Trump Evangelical Advisor: No Need for Flu Shots When You Can 'Inoculate Yourself With the Word of God'

Gloria Copeland, a televangelist serving on Trump’s evangelical advisory board, has delivered a helpful message to those concerned by alarming reports that we are experiencing the worst flu season in nearly a decade. That message is: actually, there is no flu season, because Jesus went ahead and took care of that.

“Well, listen partners, we don’t have a flu season,” Copeland drawled in a video posted to the Kenneth Copeland Ministries Facebook page last week. “We’ve got a duck season, a deer season, but we don’t have a flu season. And don’t receive it when somebody threatens you with ‘Everybody’s getting the flu!’ We’ve already had our shot, he bore our sicknesses and carried our diseases.”

That being said, she quickly added, “If you’ve already got the flu, I’m gonna pray for you right now … flu, I bind you off of the people in the name of Jesus. Jesus himself gave us the flu shot.”

That’s odd, because I’m almost positive that I received my flu shot this year from an exhausted pharmacist named Terry.

Copeland’s husband, Right Wing Watch noted in its post on the video, founded the Texas megachurch that was the site of a measles outbreak in 2013 in which the majority of patients had not been inoculated. Gloria and Kenneth Copeland (who are both on Trump’s shadowy evangelical advisory board) and their daughter Terri Copeland Pearsons—the pastor of the megachurch in question, Eagle Mountain International Church—have all expressed anti-vaccine views.

Copeland suggests in her video that you repeat the mantra: “I’ll never have the flu, I’ll never have the flu.” Certainly, that’s one idea. Or, if you haven’t yet, you can still get a flu shot.