Fox News host Tucker Carlson slammed the coronavirus lockdowns after public health officials walked back claims that asymptomatic coronavirus carriers can pass the disease on to others.
“The cost of shutting down the United States and denying our citizens desperately needed contact with one another is hard to calculate, but the cost has been staggering,” Carlson said on his show on Wednesday night. “The people responsible for doing all this say they have no regrets about it. We faced a global calamity, they say. COVID-19 was the worst pandemic since the Spanish flu. That flu killed 50 million people. We had no choice. We did the right thing.”
In a new report, the World Health Organization announced asymptomatic carriers of the virus rarely spread it to others, despite the fact that the need for social distancing from others became a reason to go into major lockdowns across the country.
Carlson hit at the “distraction” of the national unrest that’s occurred in recent weeks following the death of George Floyd. Several public health experts who previously pushed social distancing came out to say they supported the large gatherings of people, declaring that racism was a public health issue that predated the coronavirus.
He also pointed at states once criticized for reopening earlier than recommended by health officials and added that they never suffered a large uptick in coronavirus cases despite warnings by experts.
“The states that did lockdown at first but were quick to reopen have not seen explosions of coronavirus cases,” Carlson said. “All of this is the opposite of what they said would happen with great confidence. The media predicted mass death at places of Lake of the Ozarks and Ocean City, Maryland, places where the middle class dare to vacation, but those deaths never happened. In the end, the Wuhan coronavirus turned out to be a dangerous disease but a manageable disease like so many others. Far more dangerous were the lockdowns themselves.”
Experts previously warned of large gatherings, such as the one at the Lake of the Ozarks in Missouri, saying that they would backtrack progress on flattening the curve of the virus. It was found later that the mass gathering of vacationers at the Ozarks found zero new cases of COVID-19.
“The credibility of our leaders is at stake here,” Carlson said. “This is the biggest decision they have made in our lifetimes, they were able to make it, they rule, because we let them. Their power comes from us. So the question now and always is, are they worthy of that power? … We do think it’s worth, for a minute, taking a pause to assess whether or not they were, in fact, lying to us about the coronavirus and our response to it. The short answer is this, yes, they were definitely lying.”
