Tucker Carlson Gripes About Putting Health Experts In Charge Of Coronavirus

Fox News host Tucker Carlson suggested on Thursday that public health experts were to blame for the government’s bungling of the coronavirus pandemic.

In a diatribe on “Tucker Carlson Tonight,” he claimed that these experts had put people out of work and questioned whether they should be in charge of making decisions about the response. He also suggested that a better way to handle the pandemic would have been a more “conventional response,” where only “the elderly and the immunocompromised and anyone facing statistically higher risk” would’ve stayed inside while the rest of the population continued to work.

“What if we’d done that a month ago? Would the death rate today be much higher than it is today? Maybe, maybe not. We don’t know,” Carlson said, adding that regardless of the answer, it was “clearly a conversation we should’ve had before we locked the entire country down and put 10 million people out of work.”

Even with more than 90% of the country currently under local and state orders to stay at home, Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and a leading voice on the coronavirus task force, said Thursday that this was not enough to keep Americans safe. He also warned that even with social distancing measures enforced, between 100,000 and 240,000 Americans could die from the virus.

Young, healthy people are also not immune to becoming severely ill from COVID-19. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported that around 40% of patients in the first wave of hospitalized coronavirus cases in the U.S. involved people between the ages of 20 and 54.

Carlson went on to attack the World Health Organization and the CDC, claiming that “one of the main lessons of this crisis is that the public health establishment failed us badly.”

“We’re being asked to trust these same people without hesitation and for the most part, we are doing that. In other words, the experts failed yet the experts now have more power than ever before. It’s bewildering,” he said.

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This article originally appeared on HuffPost.