Hilary Rosen, a Hillary Clinton supporter, told a CNN panel on Tuesday that ten million Americans catch pneumonia each week.
"Hilary Rosen, let me hear from you and then we have to go," host Brooke Baldwin said. "But, do you think–we wish and Donald trump is included in this, wishing Hillary Clinton well, while she’s recovering from her pneumonia, but are you worried at all that her being away for a day, two days, three days, we don’t know totally yet, could hurt her politically?"
"Look, 10 million Americans a week catch pneumonia, Rosen said. "I don’t think people don’t begrudge her a couple day’s rest."
She then tried to switch subjects by disagreeing with the premise of the argument that the campaign has turned into a race of transparency with releasing documents.
"I’m going to disagree with the original premise, which is that the issues of this campaign are about health records and transparency and tax returns," she said. "Tax returns I think matter because it says, ‘Will Donald Trump scam middle-class voters the way we think he’s probably scammed the IRS or not?’"
She did say that she thinks both presidential candidates are healthy enough to be president.
"I think we have the candidates we have–you know, they are as healthy as they’re going to be ,and I don’t have any doubt that either one of them will be healthy enough to be president," Rosen said. "What I do have doubts about is what kind of presidents they’ll be."
There are about three million cases of pneumonia a year in the United States, according to a medical website, not 10 million a week as Rosen suggested.
If Rosen’s statistic were true, at the end of a year 520 million Americans would be diagnosed with pneumonia. However, the American population is hovering around 300 million people.