BRAUN: Celebrity-style COVID!

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You know how it is with celebrities — if it isn’t Keith Richards impersonating John Kennedy Jr., it’s Chris Pratt pretending to be human.

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As U.S. deaths from COVID breeze past the 750,000 mark, let us celebrate the pandemic wisdom (“It will be gone by spring!”) imparted by the celebrities and other me-first famous folks we’ve all come to admire and respect, not.

Cast your mind back to the beginning of COVID in North America, for example, and to Ellen DeGeneres complaining that being in COVID lockdown on her palatial estate was like, “being in jail.”

This was when people actually in jail were dying of COVID for lack of room to distance.

Even before that gaffe, Madonna decided to appear in a video holding forth from her bathtub to talk about COVID as “the great equalizer.” Madge, naked and surrounded by rose petals, talked about the pandemic affecting rich and poor alike, exposing a vacuity we would all have been much happier not knowing about.

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Throughout COVID, celebrities partied inappropriately while everyone else was following the rules. Earlier this year, after Dr. Fauci begged people not to party over Super Bowl weekend, 50 Cent threw a huge party at a private airport hanger in St. Petersburg.

Cardi B likewise led by bad example by hosting a Thanksgiving dinner party for 37 people. She later apologized and showed how contrite she truly was by throwing a crowded indoor bash a month later for her husband Offset’s birthday.

But nobody beat the Kardashians for tone-deaf partying during COVID, whether it was Khloe Kardashian and Tristan Thompson hosting a big Fourth Of July party at a time when California had prohibited such gatherings or Kim Kardashian jetting off to a private island to party —  and then posting about it .

The extended Kardashian family had been asked to quarantine for two weeks and then were whisked off to an island in Polynesia for Kardashian’s 40th birthday.

This was last October, around the time demand for food banks in America doubled because of the pandemic, and COVID had killed some 350,000.

After listing all the fab stuff she did on her getaway, Kardashian tweeted:

“I realize that for most people, this is something that is so far out of reach right now, so in moments like these, I am humbly reminded of how privileged my life is.”

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And then everyone’s head blew up.

Lest we forget, football cheat Tom Brady snuck into a Florida park closed because of COVID so he could exercise, Woody Harrelson and Wiz Khalifa (among many others) blame 5G for COVID , and Gal Gadot, AKA Wonder Woman , rounded up a pack of high-profile friends including Will Ferrell, Amy Adams, Kristen Wiig, Sia and Cara Delevingne to sing a version of John Lennon’s Imagine in a no doubt well-intentioned but totally gormless gesture.

Nick Minaj spoke out about her cousin’s friend’s swollen testicles as a reason to re-think vaccination, Chrissy Teigen tweeted about the importance of shipping clam chowder across the country and Drake lamented the isolation of lockdown by tweeting a picture of his private basketball court while crying, “My life for the next however long.”

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In other Canadian news, Bryan Adams complained about his cancelled shows at London’s Royal Albert Hall on social media and laid blame as follows:

“But thanks to some f—king bat eating, wet market animal selling, virus making greedy bastards, the whole world is now on hold, not to mention the thousands that have suffered or died from this virus.”

Finally, more-money-than-brains poster boy Elon Musk tweeted at the start of the pandemic that the reaction to COVID is “dumb.”

“Fatality rate also greatly overstated,” he said.

“Shut up,” we explained.