On his Fox News program Friday, host Tucker Carlson said infectious disease expert Dr. Anthony Fauci had been wrong about the current coronavirus pandemic in the U.S. “repeatedly” and that his call for all states to issue stay-at-home orders would amount to “national suicide.”
Fauci is the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and a member of the White House coronavirus task force which assists in crafting the U.S. response for combatting the virus.
After calling Fauci an “impressive person,” Carlson said, “That doesn’t mean he’s never wrong. On the question of the pandemic, Fauci has been wrong repeatedly.”
Carlson cited a January Newsmax interview with Fauci in which he said the coronavirus “is not a major threat to the people of the United States and this is not something that the citizens of the United States right now should be worried about.”
Fauci has also voiced support for each state to issue stay-at-home orders, which would effectively wind up initiating some form of quarantine throughout the entire county.
“I don’t understand why that’s not happening,” Fauci said Thursday on CNN. “If you look at what’s going on in this country, I just don’t understand why we’re not doing that. We really should be.”
“More than 10 million Americans have already lost their jobs,” Carlson said. “Imagine another year of this. That would be national suicide, and yet, that is what Anthony Fauci is suggesting, at least.”
Carlson suggested Fauci was not looking at the economic ramifications of the coronavirus response because Fauci has “bulletproof job security.”
High U.S. unemployment rates, according to Carlson, are “a far bigger disaster than the virus itself by any measure.”
“Our response to coronavirus could turn this into a far poorer nation,” Carlson said. “Poor countries are unhealthy countries, always and everywhere. In poor countries, people die of treatable diseases. In poor countries, people are far more vulnerable to obscure viruses, like the one we are fighting now. You want to keep Americans from dying before their time? Then don’t impoverish them.”
Newsweek reached out to Dr. Fauci’s office for comment.
On Thursday, data from the U.S. Department of Labor indicated that over 6 million Americans filed for unemployment insurance in the span of a week, bringing the total number of requests for unemployment benefits to more than 10 million within the space of two weeks. Much of this can be attributed to stay-at-home orders issued by state governments which have temporarily closed down businesses deemed non-essential.
Currently, 41 states are under mandatory stay-at-home orders, as are Puerto Rico and the District of Columbia.
President Donald Trump has attempted to keep small businesses solvent, if not open, by offering loans from the Small Business Administration and the U.S. Treasury as part of the coronavirus economic stimulus package.
Trump said Friday during the White House coronavirus task force briefing that through the loan program, banks in the U.S. are “ensuring that the money gets to small businesses as quickly as possible. Then they’re going to open for business and they’re going to have their employees, and we’ll try and get back to where we were. Eventually, we’re going to supersede where we were.”
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