Fox News presenter Pete Hegseth has made a splash after telling colleagues on-air that germs “weren’t a thing” and that he hasn’t washed his hands in ten years.
On an episode of Fox & Friends, which aired on Sunday, Hegseth’s co-host Jedediah Bila poked fun at his supposedly unhygienic decision to eat day-old leftover pizza, prompting the startling admission.
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“Germs are not a real thing. I can’t see them; therefore, they’re not real.”
The tongue-in-cheek comments met with bafflement on social media:
Although most viewers took Hegseth’s dismissive attitude towards germ theory as a joke, some commentators pointed out that he is far from alone when it comes to his ambivalence to handwashing.
The US Center for Disease Control has a specific section of its website aimed at converting “those who still inexplicably don’t believe in handwashing”, says Forbes’ Bruce Y. Lee.
“This was a missed opportunity for Fox & Friends to reinforce how wrong it is to believe that germs are not real,” he adds.
For his part, Hegseth told USA Today that it “should have been obvious that he was joking” about the existence of germs, but stood by the idea that clean freaks should “lighten up”.
“We live in a society where people walk around with bottles of Purell [hand sanitiser] in their pockets, and they sanitise 19,000 times a day as if that’s going to save their life,” he said.
In a follow-up tweet, the 38-year-old doubled down, giving his backing to “drinking from garden hoses and riding bikes without a helmet”.
Hegseth’s cavalier attitude to germs puts him at odds with at least one famous Fox News viewer. President Donald Trump has gone on the record several times as a self-confessed germaphobe who takes extreme measures to avoid contamination.
In a 1993 radio interview, he told shock jock Howard Stern that he washed his hands “as many times as possible” during the course of the day.
In his 1997 book Art of the Comeback, Trump described himself as a “clean hands freak” and called the practice of shaking hands “one of the curses of American society”.