Microblogging website Twitter on Sunday deleted a tweet shared by United States President Donald Trump that downplayed the coronavirus death count in the country, The Washington Post reported.

The original tweet was posted by a user “Mel Q”, a supporter of QAnon conspiracy theory that claims Trump is battling a cabal of Satan-worshiping child sex traffickers. The tweet was copied from someone else’s Facebook post and claimed that the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention had “quietly” updated its numbers “to admit that only 6%” of people listed under coronavirus deaths, or about 90,000 had “actually died” from the infection. The rest of the deaths were because of other illnesses, the tweet claimed.

A Twitter spokesperson said it was taken down because it violated the company’s Covid-19 misinformation policy.

Mel Q’s claim was apparently based on the Centers for Disease Control’s August 26 update where it said that Covid-19 “was the only cause mentioned” in the death of 6% of fatalities in the country. However, this does not imply that only 6% of the reported fatalities were because of the coronavirus, but means that in the remaining 94% deaths there was at least one additional factor contributing to their death.

A news website, The Gateway Pundit, also used the 6% claim to attack the members of the country’s coronavirus task force. “So let’s get this straight – based on the recommendation of doctors [Anthony] Fauci and [Deborah] Birx, the US shut down the entire economy based on 9,000 American deaths due entirely to the China coronavirus?” the article said.

White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany justified Trump’s retweet, saying that it was purely informative. “He [Donald Trump] was highlighting new CDC [Centers for Disease Control] information that came out that was worth noting,” she said.

Meanwhile, the US has reported 60,31,065 coronavirus cases and 1,83,601 people have died due to the infection, according to John Hopkins University data.