A video posted on Twitter by President Donald Trump‘s re-election campaign was removed from the social media platform for violating copyright rules.
The footage superimposed Trump’s head on the body of San Francisco 49ers rookie wide receiver Brandon Aiyuk, who scored a spectacular touchdown on Sunday, leaping over Philadelphia Eagles safety Marcus Epps to cap a 38-yard run in the 49ers’ 25-20 home loss.
In the video, which was posted by Team Trump, the official Twitter account for the Trump campaign, an illustration from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention displaying COVID-19’s structure was superimposed on Epps, seemingly implying Trump had hurdled over coronavirus as easily as Aiyuk and jumped over Epps on his way to score.
Trump was hospitalized at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center on Friday, after announcing that he and the first lady, Melania Trump, had both tested positive to coronavirus. However, he was released on Monday and returned to Washington, D.C. shortly after urging Americans not to live in fear of COVID-19.
“Don’t be afraid of Covid,” he tweeted.
“Don’t let it dominate your life. We have developed, under the Trump Administration, some really great drugs and knowledge. I feel better than I did 20 years ago.”
The footage posted by the Trump Campaign continued with the president’s face superimposed on Aiyuk celebrating his touchdown in the end zone, before showing footage from ITV News of an anti-Trump protester shouting “No” during the president inauguration back in January 2017.
Much like Trump’s time in hospital, however, the video was a short-lived affair. On Monday night, following “a report from the copyright owner,” Twitter disabled playback of the video. The social media platform, however, did not indicate whether the complaint had come from the NFL, ITV News or another party.
After returning to the White House, Trump hinted he would resume his campaigning ahead of the presidential elections on November 3, tweeting he “will be back on the campaign trail soon.”
Trump wore a mask as he left Walter Reed National Military Medical Center, but removed it when he posed for photographs upon returning to the White House even though, according to CDC guidelines, he should remain in isolation for at least 10 days after his diagnosis, which came late on Thursday night.
The president’s personal physician, Sean Conley, conceded that while Trump had met the discharge requirements, he was “not entirely out of the woods yet.”
On Sunday, Conley explained the president was undergoing a steroid therapy deployed to tackle severe cases of the virus.
Trump has been prescribed the anti-inflammatory steroid dexamethasone, Regeneron’s monoclonal antibody therapy REGN-COV, which mimics the proteins the body creates to fight infection, and the antiviral drug remdesivir.
However, Conley wouldn’t confirm when the president last tested negative for COVID-19.
Meanwhile, Dr. Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, warned Trump’s progress did not mean he had overcome the virus.
“The issue is that he’s still early enough in the disease that it’s no secret that if you look at the clinical course of people sometimes, when you’re five to eight days in, you can have a reversal,” he told CNN’s Chris Cuomo on Monday.
As of Tuesday morning over 7.45 million cases of coronavirus had been reported in the U.S., by far the highest tally of any country in the world.
Of the over 1.04 million deaths recorded worldwide so far, more than 210,000 have been in the U.S., according to Johns Hopkins University, which has been tracking the outbreak using combined data sources.
There have been almost 35.5 million confirmed cases globally since the outbreak of coronavirus was first identified in Wuhan, a city located in China’s central Hubei province, late last year.
Newsweek has contacted the NFL and Twitter for comment.
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