Ted Nugent has denied ever claiming that COVID-19 was a hoax — months after he memorably professed that the virus was “not a real pandemic.”

The conservative guitarist and staunch Donald Trump supporter hit out at recent press reports after announcing earlier this week that he had contracted the virus.

Speaking to fans on Facebook Live, Nugent raged: “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.”

According to Blabbermouth, Nugent went on to discuss why he had previously criticised lockdowns on social media – having questioned why the U.S. wasn’t “shut down for COVID 1 through 18.”

The reason is pretty simple, the number 19 refers to 2019 – the year when the disease was first discovered.

“You know, comfortably numb is actually uncomfortably dumb, because when I said, ‘What about COVID-1 through 18?’, they missed the whole point,” Nugent said.

“”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 [virus], 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.”

He continued: “You stupid motherfuckers. 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.”

Despite adding that the virus had left him struggling to “crawl out of bed the last few days”, Nugent went on to insist that he would not receive a vaccine.

Last month, Nugent attracted more criticism after claiming that the official reported death toll from coronavirus is significantly higher than actual deaths.

“They claim five hundred thousand people have died from COVID-19,” he said in another Facebook stream. “Bullshit. I believe that medical examiners in all 50 states have gone, ‘I put down on the death certificate that he died of asphyxiation, but they made me put COVID.’

He also recently responded to allegations of racism, calling himself “the anti-racist”.