Tucker Carlson: Coronavirus “isn't that deadly”
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From the May 21, 2020, edition of Fox News' Tucker Carlson Tonight
TUCKER CARLSON (HOST): 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, name one among countless possible examples, a former Obama administration health official called Andy Slavitt predicted that just nine days from then America's largest cities and hospitals would be, quote, “Overrun with cases." Now, Slavitt is not an epidemiologist, in fact, he's 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 W.H.O. estimated a case fatality rate of 3.4%. 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 .04%. Another in Miami-Dade, Florida, suggested .18%, One in Los Angeles, .06%. In fact, the highest figure we have been able to find from a credible blood test comes from Spain and it produced a death rate of just over 1“%, and that's still far below what they told us it would be.