Tearing into Bill Maher for declaring that he’s over COVID-19 this past weekend, The View’s Whoopi Goldberg denounced the late-night comedian’s “flippant” attitude and said his remarks were “not funny.”
On Friday’s broadcast of his long-running HBO show Real Time, Maher’s guest Bari Weiss drew praise from conservatives and mandate critics when she said that mitigation efforts during the ongoing pandemic would be remembered as a “catastrophic moral crime” in America.
“I am done with COVID! I’m done,” the self-described “left-leaning centrist” exclaimed on Friday, adding, “I think it’s, like, at this point… it’s a pandemic of bureaucracy. It’s not real anymore!”
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Maher, too, criticized the notion of vaccine passports, temperature checks, and mask-wearing throughout his show. (The 66-year-old also said he doesn’t plan on getting a vaccine booster.)
“I don’t want to live in your paranoid world anymore—your masked, paranoid world,” the acerbic comic said at one point. “You go out, it’s silly now: You have to have a mask, you have to have a card, you have to have a booster. They scan your head, like you’re a cashier and I’m a bunch of bananas. I’m not bananas. You are!”
After only recently returning to the studio after taping remotely for weeks due to the Omicron surge, The View hosts on Monday kicked off the show by discussing Sunday’s “Defeat the Mandates” march in Washington, D.C., which they noted featured “offensive” Holocaust analogies from anti-vax extremists like Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
Goldberg contrasted Maher’s recent remarks with those made by the unhinged D.C. crowd. “That’s not really funny to people who have lost their kids,” she proclaimed. “Or to people who lost family members or dear friends to this. Listen: nobody on the planet really wants to go through this. This is not something we’re doing because it’s sexually gratifying. This is what we’re doing to protect our families!”
After telling Maher to “stay out of the public” if he’s potentially sick and doesn’t want to follow COVID-19 guidelines, Goldberg (who has criticized Maher in the past) took issue with the comedian’s seeming dismissiveness.
“This is not—nobody wants this,” she sighed. “I don’t want it, and I think he’s forgetting that people are still at risk who cannot get vaccinated, people who can’t. Little kids under the age of five. Or people with health conditions. How dare you be so flippant, man?!”
Liberal co-host Joy Behar piggybacked on Goldberg’s criticism. “They’re ‘over it,’ like a relationship. I’m over it! I don’t feel like seeing him anymore,” she snarked.
Co-host Sara Haines, meanwhile, said she didn’t “understand the post-mask part” of Maher’s rant, suggesting that when it comes to flying and large indoor activities, mask-wearing may be the norm for many people going forward.
“I think some of the things we’ve learned in this pandemic will stay the same,” she said. “I may never go on a subway anymore without a mask. I may never go indoors to big crowds and feel comfortable without a mask. And that’s up to me to do that.”
