From the very start of the COVID-19 pandemic, End Times broadcaster Rick Wiles began warning that the virus was a plague sent by God to purge the world of sin as the Last Days approach. Wiles repeatedly declared that a “death angel” was sweeping across the globe and dedicated just about every episode of his nightly “TruNews” program for the last several months to warning that life as we have known was about to change forever.

But Wiles has suddenly changed his tune and has now returned to what he has always done best, which is to spin baseless conspiracy theories. Wiles used his Monday program to assert that the threat from the virus was wildly overblown and to speculate that China never really had a coronavirus outbreak at all but had faked it as cover to unleash the virus on the rest of the world.

“What if they made us believe Wuhan had massive death, that the entire city had to be fumigated?” Wiles said. “What if it was all a propaganda campaign to introduce a virus in America to bring down the U.S. economy?”

“It’s also possible the entire Wuhan pandemic was staged,” he continued. “For what purpose? To destroy the American economy. And I’m not saying that there’s no virus here—I believe that absolutely there’s a virus here. Fifty-five thousand people are dead. What I’m saying is maybe it never happened in Wuhan. Maybe the entire thing has been a calculated, well planned, well choreographed, well executed attack on the USA because nothing has ever shut us down like this … [This] is the first time in the history of America that churches have been closed from coast to coast.”