Jake Paul Calls COVID A 'Hoax' In Contentious Daily Beast Interview

No one should be getting their health information from Jake Paul. That goes without saying. Even Paul would agree, best practices during a global pandemic are a little above his pay grade. But in a contentious, new interview with the Daily Beast, he offered some pretty jarring misinformation to interviewer Marlow Stern.

After a round of questions about his surprisingly successful boxing enterprise, in which they run through his history in sports, his training regiment and plans for the future, Paul gets a little perturbed by all the questions about his recent controversies, particularly his behavior during quarantine. After asking about an incident in which Paul held "giant maskless parties" at his Calabasas home, as rates in the area surged, Paul called the pandemic a "hoax."

I gotta say, I saw all this stuff over the summer and it did piss me off a little bit. You were hosting these giant maskless parties at your home in Calabasas as COVID cases were spiking in the state, and it drew a bunch of neighbor complaints and condemnation from the mayor. And when Insider asked you about it in late July, you said, “I personally am not the type of person who’s gonna sit around and not live my life.” Do you regret those comments, and are you still living by that mentality?

Yeah, I mean… it’s time for us to open up. Obviously, it’s a controversial subject, but it’s time for our nation to open up and go back to normal.

You really think that?

Yeah. A hundred percent. There are people losing jobs, there are small businesses who are going bankrupt, there are millions of people who are unemployed right now, people are turning to alcohol and drugs to cope with everything that’s going on. This is the most detrimental thing to our society. COVID cases are at less than 1 percent, and I think the disease is a hoax.

Of course, as noted above, no one should be taking health advice from Paul, especially on the subject of a virus that has killed nearly 260,000 people in the United States. However, when you consider that Paul has more than 20 million YouTube followers and nearly 12 million on TikTok, his beliefs become more concerning. Despite his belief that COVID is as bad as the flu, and that we might already have a vaccine for the coronavirus, we don't have a vaccine and the flu kills far fewer people than COVID.

The coronavirus questions really didn't jibe with Paul, and as they moved into other controversial topics, the interview continued its trajectory off the rails. Things like his being "fired" by Disney, rapping the n-word in a freestyle and joining the destruction of a mall riot in Scottsdale, Arizona, during the George Floyd protests put Paul on the defense. He lashed out at Stern, saying that he only wanted to talk about the controversies, rather than more benign aspects of his life.

Jake Paul: I think the media will paint people however they want that person to be painted. I think that until you meet someone in person and get to know them as a human being, you can’t listen to what an article says. For example, on this call you’ve only asked me about my controversies and the bad things I’ve done, but you haven’t asked me about the million dollars I’ve raised for kids, all the Make-a-Wishes I’ve done, and the millions of kids I’ve inspired to chase their dreams. You haven’t asked me a single thing about that. So you are actually the epitome of what the media is, because obviously bad news travels faster.

Marlow Stern: I’ve only asked you about these controversies in the last six minutes of this interview. We spent the first 10 minutes of the interview discussing your boxing skills, and how you got to where you are today in the ring. Do you think these things should be off-limits for me to ask you?

JP: No, I don’t think they should be off-limits. I think it’s, like, a typical reporter trying to probe an answer out of someone to get a viral article, essentially. Um… and I think that if someone out there thinks that they can understand who a person is and what they stand for and know who they are by reading an article about them, then that person is a fucking idiot.

MS: So you think my questions have been unfair to you.

JP: No, I never said that. This is what I’m saying. You’re [asking] leading questions and so on and so forth because you want to tell a certain story about me. You got on this call with an agenda of exactly how you’re going to tell this story.

Note for the future: If you want to interview Jake Paul, just ask him about the good stuff.