The celebrity COVID count climbed once again by one this week, just ahead of the end of the year, with Dr. Drew Pinsky announcing on social media that he’d been diagnosed with the disease. Per Variety, Pinksy’s catching of COVID was especially notable in light of statements he made—and later apologized for—earlier in the year, calling the virus a “press-induced panic” and labeling it as little more than the flu.
Pinsky recanted those statements back in April, back near the start of the global response to the virus. Now he’s been diagnosed, per a sequence of events that apparently went thus: “I was supposed to get the vaccine, I got stonewalled by my hospital, walked into an outbreak (and) got it.” (If you ask us, those outbreaks really need to be better marked.) In any case, the long-time talk show and radio host and Celebrity Rehab frontman says he’s now on the mend; he’s been posting on Instagram over the last two days, assuring fans that no other members of his family were exposed to the virus, and talking about receiving an infusion of Bamlanivimab, which was authorized by the FDA back in November for potential treatment of the disease.
Pinsky originally made the announcement back on Tuesday. America is coming up quickly on its 20 millionth COVID-19 case, with roughly 341,000 deaths reported to date.