John Oliver Calls COVID-19 ‘the Timothée Chalamet of Viruses,’ Rips U.S. Testing Rollout (Video)

“You barely had time to learn its name before, suddenly, it was f—ing everywhere,” HBO host says

John Oliver, like so many Americans, is completely frustrated by the state of coronavirus testing in his adopted home country. Unlike the vast majority of citizens here, the “Last Week Tonight” host has a national (pay-)TV platform on which to blast this botched rollout.

He did exactly that on Sunday.

“Broad testing is our only safe way out,” Oliver said last night. We’re nowhere near that in terms of diagnostic testing, he stated, and we “overcorrected — hard” in terms of the loose creation of numerous antibody tests.

But before he got to the sincere stuff, the HBO personality drew a solid parallel between the COVID-19 spread and the breakout star of “Call Me By Your Name.”

Coronavirus is “very much the Timothée Chalamet of viruses, in that you barely had time to learn its name before, suddenly, it was f—ing everywhere,” Oliver quipped.

Whether you agree or disagree with Oliver’s politics, he ain’t wrong about that one.

Watch the video above.

Oliver did his best to be fair to the administration that screwed it all up. Well, maybe not to Jared Kushner (who Oliver called a “translucent sociopath” with “the most punchable face in America”), who called our national response to the novel coronavirus pandemic “a great success story.”

“Look, some confusion is inevitable when a new disease starts spreading its way around the world — and it’s not like rolling out testing on this kind of scale was ever going to be easy. But again and again, the people in charge failed to prepare for the worst-case scenario and have been slow in fixing mistakes,” Oliver said. “All of which means, in May, we are still playing catch-up in the middle of a pandemic, which in turn, means thousands upon thousands of people dying preventable deaths.”

“So if this is ‘a great success story’ for anyone, it’s for the f—ing coronavirus,” Oliver said.

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