Tucker Carlson tells his audience the COVID-19 crisis is “easing” as models revise death estimates upwards
Written by Madeline Peltz
Published
Fox News host Tucker Carlson wasted no time on his May 4 show before lying to his viewers, telling the audience that “the coronavirus epidemic appears to be easing” and that “there appears to be a lull.”
Publicly available data clearly shows the exact opposite of Carlson’s disingenuous claim.
The New York Times describes the COVID-19 crisis in the United States as “an unrelenting crush of cases and deaths,” with the number of cases “growing by 2 to 4 percent daily,” and at least 1,000 people have died from the virus every day for the last month. The much-cited model from the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) at the University of Washington recently doubled its projection with regard to the number of COVID-19-related deaths, estimating more than 134,000 lives lost by August; these revisions were driven by “an increasingly restless population and moves in many states to ease restrictions,” according to CNN.
Throughout the pandemic, Fox News has encouraged behavior that could spread the virus-- promoting anti-stay-at-home protests, prematurely declaring the country safe to reopen, lying about the efficacy of social distancing, and attacking public health experts whose statements undermine the network’s dangerous political agenda.
Unlike Carlson, small-town hospitals do not have the luxury of lying to themselves about an imaginary “lull” in the crisis (especially given that many closed in recent years). CNBC reports that peaks in rural areas could be weeks away and will strain understaffed hospitals that “are already operating at full capacity.” This devastating reality belies a previous claim from Carlson, who argued without evidence last month that “the threat to rural America from this virus is minuscule.”
By downplaying the continued threat of the virus, Carlson is directly putting these vulnerable populations at risk.