| Topic List | Page List: 1 |
|---|---|
| Topic | Tucker Carlson: 'Lockdowns haven't saved lives they've killed people' |
| UnfairRepresent 05/22/20 12:12:07 PM #1: | It has now been 63 days -- we're keeping track -- since California became the first American state to issue a so-called shelter-in-place order for all citizens. Governor Gavin Newsom's order was the beginning of an unprecedented coronavirus mass quarantine that has changed this country forever. In many ways, the United States is hard to recognize compared to just two months ago. Two months from now, it will be more different still. In fact, it may be years before we fully understand the effects of what our leaders have done in response to the Wuhan coronavirus. There are certain to be battles over how to interpret this moment many years from now. It's possible your children will hear only one version of the story. Uncomfortable facts by that point may have been scrubbed from social media platforms as disinformation. So, while we can, we'd like to get on tape, for the record, some of what actually happened here. The first thing to remember is that our leaders didn't simply revoke the country's constitutional rights one day from a cold start. They laid the groundwork first. They softened opposition by sowing fear. On March 14, to name one among countless possible examples, a former Obama administration health official called Andy Slavitt predicted that just nine days from now, America's largest cities and hospitals would be "overrun with cases." Now, Slavitt is not an epidemiologist. In fact, he is a former McKinsey consultant. But countless other self-described experts on television backed him up. A huge number of Americans, they told us, would get infected with the coronavirus, and a huge number would die and die in the ugliest most desperate way -- gasping for breath with tubes shoved down their throats. Now at the time, the World Health Organization suggested that a million Americans would die this way. The WHO estimated a case fatality rate of 3.4 percent. It's horrifying. It scared the hell out of the country. It scared the hell out of us. I think we repeated those numbers to you on this show. But they were totally wrong. We now know, thanks to widespread blood testing, that the virus isn't that deadly. An enormous percentage of coronavirus infections produce mild symptoms or no symptoms at all. They're asymptomatic. The death toll is a tiny fraction of what we were told it would be. One study in Scotland estimated the real death rate could be 0.04 percent. Another in Miami Dade, Florida suggested 0.18 percent. The one in Los Angeles 0.06 percent. In fact, the highest figure we've been able to find from a credible blood test study comes from Spain, and it produced a death rate of just over 1 percent, and that's still far below what they told us it would be. At the time, ambitious politicians understood instinctively that Americans were really scared, and some did their best to heighten that fear. Here's New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo telling his daily television audience that tens of thousands of Americans would die unless the Trump administration sent more ventilators. New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo: FEMA says we're sending 400 ventilators. Really? What am I going to -- what am I going to do with 400 ventilators when I need 30,000? You pick the 26,000 people who are going to die because you only sent 400 ventilators. This is why it pays to use a little restraint in your public statements because, as it turned out, New York had more than enough ventilators. Too many ventilators, really; some were never even used. But Cuomo didn't dwell on that. He blew right past it and spent most of the subsequent weeks discussing the vital importance of obeying his quarantine. Cuomo's lockdown, like most in this country was modeled on the Chinese government's quarantine, their response to the Wuhan coronavirus -- which is odd if you think about it. Who decided that following the example of the country responsible for unleashing the pandemic was somehow good public health? Well, they all thought that. Virtually, all of our leaders agreed the Chinese course was the only course. Dr. Anthony Fauci came on Fox Business to explain that actually, the Chinese government could be trusted. David Asman, Fox Business' "Bulls & Bears" host: China has been known to fiddle with their stats before. Do you trust what they are telling us about this illness? Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases: From what I can see right now, they really are being much, much more transparent than what happened with SARS, where they really kept back information for a while. It was embarrassing to them. They're really transparent now. They've put the sequence of the virus up on the public database right away. So, in that respect, they've been transparent. Yes, because when you think of the Chinese Communist Party, transparent is the first word that comes to mind. Even then, when Fauci said that, there were some informed and independent- minded Americans who had real questions about the wisdom of following the Chinese model. But over time, their views began to disappear from Twitter and YouTube and Facebook. In their place, the media presented hardened political activists, people like Zeke Emanuel, and allowed them to pose as experts on virus mitigation. Zeke Emanuel, Vice Provost for Global Initiatives at the University of Pennsylvania: 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 of that economic pain worth trying to stop COVID-19? The truth is, we have no choice. "The truth is, we have no choice." Get a pen and write down that sentence for future reference. The next time you hear someone say it, run. "The truth is, we have no choice." When you hear that, you know, things are about to get much worse. In fact, we always have a choice. A handful of political leaders made that choice. They decided to try a different approach, and then immediately -- and in unison -- they were denounced as enemies of the state. When Georgia began to reopen some of its businesses in late April, The Atlantic magazine described that plan as "Georgia's experiment in human sacrifice." In the words of The Washington Post, Jeff Bezos's personal newspaper, "Georgia leads the race to become America's number one death destination." As if Jack Kevorkian had become the governor of Georgia. And that was just in print. On television, the geniuses decided that relaxing the lockdowns would be far worse for Georgia than Sherman's March to the Sea. Stacey Abrams, former Georgia gubernatorial candidate: This makes no sense and it doesn't improve our economy. It simply puts more Georgians at risk. Chris Hayes, MSNBC host: If that sounds insane to you, you're not alone. Mayors in Georgia are describing the governor's decision as reckless, dangerous and illogical. Chris Cuomo, CNN anchor: Georgia may be doing too much too soon. Don Lemon, CNN anchor: No matter what anybody tells you, no matter how many hopeful signs there may be, it's far too early to let down our guard. It's far too early to go back to the lives that we were living just last month. And if that shocks you, it should. --- ^ Hey now that's completely unfair! https://imgur.com/yPw05Ob ... Copied to Clipboard! |
| Topic List | Page List: 1 |