Former President Trump acknowledged he was scared when he discovered he had COVID-19 given how many friends of his had died during the pandemic, he told a British documentarian filming him in the months leading up to Jan. 6.

The remarks are a shift from his public comments after he was infected with the coronavirus in October 2020. After Trump left Walter Reed Hospital, where he spent 3 days being treated for COVID-19, he told people “don’t be afraid of it.”

“At that point he was no longer the president, but when he was, he was in charge of the entire the COVID response, and hundreds of thousands of people had died. What he said to me was that the reason why he was sort of scared of COVID was essentially because he knew people who had died of COVID, basically he was referring to his friends, he was referring to people he knew personally that had got COVID and that some of them had died,” Holder said.

“And that’s why it was quite shocking to him when the doctor said to him he actually had COVID, so his way of understanding the danger of COVID came from his own personal connections to people rather than a national or global scale.”

[link to thehill.com (secure)]