The novel coronavirus just isn’t so deadly! That’s the conclusion Fox News host Tucker Carlson came to in a monologue Monday night.
It’s not that social distancing and enforced business closures have slowed the virus, Carlson said — COVID-19 just isn’t as bad as public health officials say it is.
“You may remember what they first told us back in February and March,” Carlson told viewers. “They said, we have to take radical steps in order to, quote, ‘flatten the curve.’ Well, six weeks later, we’re happy to say that curve has been flattened, but it’s likely not because of the lockdowns. The virus just isn’t nearly as deadly as we thought it was.”
Carlson didn’t provide much in the way of evidence.
Introducing his argument, the Fox News host cited a recent news conference from a pair of California doctors and urgent care clinic owners who concluded — based on testing numbers at their clinics and the state’s relatively low number of deaths — that the threat of COVID-19 had been over-hyped.
“These are serious people who’ve done this for a living for decades,” Carlson said of the two doctors, who were also on Laura Ingraham’s show Monday. “They have in their hands the largest currently available data set on this question.”
Left unsaid by Carlson: The doctors have been “emphatically condemn[ed]” by the American College of Emergency Physicians and the American Academy of Emergency Medicine for their “reckless and untested musings” that are inconsistent with established epidemiology regarding COVID-19.
“As owners of local urgent care clinics, it appears these two individuals are releasing biased, non-peer reviewed data to advance their personal financial interests without regard for the public’s health,” the organizations said in a statement.
Carlson, criticizing the assumptions of political leaders, nonetheless made a few whoppers himself.
“Our national quarantine hasn’t worked in the way they told it would,” he said at one point Monday. “But you’d never know that from listening to the people in charge.”
Watch below:
Carlson: Lock-downs likely didn't flatten the curve of COVID-19, "the virus just isn't nearly as deadly as we thought it was." pic.twitter.com/KVPKG5Bstl
— Matt Shuham (@mattshuham) April 28, 2020
