Rush Limbaugh on coronavirus: “Who cares if it’s 10 times more lethal than the flu?”
Limbaugh: “What does lethal mean? Does lethal kill you?”
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From the March 11, 2020, edition of Premiere Radio Network's The Rush Limbaugh Show
RUSH LIMBAUGH (HOST): The very top headline on the Drudge page right now is this: “Top Doc: Virus 10 Times More Lethal Than the Flu.” Now, wait. That’s not the – they’re burying the lede. That headline is going to scare people to death. It’s an outrageous headline. The headline comes -- it’s not Drudge’s headline. The website is called The Week. “Coronavirus Is 10 Times More Lethal Than the Seasonal Flu, Trump’s Task Force Immunologist Says.” That’s not the point of the story. Do you know what’s really the point of the story? The fatality rate is just 1% from this disease. So who cares if it’s 10 times more lethal than the flu?
The fatality rate of the coronavirus is 1%. “Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, told lawmakers during hearing on Wednesday that COVID-19 is probably about 10 times more lethal than the seasonal flu.
“At the same time, he clarified that 10 times figure actually brings the new fatality rate lower than official estimates, which hover around 3%. The flu has a mortality rate of about 0.1%, so Fauci places the new coronavirus lethality rate at somewhere around 1%.” That’s the story. It isn’t that it’s 10 times more lethal than the flu, and this is how this crap gets politicized.
Pardon my yelling, but this stuff is what ticks me off, and my instincts tell me this. I know this kind of trickery and monkeying around with stuff is going on in these things because I know the media, I know the left, I know the Democrat Party, and I know how they’re trying to scare everybody and now they’re using Fauci here. “This is Trump’s guy. Trump’s guy is saying it’s 10 times more lethal than the flu,” which means nothing.
Ten times more lethal? Lethal than what? What does lethal mean? Does lethal kill you? Does lethal infect you? Does lethal give you a temperature of 102 versus 100? What does it do to you? It’s a meaningless comparative. Ten times more lethal? The only thing worth knowing in this story is that Anthony Fauci says the fatality rate to coronavirus is much less than what they believed.
It is 1%. It is not between 3 and 6%, and that number 3% and 6% has been out there for a couple of weeks. So here comes a news story saying, “Guess what? The fatality rate’s only 1%,” and that’s not the headline. The headline is: “Coronavirus 10 Times More Lethal Than the Seasonal Flu, Trump’s Task Force Immunologist Says.”
Well, yeah, he may have said it, but it was a setup for the actual lede in the story, and you have to read to the last paragraph to get to the nut. “At the same time, Dr. Fauci did clarify that 10 times figure actually brings the coronavirus’ fatality rate lower than official estimates”
So what the hell is the point of a headline that says the coronavirus is 10 times more lethal than the flu, if what that means is the fatality rate is actually much less than we thought it was? It isn’t 3 to 6%. It’s 1% tops. So, no, I’m not apologizing for one damn way I’ve approached this today, and I’m not gonna apologize. Not that anybody’s demanding, anyway.