The new spokesman for the Department of Health and Human Services in a series of
now-deleted tweets made racist and derogatory comments about Chinese people, said Democrats wanted the coronavirus to kill millions of people and accused the media of intentionally creating panic around the pandemic to hurt President Donald Trump.
Michael Caputo, a longtime New York Republican political operative who worked on Trump's 2016 presidential campaign,
was appointed last week as Assistant Secretary for Public Affairs at HHS, a prominent communications role at the department which serves a central role in the federal government's response to the coronavirus pandemic.
Caputo, a prolific user who often tweeted insults and profanity, recently erased
nearly his entire Twitter history from
before April 12. CNN's KFile used the Internet Archive's Way Back Machine to review more than 1300 deleted tweets and retweets from late February to early April many of which were regarding the rapidly spreading coronavirus.
In a series of tweets on March 12, Caputo responded to a baseless conspiracy theory that the United States brought the coronavirus to Wuhan, China, by tweeting that "millions of Chinese suck the blood out of rabid bats as an appetizer and eat the ass out of anteaters." He followed up at another user, "Don't you have a bat to eat?" and tweeted at another user named, "You're very convincing, Wang."
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