Fox News host Tucker Carlson questioned the logic behind a prolonged national shutdown during a Monday night monologue.
Carlson pointed out a statement from Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti predicting the “first in a series of lockdowns will go on until June” as well as a former Obama official who predicted a “meaningful level of deliberate suppression of economic activity for the rest of the year.”
“It would be nice to know there’s a good reason for all this,” Carlson asked. “Everyone wants there to be. Yet the arguments for a prolonged national lockdown are starting to sound strained.”
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Carlson cited examples from across the globe of situations where a lockdown didn’t seem to affect the spread of the virus.
The Fox host mentioned an Italian village in Lombardy where 60 people came to donate blood and 40 of them were positive for the virus despite showing no symptoms.
“Keep in mind that Lombardy has been strictly locked down by government order since March 9, that’s almost a month ago,” Carlson said. “Yet about 70% of this group got it anyway.”
“A mass quarantine makes sense if you’re fairly certain it will prevent mass infection,” Carlson continued. “But are we certain of that? Despite what you may hear on television, we are not certain of that still. In fact, there are some indications it hasn’t been as effective as we’d hoped it would be. Italy imposed one of the toughest lockdowns in Europe. Almost a month later, as we just told you, an overwhelming majority of at least one town had been infected with the virus anyway.”
Carlson went on to question the validity of closing all businesses but allowing grocery stores to stay open.
“From an epidemiological standpoint, this is lunacy,” he said. “If you wanted to infect an entire population, you’d encourage everyone in a specific zip code to meet regularly in one enclosed location. It doesn’t make sense. Authorities must know it doesn’t make sense, that’s obvious, but instead of changing course, or fine-tuning, they’re doubling down, hoping that vehemence will compensate for bad science.”
Carlson said that the country has decided that “offices are somehow more dangerous than supermarkets,” and the result is 17 million unemployed people in the United States.
“A year from now, we should think about this. How will we feel about all this, about our decisions in the face of this pandemic?” Tucker asked his audience.
“For most people, going to work cannot be more dangerous than buying produce at Safeway twice a week. And if it is more dangerous, tell us how it’s more dangerous, and be specific when you describe that. Otherwise, it’s time to start caring about the entire population. Healthy people are suffering badly too.”
