President Donald Trump speaks at a Florida campaign rally. Photo / AP
Donald Trump has declared he feels "powerful" at his first major rally since his hospitalisation for coronavirus, boasting that he is "immune" and could "walk into the crowd and kiss everyone".
"One good thing with me is I went through it," the US President told the tightly packed audience at the Orlando Sanford International Airport in Sanford, Florida on Monday.
"I feel so powerful. I'll walk into that crowd, I'll kiss everyone in that audience. I'll kiss the guys, the beautiful women, everyone I'll give a big, fat kiss."
Trump claims he's now "immune" to the coronavirus, feeling "powerful" and willing to "kiss everyone" in the audience. "I'll kiss the guys and the beautiful women," he said. pic.twitter.com/0brz0Rl8UQ
— The Washington Post (@washingtonpost) October 12, 2020
Trump said it "does give you a good feeling when you beat something and you're immune".
It comes a day after he was censored by Twitter for making that claim.
Twitter said the post violated its rules about spreading misleading and potentially harmful information related to Covid-19.
Trump told the rally that he didn't know how long supposed immunity lasted as doctors kept changing their mind because "they want it to be as bad as possible".
He also talked up the development of "therapeutics and cures" for the virus, saying "we're 90 per cent better now than we were six months ago" for people who became infected.
"With children it's 99.9 per cent, you're going to be okay," he said. "They have better immune systems."
He had previously attributed his recovery to an experimental antibody cocktail produced by biotech company Regeneron.
The US President also seized on recent comments by the World Health Organisation backing away from lockdowns.
WHO official Dr David Nabaro went viral over the weekend after appealing to world leaders to "stop using lockdowns as your primary control method" for the coronavirus in an interview with The Spectator.
"The World Health Organisation, did you see what happened?" Trump said.
"They just came out a little while ago and they admitted that Donald Trump was right. The lockdowns are doing tremendous damage to these Democrat-run states where they're locked down, sealed up – suicide rates, alcoholism, death by so many forms – you can't do that."
The World Health Organization just admitted that I was right. Lockdowns are killing countries all over the world. The cure cannot be worse than the problem itself. Open up your states, Democrat governors. Open up New York. A long battle, but they finally did the right thing!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) October 12, 2020
Trump thanked Florida's Republican Governor Ron DeSantis for reopening his state.
"You're open and open for business and doing great," he said.
"We've got to remember the cure cannot be worse than the problem itself."
He slammed the "draconian, unscientific lockdowns", but suggested people could stay home if they were vulnerable.
"If you don't feel good about going out, stay, relax, you know the risk groups, but if you want to get out there, get out," he said. "Normal life, that's all we want, a normal life."
Trump claimed that if not for his administration's coronavirus response, the death toll would have been 2.2 million rather than 210,000.
"We shouldn't be at one (death)," he said, again attacking China for allowing "it to escape".
He slammed Democratic rival Joe Biden, saying he would have done a much worse job – pointing to the former Vice President's handling of the H1N1 swine flu response.
"He always calls it 'N1H1'," Trump said. "I said, 'No, Joe, the H comes first.' But it was a disaster the way they ran it, it was a total catastrophe."
He added that Biden "called me xenophobic" for banning travel from China in January but "then ultimately admitted I'm right".
"Nobody acted fast like I did, I also shut down Europe, and the bottom line is we saved millions of lives," he said.
It came hours after Trump's doctor said he had repeatedly tested negative for Covid-19.
The US President was flown to the Walter Reed military hospital on October 2 after testing positive and subsequently experiencing difficulty breathing.
He was hospitalised for four days, returning to the White House last Monday night.
The 74-year-old has since boasted about his rapid recovery, describing himself as a "perfect physical specimen" and "extremely young" in an interview with Fox News on Thursday.
At the rally Trump slammed the media for fact-checking his tongue-in-cheek comment.
"They said, 'Donald Trump misrepresented again.' These people are the sickest of them all," he said.
Observers of the rally noted that the President seemed particularly energetic.
"Anyone watching (Donald Trump)? Maybe it's just pent up energy after 10 days off the trail, but does he seem particularly jacked up to you?" tweeted former Obama White House official David Axelrod.
Jack Posobiec from the pro-Trump cable channel One America News Network wrote, "I was at rallies with Trump before he went into the hospital and he looks even stronger tonight at his first rally back."