John Oliver Slams Marjorie Taylor Greene's Ignorant Take On The Monkeypox Virus: 'Obvious Bigotry'

Fans love a good episode of "Last Week Tonight With John Oliver," where TV personality John Oliver, delivers trending news in a satirical way. On the eight-season-long show, he discusses the week's news, from politics to current events.

The most recent episode on Sunday revolved around Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene. Oliver publicly called her out for her recent comments on the monkeypox outbreak. While the virus is fast spreading, it has majorly affected the LGBTQ community.

In the monkeypox-related comments, Greene triggered fans by insisting that the virus strictly concerned the LGBTQ community and no one else.

Keep scrolling to read her statements and find out how Oliver responded.

"Of course monkeypox is a threat to some people in our population, but we know what causes it," Green said. "That's pretty much, um — it's basically a sexually transmitted disease, so it's not a threat to most of the population," she continued, implying that the population didn't have to worry as much since it only affected a set of people.

She also urged fans to worry less about the virus and called it bogus. "And so it's not a global pandemic. It's really not. And people just have to laugh at it, mock it, and reject it. So I think it's another scam."

Many people have defended Greene, insisting that she meant well. However, it is clear that her statement specifically affected LGBTQ fans as they felt left out and less cared for than other citizens. This also upset Oliver as he took to his show on Sunday to call her out for the statement.

https://youtu.be/pQcFCFZIuZI?t=982

In response to her statement, the 45-year-old comedian simply said, "Okay, obviously that is ridiculous." He then explained how absurd it was to think that way. "If the way to get rid of something awful was for people to laugh at it and mock it, that woman clearly wouldn't be in Congress, and yet, here we all are."

While Oliver also called her out for being inconsiderate, this wasn't all she said on the matter. She recently wrote a statement on Twitter that he believed was a dog whistle to support the narrative that gay men were dangerous to children. He also referenced this and defended the LGBTQ community in the episode.

The TV personality also criticized Greene for insisting that the outbreak only concerned the LGBTQ community. He then highlighted a tweet from her account, referring to it as homophobic and bigoted.

Rereading the tweet, he said, "Greene also tweeted, 'If monkeypox is a sexually transmitted disease, why are kids getting it?' in an act of obvious dog whistle bigotry, suggesting gay people are a danger to children."

He added, "when what's clearly an actual danger to children is the QAnon congresswoman who once tweeted, 'The kids at Uvalde needed JR-15s.'" This was a reference to a previous tweet she wrote that suggested that children should be given guns to defend themselves in school.

After calling her out, he made time to inform fans about the scary virus. "So tonight we thought it'd be worth talking about monkeypox: What it is, how we fumbled our response to it, and what we should do going forward." He started with the general symptoms: fever, headache, rash, exhaustion, and swollen lymph nodes.

After informing fans, he took a closer look into the virus outbreak so far and specifically attacked the federal government for how poorly they had handled things. He also insisted that their carefree attitude stemmed from many infected people being gay.

"You have to believe that if monkeypox were spreading largely through heterosexual sex, things would be drastically different," Oliver said. "By now, you'd probably be able to get a 'free vax with purchase' at every J. Crew in the country."

He also assured the audience that it was okay to recognize that most people affected by monkeypox were sex workers and gay men. However, it wasn't right to shame them for being victims or consider them less important than others.

"What is homophobic is when you blame or shame the people who are suffering or you decide you don't need to care about this because you don't see their lives as valuable or their suffering as consequential," he said. He then used Greene as a typical example to show fans what not to do or how not to behave.