By Michael Houltt

If you’ve been following the reaction of fundamentalists to the coronavirus, it has been a daily carnival of BS.

The latest comes from disgraced televangelist Jim Bakker. He said he was confident that President Donald Trump would eventually defeat the virus because he had a hotline to God.

“Trump will eventually defeat the coronavirus because he has a hotline to God,” said Bakker in a recent sermon. “God will soon download a cure for the virus directly into Trump’s brain and he will share it with the scientists.”

Bakker was recently legally blocked from selling a “silver solution” that he claimed could cure COVID-19.

In further crackpot news, Florida minister Rodney Howard-Browne, a Trump supporter and conspiracy theorist, claimed he had “13 machines” in his church that would automatically zap the virus.

“If they sneeze, it shoots it down at like 100 mph. It’ll neutralize it in split seconds,” said Howard-Browne.

But many pastors still seemed to stubbornly refuse to believe the disease is real.

Homophobic preacher E.W. Jackson claimed he’s immune from the virus because “he’s protected by God.”

However, this aggressive ignorance is proving deadly. The Chrisitan Post reported that at least three ministers have died from the coronavirus after initially dismissing the disease. Pastor Ronnie Hampton, a Louisiana-based minister, was one of them. He veered into conspiracy theories when he was denying the disease.

“They’re gonna come up with a vaccine and in that vaccine everybody is gonna have to take it … and inside of that vaccine there’s going to be some type of electronic computer device that’s gonna put some type of chip in you and maybe even have some mood, mind-altering circumstances … and they’re saying that the chip would be the mark of the beast,” said Hampton.

Hampton was later hospitalized and died after contracting the coronavirus.

However, New York Times columnist Katherine Stewart lambasted this type of anti-science thinking.

“This denial of science and critical thinking among religious ultraconservatives now haunts the American response to the coronavirus crisis,” said Stewart.