Tucker Carlson: ‘No Evidence That the Lockdowns in America Saved Lives Anywhere’

Thursday on Fox News Channel’s “Tucker Carlson Tonight,” host Tucker Carlson opened his program offering a skeptical take on lockdowns initiated around the country in response to the coronavirus pandemic.

Carlson questioned the science behind the reasoning for the lockdown, adding the data for lockdown policies in terms of lives saved was lacking.

Partial transcript as follows:

CARLSON: The one thing you never saw from these people, these journalists, was a straightforward discussion about whether or not lockdowns actually work. You’d think that would be the first thing they would talk about, but they didn’t want to. Hundreds of millions of people ordered to stay home, only go outside for essential reasons. Does forcing people to live like that really contain a virus? There are a lot of reasons actually to believe that it does not contain a virus.

For example, forcing people into close quarters all day obviously increases the odds of infecting family members. The biggest studies on that have shown it. Closing every business except grocery stores forces a lot of people into a small space. Is that a good idea? There are a lot of potential problems. We don’t know all of the answers. Someday we’ll have a better understanding of the science behind quarantines. We should have had it before we imposed them.

But for now, here’s what you need to know and what they’re not going to tell you. There is, as of tonight, precisely no evidence that the lockdowns in America saved lives anywhere. In fact, it’s possible that mass quarantines killed people. Researchers at JPMorgan compared the coronavirus infection rates of all 50 U.S. states and many European countries before and after the mass quarantines.

Overall, ending the lockdowns was associated with a slower spread of the virus. Did you hear that? Ending the lockdowns slowed the spread of the virus or was associated with a slower spread. Amazing. For some reason, that study has not received a lot of attention. Maybe you shouldn’t be surprised by that. More than any other governor, maybe in the country, Kristi Noem from South Dakota refused to lock her state down. She refused to use the coronavirus pandemic to enhance her personal powers.

For that, she was vilified in the national press. Some outlets treated her like a mass murderer. On April 13, The Washington Post wrote this, quote, “South Dakota’s Governor resisted ordering people to stay home. Now it has one of the nation’s largest coronavirus hotspots.” Meanwhile, the obedient states, states that imprisoned their entire population, got round applause from the entire American media. The very next day. “The New York Times” lauded California, by contrast, this way, quote, “California set the tone on coronavirus shutdowns. What’s its next move?”

And the message of all of this, of course, is unmistakable. You saw it at the time, California was saving its people. Rightwing, old South Dakota was plunging its state into calamity. So, that was more than five weeks ago. How did things turn out in the end? Have you seen a follow-up story on it? Probably not. Here the facts. As of today, about five per hundred thousand people in South Dakota have died of the coronavirus. In California, the death toll is 8.4 per hundred thousand. That’s 64 percent higher.

That doesn’t prove lockdowns kill people. It does suggest it doesn’t work very well. And yet even now, millions of Americans are living, suffocating under continued lockdown. The state’s economy has been crushed, particularly for middle-class people. They’re barred from going to work. They can’t go on the dry sand in Los Angeles per their lunatic mayor. Now, you can laugh about this because it’s stupid. But for millions of healthy people at virtually no risk from dying of this virus, the lockdowns have been a life-changing disaster.

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