night on CNN, The Lead with Jake Tapper. And they’ve got their investigative correspondent here, a guy named Drew Griffin, reporting on where COVID-19 originated.

GRIFFIN: Because we don’t know where the novel coronavirus came from yet, the conspiracy theories fill the void.

RUSH ARCHIVE: I’m telling you: The Chi-Coms are trying to weaponize this thing.

GRIFFIN: Conservative talk show host Rush Limbaugh — with zero proof — suggesting a Chinese bioweapon lab is to blame.

RUSH: Stop the tape!

GRIFFIN: A Chinese official —

RUSH: I never said any such thing. When I said that ChiComs are trying to “weaponize” this thing, they’re trying to use it to damage our economy. I never said it was a bioweapon. I never got anywhere near saying it was a bioweapon. It’s the same way when I accused the media of “weaponizing” a piece of information against Trump, they claim that it… When I use “weaponize,” I’m talking about media procedure.

I am talking about the procedure of the left — in this case, the ChiComs — to do damage to Donald Trump. I never once said bioweapon! I never once got anywhere near saying that this was any kind of a weapon. I said the Chinese are weaponizing the existence of the virus as a means of harming the United States economy. But these people hear “weaponize,” and they think bioweapon.

They think military weapon, they think gun, they think whatever — and then, they misrepresent what I said. I never said anything of the sort, and even if I thought that was the case, I wouldn’t say so yet. Even if I thought it was the case, I wouldn’t say it yet. But there they are lumping me in with some conspiracy kooks here, when I didn’t say… They are limiting the use of our vocabulary here.

You people in this audience, you know what I mean, because you’ve been here; you know the context. When I talk about how the left weaponizes things, they weaponized the phone call that Trump made with the Ukraine president as a way to impeach him! They turned it into a weapon. They tried to weaponize Trump colluding with Russia. They’re using everything they can, issue-oriented-wise, as weapons against Trump.

The ChiComs here are using this virus as a weapon against the U.S. economy, not as a bioweapon. I never said it was a bioweapon. So, Sharon, I wanted you to hear that because this is what happens to you when you go say stuff like this where the media doesn’t… The media is more interested in discrediting Trump and Trump supporters than they are in reporting the truth of what this might be.

CALLER: I would agree completely, and I’m not saying that the Wuhan lab was doing anything that it wasn’t supposed to be doing. But perhaps we have intelligence that it was, and this might be something that just got out that, as you said, the Chinese decided to —

RUSH: The Chinese have said that they want to wipe out our economy! The Chinese have said they want to become the world economy. The Chinese have said this. None of this is a mystery. The Chinese have been very open about the fact that they consider us an enemy and they would like to take us down a peg, the same way the Soviets did back during the Cold War era. There’s nothing “newsy” here. There’s nothing new about the fact the Chinese consider us an enemy.

CALLER: Agree. Agree completely except it seems that our media and the Democratic Party don’t agree that China is the enemy.

RUSH: No. No. They are spreading Chinese propaganda.

CALLER: Yes. Yes.

RUSH: Just like the World Health Organization is spreading Chinese propaganda. The World Health Organization is saying the Chinese have nothing to do with the virus. The Chinese have said that we created the virus, that American military people created the virus as a way of wiping them out. That’s what the Chinese are saying. The World Health Organization is backing that up.

CALLER: And I believe the phrase is the best defense is a good offense.

RUSH: Yeah. Yeah. This is true. I don’t know. How many years have I talked about the left weaponizing the climate, weaponizing climate change? I use this word constantly. And here come these doofuses, these dingbats at CNN who are either real obtuse and limited in their ability to learn and understand things or they’re just off the charts filled with hatred and bias. I never once said that the Chinese launched a biological weapon in the form of the Wuhan virus. I have never said it. And not only that, I wouldn’t say it. Sharon, thanks for the call.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: Ross in Lexington, Kentucky, you’re next. Hello, sir.

CALLER: Rush, an honor above all honors speaking to you today. I saw Trey Gowdy in an interview this morning. He made a good case for how the Chinese are culpable in all this. He stated that the Chinese customs showed that they were out buying all kinds of personal protective equipment — masks, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, in early January from all over the world. They knew it was coming. They concealed, they lied. He also said our country and the other countries should deduct a cost from the Chinese. He never actually said deduct from what. I’m gonna finish the sentence for him. Deduct from our debt to the Chinese.

RUSH: They hold about a trillion dollars in U.S. Treasuries. So there’s a lot of debt there to deduct from. Is that what you mean?

CALLER: There’s a whole lot of debt there to deduct from. And if we and every other country that was hit did that, bam, China’s not a threat anymore.

RUSH: What, then, if China wants to cash in its debt? Of course, we just spent $6 trillion. I guess it would be nothing to pay them off.

CALLER: It wouldn’t be enough. But, anyway, Italy just sent them as a donation a bunch of masks, six million masks or something. Now China’s wanting to sell those same masks back to Italy, sell them. Numerous online stories about that. The Chinese are culpable. Trey Gowdy made a point that it’s murder in the first degree if you followed it through the line.

RUSH: Wait ’til CNN gets hold of that. Former Republican Congress accuses ChiComs of murder!