Monday, Fox News Channel’s Tucker Carlson opened his program questioning the decisions of National Institutes of Allergy and Infectious Diseases director Anthony Fauci, including closing down schools to children, a segment of the population that does not appear to be as vulnerable to the threat of COVID-19.
Carlson insisted Fauci could have intervened earlier and prevented Draconian measures from being taken with regards to coronavirus and education.
Transcript as follows:
CARLSON: I hope you had a great and relaxing Thanksgiving weekend, away from the endless drone of news. If you somehow managed to pull that off, a few days of peace and happiness with the ones you love, you found it was like a spa treatment. You’re obviously better off for it.
But you also may be wondering what happened? What did you miss over the weekend? And we’re here to tell you.
For starters, Joe Biden broke his foot in a couple of places. It sounds serious, but don’t worry about it. Biden was just out playing with his dog as healthy, vibrant adults in full command of their faculties are not at all fragile and fading often do. It could have happened to anyone. Seriously, it’s totally normal.
CNN, in fact, wrote a piece congratulating Biden for it. Biden’s injuries are far better than Donald Trump’s. So don’t ask questions. You’ve got bigger stories to worry about in the news landscape.
For example, did you hear that Joe Biden picked women to lead the White House Communications Office? That was a historic moment. Nothing like that has happened in this country since the presidency of Donald Trump. Another triumph for the forces of identity. Systemic sexism finally in retreat. Nothing can stop Joe Biden from smashing the glass ceiling, not even his dog.
So that’s what you missed.
Oh, and one other thing. The country’s public health establishment has tortured your children for eight months for no apparent reason. That happened. That story has not received a lot of coverage, but it has been confirmed tonight. The authorities have admitted 60 million American children languishing in their rooms since spring, sitting in front of screens, learning nothing, isolated from human contact, in many cases driven to mental illness.
We can now report there was no reason for any of that. The experts were wrong. They had no idea what they were doing. But the most amazing part — and this really is the headline of the story — is that they knew they were wrong when they did it. But they kept lying about it, even as American children began to kill themselves.
On Sunday in New York, city officials all but admitted this. They announced the reopening of elementary schools. Those are the same schools that they closed fewer than two weeks ago. Now, from a medical standpoint, nothing has changed. New York didn’t get an early shipment of the Pfizer vaccine. There wasn’t some groundbreaking new research paper that revolutionized our understanding of the coronavirus, nothing like that at all.
In fact, parents simply had enough and they forced Bill de Blasio to admit the obvious. This virus is not a threat to children. As de Blasio put it in that weird euphemistic way that dumb people speak, quote, “We know that the health realities for the youngest kids are the most favorable.” Well, yes, we do know that. We’ve known it for a long time. We knew it when Bill de Blasio shut down New York schools.
And Tony Fauci knew it, too, though he didn’t say anything about it. Now, he has decided to say something about it eight months late. Here’s Anthony Fauci on Sunday. And as you watch this, keep in mind that this man on the screen is leading our response, America’s response to the coronavirus.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
DR. ANTHONY FAUCI, DIRECTOR, NATIONAL INSTITUTE OF ALLERGY AND INFECTIOUS DISEASES: Close the bars and keep the schools open is what we really say. Obviously, you don’t have one size fits all. But as I’ve said in the past, and as you accurately quoted me, the default position should be to try as best as possible within reason to keep the children in school or to get them back to school.
If you look at the data, the spread among children and from children is not really very big at all. Not like one would have suspected.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
CARLSON: Oh, I’ve always said you should keep the schools open says the man in charge of America’s coronavirus response to a nation whose schools have been closed for months. Right. Yes, I always said that. Check the tape. Because, quote, “If you look at the data,” says Anthony Fauci.
But wait a second. Why is this just now occurring to Tony Fauci? Isn’t this Fauci’s entire job to quote, “look at the data”? Yes, it is. And yet somehow he never thought to do that. That’s our corona czar.
Over the summer when the data look the same as they do tonight, Fauci explained that he couldn’t really say, if kids should be allowed to go to school, it was quote, “complicated.” Except it wasn’t complicated. It wasn’t complicated then, it’s not complicated now.
In April, many months ago, a study by the “Journal of the American Medical Association” found that school-aged children who get the coronavirus, quote, “Develop only mild symptoms and typically recover within two weeks.” Months later, same story, in June, a study in “The Lancet” affirmed this, quote, “COVID-19 is generally a mild disease in children, including in infants.” Other studies found the exact same thing. No studies found anything but that. There was never much question about it.
But if you’re looking for more evidence, check the death rates. Those are publicly available. Deaths are not hard to track. Consider the State of New Jersey. That’s one of the states hit hardest by the coronavirus. So far in New Jersey, not a single school-aged child has died from the coronavirus, not one. Many children have died from car accidents and fires and drug ODs and suicide. None have died from COVID-19.
In California, the biggest state in the United States, 40 million people live there, a total of two people under the age of 18 have died from the coronavirus — two. The numbers nationwide according to the latest C.D.C. numbers, 123 Americans under the age of 18 have died from the coronavirus, 123 out of 350 million.
We shut the schools anyway, crushing millions of kids, affecting their futures in ways we can’t even understand at this point. But it’s clear it’s bad. Really bad in some cases.
So the question is, why did we do this? And the answer is to save the teachers. The teachers unions pushed this and their servants in the Democratic Party obey. They’re the single largest donors to the Democratic Party, so of course they did.
So unionized teachers get to stay home collecting checks, while you’re losing your jobs because classrooms are just too dangerous. It’s like the Battle of the Bulge five days a week. And that’s exactly what they’ve done.
But what does the data say about this? Well, for teachers under the age of 50, and that’s the vast majority of them, the odds of surviving a coronavirus infection are roughly 99.98 percent. But we should tell you that for teachers under 70, the risk of dying escalates to a terrifying 99.5 percent chance of survival. And by the way, teachers do get sick, it likely won’t be from teaching. Children appear not to spread the coronavirus, surely not effectively. We’ve done this for a long time.
Back in May, researchers in Europe found, quote, “Children do not appear to be drivers of transmission. And we argue that reopening schools should be considered safe accompanied by certain measures.” Again, none of this is new. Tony Fauci, that data guy knew it at the time. And so did anyone in the news media who could read which is still most of them, and yet they kept lying about it, all of them.
In July, here is just one example, a panel of physicians and experts on infectious disease went on television to explain that going to school isn’t dangerous for anyone, they would send their own kids. Watch the news anchors’ reaction.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Would you let your kids go back to school?
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: I will. My kids are looking forward to it.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Yes. Period. Absolutely.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Absolutely. As much as I can.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Without hesitation?
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Without hesitation. Yes.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: I have no concerns about sending my child to school in the fall.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: I would let my kids go back to school.
JOHN TORRES, NBC NEWS CORRESPONDENT: Dr. John Torres, NBC News.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: They all said yes.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
CARLSON: “They all said yes,” says the newsreader, feigning shock. Can you believe that? Doctors have concluded their own children should go to school. They must be crazy. They are crazy. What do doctors know about coronavirus?
What was this about? And of course, you know the answer. It was about Donald Trump.
Donald Trump in this case agreed with the doctors. Therefore, the doctors had to be mocked and ignored. Here’s what the President said about schools in July.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
DONALD TRUMP (R), PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: We have to open our schools. Open our schools. Stop this nonsense. We open our schools.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
CARLSON: “Stop this nonsense. We reopen our schools.” Now in point of fact, as a scientific matter that turned out to be sound policy based on sound data. But the media told us the exact opposite of that. One headline at CNN warned of, quote, “The very clear dangers of Donald Trump’s push to reopen schools.” Google didn’t censor that as misinformation, it should have.
Another headline called out, quote, “Donald Trump’s mind-bending logic on school reopenings.” Mind-bending logic. Those damn data again, Joe Biden’s campaign didn’t want to hear it. They didn’t want you to hear it either. School was dangerous. Period.
Donald Trump claimed the opposite. Therefore, it was too dangerous to send your kids or for you to decide to send them. Watch.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Ignoring how the virus spreads, risking teachers and parents’ lives, going against the advice of experts.
TRUMP: It’s had very little impact on young people.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Do you trust him to do what’s best for our children? Because this is not a test.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
CARLSON: Yes, going against the advice of experts. In this country, that’s no longer allowed, even and maybe especially when the experts are completely wrong. What’s the message? The message couldn’t be clearer. They’re not your kids anymore. If they were your kids, you could make the key decisions about their lives, but they’re not.
Those kids, your former kids belong to Tony Fauci now. Tony Fauci, America’s parent. He’ll make the decisions about your kids, thank you very much, in conjunction with the nation’s uber mom, who by the way, is also 80 years old, Mrs. Nancy D. Pelosi.
Watch Mrs. Pelosi fret about the health of our children.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
DANA BASH, CNN CHIEF POLITICAL CORRESPONDENT: Are you confident that students and teachers will go back safely to school in the fall?
REP. NANCY PELOSI (D-CA): No, I think what we heard from the Secretary was malfeasance and dereliction of duty. This is appalling. They’re messing. They’re messing — the President and his administration are messing with the health of our children.
Going back to school presents the biggest risk for the spread of the coronavirus.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
CARLSON: If that’s not criminal, what she just said, we may need to redefine what it means to commit a crime. Sixty million school-aged children affected by a decision that was wrong and many of them hurt for life, but we just blow right past it and allow political leaders like that to blow right past with phrases like the health of our children.
What happens when you lock children in their rooms in front of screens and prevent them from experiencing human contact? Has Nancy Pelosi ever been asked that question? Has she ever wondered about the answer?
According to the Centers for Disease Control, a total of 522 children between the ages of five and 14 died of suicide in 2017. And that same age group, only 42 children have died from the coronavirus so far this year. What are those suicide numbers going to look like if we continue to take Nancy Pelosi’s advice about the health of our children? We’re going to have some indications of that. Future years will reveal the whole picture and you can be certain it’ll be horrifying.
But for right now, with incomplete data, here’s what we know. In St. Paul, Minnesota, for example, 40 percent of all grades given this year have been Fs, and you can be certain they are grading lightly, but it’s still double the normal amount of failures.
In Fairfax County, Virginia, the number of middle and high school students with failing grades in two or more classes has increased by 83 percent. The number of students with disabilities who are failing two or more classes has increased by more than 100 percent.
In a lot of school districts, huge numbers of kids never even registered for online classes. Do you have kids? Do you know anyone who does? They are learning nothing. Those are real consequences.
If you want to know the health of a society, look at its young people. Look at its schools. These are obvious points that are being roundly ignored and anyone who makes them is attacked for making them. We’re going to look back on this woman in shame.
Back in June, we interviewed Dr. Scott Atlas. He was then a member of the White House’s Coronavirus Taskforce. He was one of the very few people then or now brave enough to make a simple point. Here’s what he said.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
DR. SCOTT ATLAS, FORMER MEMBER OF WHITE HOUSE CORONAVIRUS TASKFORCE: But the point about the schools is really critical because this is the most irrational public policy probably in modern history. Children have virtually zero-risk of getting a serious complication, virtually zero risk of dying. You don’t lock down the children because you are personally afraid. It is totally outrageous.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
CARLSON: Dr. Scott Atlas was attacked as a monster for saying that. Really attacked. Dr. Tony Fauci, by contrast, was deified. Signs throughout Northwest DC said I believe, Dr. Fauci, but the truth is that Scott Atlas was right and Dr. Fauci was revealed as a power-mad incompetent.
That’s not our opinion, by the way, the data prove it.
Follow Jeff Poor on Twitter @jeff_poor