Whoopi Goldberg rips Bill Maher over COVID-19 remarks: ‘How dare you be so flippant’

Whoopi Goldberg is slamming Bill Maher for cracks he made calling COVID-19 mitigation efforts “bananas,” saying there’s nothing funny about the pandemic.

“How dare you be so flippant, man,” Goldberg said Monday on “The View,” in response to remarks Maher made on Friday on his HBO show, “Real Time.”

“I don’t want to live in your paranoid world anymore — your masked, paranoid world,” Maher said. “You go out — it’s silly now. You know you have to have your mask, you have to have a card, you have to have a booster. They scan your head like you’re a cashier and I’m a bunch of bananas,” Maher said to laughs from the audience.

“I’m not bananas — you are,” he added.

“That’s not really funny to people who have lost their kids,” the “View” co-host said of Maher’s comments, “or people who have lost family members or dear friends to this.”

“Listen, nobody on the planet really wants to go through this,” Goldberg, 66, continued. “This is not something we’re doing because it’s sexually gratifying. This is what we’re doing to protect our families.”

“You don’t have to do it, but stay away from everybody,” she said.

“I want to point out, there are little kids who can’t get vaccinated. Lots of people who cannot get vaccinated, so you’re playing Russian roulette with their lives,” the Academy Award winner added.

Children under 5 are currently the only age group not eligible to get vaccinated.

Goldberg tested positive for COVID-19 in December, the ABC daytime talk show announced earlier this month.

“Since she’s vaxxed and boosted, her symptoms are fortunately very, very mild,” co-host Joy Behar said at the time.

Goldberg’s criticism came after Maher made headlines last week in a wide-ranging interview with Deadline in which the comedian advised the public against blindly following COVID-19 recommendations made by White House chief medical adviser Anthony Fauci and the medical community.

“Don’t sit there in your white coat and tell me ‘Just do what we say,’ ” Maher, 66, said.

It’s not the first time that Goldberg and Maher have engaged in a public war of words. Last year, they took aim at one another when the HBO host criticized the NFL for playing “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” known as the Black national anthem, before games.