Ted Nugent recently admitted to testing positive for COVID-19 after repeatedly expressing skepticism over its existence, calling it “not a real pandemic,” people who wear masks “sheep,” and complaining that his tour had been cancelled because of “Dirty bastard, lying, scam, smoke-and-mirrors COVID-19 freaks.” Naturally, people had plenty to say about that, including Twisted Sister‘s Dee Snider, Trivium‘s Paolo Gregoletto, Testament‘s Alex Skolnick, and former Skid Row frontman Sebastian Bach (who references Tom Morello‘s unlikely friendship with Nugent, which he discussed on the Howard Stern show):

Meanwhile, Nugent also had more to say about his diagnosis, and denied he was ever a COVID-denier. As Blabbermouth points out, he did another Facebook livestream on Tuesday (4/20), saying, “The lies I’ve seen that I’ve been doing these public appearances knowing I had the COVID-19. False. Saying that I claimed COVID-19 was a hoax. False. I’ve always said… We have actually footage of me saying, if not hundreds, thousands of times… Of course there’s a Chinese virus. Hello? Who thinks that I claimed there’s no Chinese… There’s a Chinese virus. They call it COVID-19. I’m well aware of that.”

He also brought up his much publicized remarks from earlier this month, when he asked why “COVID-1 through -18 didn’t shut anything down.” “You know, comfortably numb is actually uncomfortably dumb,” he said, “because when I said, ‘What about COVID-1 through 18?,’ they missed the whole point. I know there was not a COVID-1 through 18, but there were past COVIDs prior to COVID-19 that nobody ever shut down any mom-and-pop businesses, never encouraged the economic destruction of the entrepreneur engine that drives America. So I was merely commenting that prior to COVID-19, nobody ever shut down anything — not for Ebola, not for the Spanish Flu, not for AIDS, not for the Black Plague. But they’re doing it for COVID-19. So I was referencing those past epidemics-slash-pandemics as maybe a generalization of COVID-1 through -18.”

“You stupid motherfuckers,” he continued. “The left is such a great source of comedy. Keep it up. Richard Pryor isn’t around anymore. We can’t rely on him for the ultimate comedy, so we rely on the comfortably numb nuts, uncomfortably dumb nuts.”

Nugent called his experience contracting COVID “Just a clusterfuck,” saying, “I thought I was dying.”