Tucker Carlson claims medical experts 'failed us badly' on the coronavirus
Following record unemployment insurance claims over the past two weeks, Fox News host Tucker Carlson attacked the medical experts’ handling of the growing coronavirus crisis in the United States. Unemployment has skyrocketed as more states across the country have issued the recommended stay-at-home orders, causing shops, restaurants and other businesses to temporarily close in an attempt to slow the spread of the virus. And despite the Trump administration ignoring a 2019 intelligence report warning that the country was unprepared for a global pandemic, and declining coronavirus tests offered by the World Health Organization, Carlson blames those trying to save lives. He believes health experts aren’t the ones who should be making those decisions.
“One of the main lessons of this crisis is that the public health establishment failed us badly,” Carlson said, before accusing the WHO of colluding with China, and blaming the CDC, not the administration, for the lack of testing. “Once the coronavirus reached our shores the CDC couldn’t seem to produce working tests,” Carlson said. “Those were disasters. Many people died because the people we trusted to protect our health didn’t do it.”
Carlson then went on to question whether the experts should be trusted.
“We’re being asked to trust these same people without hesitation, and for the most part, we’re doing that,” Carlson said. “In other words, the experts failed, yet the experts now have more power than ever before.”
Carlson even went so far as to defend Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, who got national attention for taking the controversial stance that the elderly should risk their health to save the economy for their grandchildren in an appearance on the show last week.
In his appearance, Patrick, 70, said, “Tucker, no one reached out to me and said, ‘As a senior citizen, are you willing to take a chance on your survival in exchange for keeping the America that all America loves for your children and grandchildren?’ And if that’s the exchange, I’m all in.” He later added, “My message is, let’s get back to work. Let’s get back to living. Let’s be smart about it, and those of us who are 70-plus, we’ll take care of ourselves.”
Carlson claimed the media overreacted and took Patrick’s comments out of context.
“Almost immediately the media outrage machine began belching smoke and making loud noises,” Carlson said. “‘Dan Patrick is telling old people to die for the stock market,’ they screamed. No, Dan Patrick was not doing that. Not even close. He didn’t say anything like that on the air and that’s not what he meant.”
And though the White House coronavirus task force predicts hundreds of thousands of deaths even with nationwide stay-at-home orders, Carlson believes he knows what should have happened, though he admits he doesn’t know what kind of difference his idea might have made.
“What if we asked the elderly and the immunocompromised, and anyone else facing statistically higher rates of risk, to stay inside, cloistered away? And then at the same time allowed the rest of the population to use informed common sense and continue to work? What if we’d done that a month ago?” Carlson asked. “Would the death rate be much higher than it is now? Maybe, maybe not. We don’t know.”
Of course, ignoring the experts comes at a risk, as Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp recently discovered. Kemp ordered a statewide shelter-in-place order only after parts of the state became coronavirus hotspots. Kemp admitted on Wednesday that he’d just learned that even people with no symptoms of having the virus can spread the disease, despite experts warning as much for months.
Tucker Carlson Tonight airs weeknights at 8 p.m. on Fox News Channel.
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For the latest coronavirus news and updates, follow along at https://news.yahoo.com/coronavirus. According to experts, people over 60 and those who are immunocompromised continue to be the most at risk. If you have questions, please reference the CDC and WHO’s resource guides.
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