Monday, Fox News Channel’s Tucker Carlson questioned the efficacy of lockdowns nationwide, where in some cases he says there was the scientific justification was lacking in some cases where draconian lockdown measures have been implemented.
Transcript as follows:
CARLSON: Fifteen percent of everybody in New York State may have already contracted that illness and not known they had it. That’s not close to the result that we expected and it’s not the only study to find stunningly widespread infection of this virus. There are many such studies and they come from around the world. This new evidence means that the virus is far less deadly, a full order of magnitude less deadly than authorities first told us that it was. At the same time, the same research also suggests the virus is incredibly easy to spread between adults, which is another way of saying the coronavirus is nearly impossible to control. How do we know that? Because we haven’t managed to control it.
Our national mass quarantine hasn’t worked in the way they told us it would. But you never know that from listening to the people in charge. Given the suffering and the disruption these policies have caused, you’d think that people who made them and now are enforcing them would be staying up late every night double-checking their assumptions against reality. But they’re not doing that, they’re doing just the opposite. They’re ignoring the science because the science indicts their political judgments. A recent analysis published in The Wall Street Journal found virtually no correlation at all between how quickly a state lockdown and how deadly that state’s coronavirus outbreak turned out to be.
You’d think that would be breaking news on every channel. Needless to say, it’s not, it’s essentially being ignored. From Australia, meanwhile, we have new evidence that for huge segments of the population, this virus poses no meaningful risk and that’s not an overstatement based on these numbers. Researchers in Australia tracked 18 students and staff who contracted the virus across 15 different schools. They concluded that about 850 people had come into close physical contact with the people who carried the virus. But they found only two cases of secondary coronavirus infections at those schools. None of them involves students infecting adults. What does this mean? It suggests that this strain of coronavirus is extremely mild in children and all the other numbers bear that out. It’s very hard for kids to get this illness, it’s hard for them to spread it.
If they do get it, and some do, the risk of dying is mathematically close to zero. Now, keep in mind, and this is an essential contrast, this virus behaves in a way that’s dramatically different from ordinary influenza. Children contract and spread the annual flu very easily. If you have them, you know it. By the numbers, the annual flu is much more dangerous to children than the coronavirus is. Now, why is this relevant right now? Well, it’s relevant because we’ve shut down education nationwide. Many schools and colleges are now considering staying closed in the fall. For the kids who go to those schools and their families, this is a disaster. So, it’s fair to ask, who has been saved by doing this? And the people in charge don’t even bother to tell us. Shut up and lockdown, they say you. You’re saving lives when you do, people will die if you don’t.
Every day you hear that, but it’s not science. Those are political slogans. Increasingly people fluent in the actual science of epidemiology are asking hard questions about these policies. Here’s a physician and researcher from California called Dr. Dan Erickson. Erickson and a partner just delivered a 50-minute briefing on the latest numbers from California. The video they made has been viewed millions of times in a few days online. The bottom line is, after looking carefully at the data, these two researchers have concluded that California should end its shelter-in-place order. Watch.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
DR. DAN ERICKSON, PHYSICIAN, CALIFORNIA: We’ve seen 1,227 deaths in the state of California, with a possible incidence or prevalence of 4.7 million. That means you have a 0.03 chance of dying from COVID-19 in the State of California — 0.03 chance of dying from COVID in the State of California. Is that — does that necessitate sheltering in place? Does that necessitate shutting down medical systems? Does that necessitate people being out of work?
(END VIDEO CLIP)
CARLSON: These are serious people who’ve done this for a living for decades. They have in their hands the largest currently available datasets on this question, and the question they’re asking after analyzing all of those numbers, are the lockdowns worth it? So, what is the answer to that? What’s so striking is it’s so many politicians, the ones enforcing the lockdowns don’t seem at all interested in asking it. Instead, they’re bulling forward as if nothing has changed. Just today, the San Francisco Bay Area announced it’ll be extending its lockdown until the end of May. That’s five weeks from now.
What is the scientific justification for doing that? They didn’t tell us because there is none. None. You may remember what they first told us back in February and March. 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. All of us, including on this show, everybody thought it was, but it turned out not to be. Hospitals never collapsed. Outside of a tiny number of places. They never came close to collapsing, at least not from an influx of infected patients. Instead, something remarkable happened, something amazing, really without parallel in American history. The opposite happened.
Thanks to the lockdowns, hospitals have begun to collapse. Why? From a lack of patients. Politicians who couldn’t pass ninth-grade biology decided that practicing physicians should not be allowed to calculate the risk of transmitting the virus. They’re just not qualified, unlike us. So, these politicians banned so-called nonessential procedures, many of which are in fact essential. The result of this policy — in many hospitals, entire floors have been mothballed. Doctors and nurses are being furloughed in the middle of a pandemic. This is insanity. It weakens our healthcare system. Its effects will last for many years. That’s all from the lockdown.
So how long we have to live with these lockdown? Earlier this month, Dr. Anthony Fauci, whom we are apparently required by law to respect no matter what he says, suggested that in fact, we may never be allowed to resume normal life.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
DR. ANTHONY FAUCI, DIRECTOR, NATIONAL INSTITUTE OF ALLERGY AND INFECTIOUS DISEASES: If back to normal means acting like there never was a coronavirus problem, I don’t think that’s going to happen until we do have a situation where you can completely protect the population.
If you want to get to pre-coronavirus, you know, that might not ever happen in the sense of the fact that the threat is there.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
CARLSON: Now, we should tell you that is the same Dr. Fauci — and keep this to yourself because as noted, it’s not allowed to show any skepticism whatsoever — but that’s the same Dr. Fauci, who also announced that shaking hands, the ancient custom of shaking hands should be done away with forever. And then a week later, told Snapchat, that actually it’s fine to have sex with strangers you meet on Tinder. That was his epidemiological advice. Other experts on television warned that full-blown lockdowns may be necessary until a vaccine or effective treatments are found. What they didn’t mention is that scientists have never produced a single approved vaccine or antiviral drug for any coronavirus.
So, that could be a while and that thought seemed to please frequent television guest, Zeke Emanuel.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
ZEKE EMANUEL SENIOR FELLOW, CENTER FOR AMERICAN PROGRESS: Realistically, COVID-19 will be here for the next 18 months or more. We will not be able to return to normalcy until we find a vaccine or effective medications.
Is all that economic pain worth trying to stop COVID-19? The truth is, we have no choice.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
CARLSON: Oh, the truth is, we have no choice. Well, here’s a handy guide for in case you watch a lot of television. When a political operative like Zeke Emanuel, someone with a long history of lying, begins a sentence with the phrase, the truth is, you should probably be on guard. When he ends that sentence with, we have no choice, you should be terrified. And in fact, that’s wrong. We have always had a choice.
Other countries made different choices from ours, in fact. They’re not waiting for a vaccine to open their societies. Why would they do that? There’s no precedent for doing that, as a scientific matter. For example, we spent millions of dollars and more than a decade trying to find a vaccine for the SARS virus. Scientists never developed one. That’s a shame. But did we halt life in the United States in response? We didn’t.
In fact, you may not even remember that any of that happened. The strangest thing is the science has not changed that much since then. Unfortunately, American politics have changed a lot and that’s the difference.
Follow Jeff Poor on Twitter @jeff_poor