A CNBC business pundit and heartless capitalist Rick Santelli actually went on the air Thursday and called for infecting all Americans with coronavirus for the sake of the stock market.

Health experts and organizations are advising everyone to take the virus seriously and self-quarantine if they suspect they have it in an effort to keep the outbreak from spreading. So far, 13 Americans have died and over 200 cases have been reported across over a dozen states.

But instead of caring more about people, former hedge fund vice president Rick Santelli told CNBC that all Americans should be infected on purpose to reduce the economic fallout from the outbreak.

“Of course, people are getting nervous,” Santelli said. “And listen, I’m not a doctor. All I know is, think about how the world would be if you tried to quarantine everybody because of the generic-type flu.”

“Now I’m not saying this is the generic-type flu,” he continued. “But maybe we’d be just better off if we gave it to everybody, and then in a month it would be over because the mortality rate of this probably isn’t going to be any different if we did it that way than the long-term picture, but the difference is we’re wreaking havoc on global and domestic economies.”

Here’s the video via Twitter:

The idea is particularly morbid when you consider the fatality rate thus far around the globe and in the United States. There are currently over 300 million Americans. Infecting every single one of them based on the 3.4 percent fatality rate reported by the World Health Organization would result in around 11 million deaths. The generic flu virus, meanwhile, only claims tens of thousands of lives.

But the fatality rate in the United States right now is nearly double the WHO rate at nearly 6 percent, meaning around 20 million Americans would die if we infected everyone just so wealthy people can continue enjoying a booming stock market, which quite frankly would likely crash anyway if 12 million people died and hundreds of millions were infected. This is why Americans should kill capitalism. Because if not, it apparently has no problem killing us.

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