This April 8, 2016 photo released by HBO shows Bill Maher, host of “Real Time with Bill Maher,” during a broadcast of the show in Los Angeles. (Janet Van Ham/HBO via AP)

Thankfully, the mainstream media aren’t hijacking White House Coronavirus Task Force press briefings much anymore with questions about why President Trump calls the coronavirus the “Chinese virus“, but that doesn’t mean the discussion is over.

Bill Maher, who is about as hardcore anti-Trump as a person can get, went absolutely nuclear on his fellow left wingers in an epic rant Friday, pointing out how historically viruses have been named for their places of origins. In addition to that, Maher noted, as many on the right have, that it’s important to know not just where the virus came from but also how it started – in disgusting wet markets, which Maher believes should be outlawed:

“Scientists, who are generally pretty liberal, have been naming diseases after the places they came from for a very long time,” Maher said Friday night while broadcasting his weekly show from his home in California.

Zika is from the Zika Forest, Ebola from the Ebola River, hantavirus the Hantan River,” he added. “There’s the West Nile virus and Guinea worm and Rocky Mountain spotted fever and, of course, the Spanish flu.”

[…]

“This is about facts. It’s about life and death. We’re barely four months into this pandemic, and the wet markets in China — the ones where exotic animals are sold and consumed — are already starting to reopen,” he later added.

“Sorry, Americans. We’re going to have to ask you to keep two ideas in your head at the same time: This has nothing to do with Asian Americans, and it has everything to do with China,” Maher concluded. “We can’t afford the luxury anymore of nonjudginess towards a country with habits that kill millions of people everywhere because this isn’t the first time. SARS came from China and the bird flu and the Hong Kong flu, the Asian flu. Viruses come from China just like shortstops come from the Dominican Republic. If they were selling nuclear suitcases at these wet markets, would we be so nonjudgmental?”

Amen!

Watch Maher unload below, where he also slams a March tweet from Rep. Ted Lieu (D-CA) complaining to Rep. Paul Gosar (R-AZ) about his use of the term “Wuhan virus”:

This is absolutely fantastic from @billmaher on China. Watch it: pic.twitter.com/3izje7ddwM

— Clay Travis (@ClayTravis) April 11, 2020

The bottom line is that Trump and every member of his team know that every single person in America who has suffered from the virus or who has died from it did so because of deliberately deceptive actions from the Chinese government to keep the spread of it in Wuhan quiet.

Republicans including Trump aren’t willing to let anyone in America forget that, nor should they be.