Kiwi actress Lucy Lawless has divided fans after sharing a controversial Covid-19 meme on social media.
However, the actress told the Herald she shared it as she thought it was humorous and believed that people should take a little bit of joy wherever they can during the pandemic.
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Lawless shared a popular meme that has been doing the rounds on social media that reads: "Whoever said one person can't change the world never ate an undercooked bat."
After posting it yesterday, it has caused controversy online with some fans not happy with the actress' decision to share the meme and urged her to delete her post.
Meanwhile, others found the meme funny and assured others that it's just a joke.
Lawless said she found it funny that people were upset with her for sharing the meme.
"You're not allowed to have any humour about [Covid-19] eh?", she rhetorically asked.
The actress also made reference to Ellen DeGeneres, who upset many viewers for making a jail isolation joke in her opening monologue while hosting her show from her living room.
• Covid19.govt.nz: The Government's official Covid-19 advisory website
"I guess everybody has a lot of reasons to feel super pressured, but sometimes you've got to have a bit of light-heartedness," Lawless said.
"To take a little bit of joy where you can and not feel bad about it because we all do feel guilty when we are enjoying times with our families - as if we shouldn't."
Lawless also recommended for people not to try uncooked bat.
In the early stages of the coronavirus outbreak, conspiracy theories started spreading just as fast on where the virus originated.
One of them being that the virus originated from Chinese people who ate uncooked bats.
The theory was sparked from an old video of a Chinese woman biting into a whole bat — however it was soon discovered that it wasn't set in Wuhan and was actually showing a host from a travel show eating the dish in Palau, a Pacific island nation.
In fact, the coronavirus' initial outbreak started at Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market in Wuhan, China, in late 2019, The Conversation reports.
Since January 2020, the current consensus among the scientific community is the virus originated in horseshoe bats; however, it's unlikely that bats directly gave the virus to humans.
Instead, scientists suspected that the bat coronavirus infected another animal, an "intermediate host," which subsequently transmitted the virus to humans.