System of a Down’s Shavo Odadjian Calls Coronavirus Panic “Sensationalism at Its Finest”
It would appear that System of a Down bassist Shavo Odadjian does not think very much of the current concern regarding COVID-19.
In an interview conducted earlier this month for The Jasta Show (bottom of this post), Odadjian said (via The PRP):
“I think it’s the stupidest thing… I think it’s lame. It’s just a regular cold, bro, at this point.
“I saw a doctor yesterday for just a checkup. He owns the floor; it’s his. Anyway, he was telling me how he was upset at how media’s only focusing on one thing, and that’s putting fear in you, which is what’s going on — it’s like control by fear. But he’s, like, the actual virus has actually diminished in power and strength since it started with all the deaths that have been happening.
“He’s, like, we have 50 times more people contaminated with it, but we have 30 times less deaths. Where before there was a certain amount that got contaminated and this many died from it — like maybe 20 percent, 10 percent. And now it’s, like, 0.01 percent, and it’s mostly people in convalescent homes in their 80s and 90s, or people that have weak immune systems.
“It’s people that would die from the flu or anything else that would happen, which happens, like, 27,000 to 57,000 a year in America alone — people die from the flu and no one talks about it… I’ve been doing research, ’cause I’m, like, ‘Dude, why are these important things getting canceled, like South By Southwest, just for a cold?’”
“I know it’s scary — it’s scary to have this new thing, but every two years we have something new, man. We went from Zika to the fucking swine flu to SARS to Ebola, back to this, back to that… And it’s, like, every time they don’t have something, they’re gonna bring something else back and say, ‘Oh, remember this? Wasn’t it scary? Well, it’s back. We have two new cases.’ Ooh, the world panics, bro…”
Then, in a social media post from last week comparing the coronavirus scare to various other viruses (e.g., bird flu, ebola, etc.), Odadjian wrote, “Who else is sick of all this BS? Sensationalism at its finest! #corona.”
Still, it is possible Odadjian has finally begun to take the pandemic seriously: just this morning, he shared a social media post from SOAD frontman Serj Tankian seeking help for COVID-19 philanthropic efforts.
