Fox’s Brit Hume claims the number of coronavirus deaths are being inflated
Hume: “I remember my own doctor telling me at one point when I was discussing prostate issues, he said about prostate cancer … ‘You know, a lot more people die with it than die from it’”
Published
Citation From the April 7, 2020, edition of Fox News' Tucker Carlson Tonight:
BRIT HUME: Over the weekend, The New York Times and Washington Post -- I thought as if on cue -- published stories about “Well, it looks like we are obviously underestimating the fatalities from this, because, you know, before we really knew more about it, a lot of people died and undoubtedly they had it so we missed those and they should be in the coronavirus death count," and so on.
But there's another side to this. Dr. Birx said tonight during the briefing at the White House that all deaths from anyone who died with coronavirus is counted as if the person died from coronavirus.
Now, we all know that isn't true. I remember my own doctor telling me at one point when I was discussing prostate issues, he said about prostate cancer -- I didn't have it, as it happened, but he said, “You know, a lot more people die with it than die from it."
That's a real possibility, that people who have this disease, particularly they're -- lots of people are asymptomatic, who may have other terrible diseases. And if everybody is being automatically classified, if they're found to have COVID-19, as a COVID-19 death, we're going to get a very large number of deaths that way and we're probably not going to have an accurate count of what the -- of what the real death total is.
TUCKER CARLSON (HOST): And there may be reasons that people seek an inaccurate death count but we can address that later.
HUME: Yeah, I don't -- I wouldn't accuse, I wouldn't --
CARLSON: I'm not accusing anybody.
HUME: Yeah, I just don't think Dr. Birx -- Dr. Birx and Fauci are doing that, but I think that's -- they were working with what they had.
CARLSON: I'm not accusing them of that at all.
HUME: Right.
CARLSON: But when journalists work with numbers, there sometimes is an agenda. Unfortunately.