MUMBAI: Kanye West has revealed he contracted the coronavirus in February and spoke against a COVID-19 vaccine.

Following the rapper’s Independence Day announcement that he would be running for the US presidency in 2020, Ye revealed to Forbes he’d contracted COVID-19 in February and insisted his tweet was not a publicity stunt.

“Chills, shaking in the bed, taking hot showers, looking at videos telling me what I’m supposed to do to get over it,” West described his experiences with the illness.

“I remember someone had told me Drake had the coronavirus and my response was Drake can’t be sicker than me!”

He maintained that the illness had nothing to do with his considerations to run this year.

“God just gave me the clarity and said it’s time,” West said. “You know I was out there, ended up in the hospital, people were calling me crazy. I’m not crazy.

“Between all of the influences and the positions that we can be put in as musicians… It can drive you crazy, through all of that I was looking crazy because it wasn’t the time. Now it’s time. And we’re not going crazy, we’re going Yeezy, it’s a whole ‘notha level now. N-O-T-H-A.”

West also revealed his suspicions of a COVID-19 vaccine, calling it “the mark of the beast”.

“It’s so many of our children that are being vaccinated and paralyzed,” he claimed. “So when they say the way we’re going to fix Covid is with a vaccine, I’m extremely cautious. That’s the mark of the beast. They want to put chips inside of us, they want to do all kinds of things, to make it where we can’t cross the gates of heaven.”