Monday, during an interview with Huntsville, AL’s WVNN, Rep. Gary Palmer (R-AL), the chairman of the House Republican Policy Committee, offered reasons for the public to be skeptical of how the coronavirus is portrayed.
According to Palmer, the initial goal was to “flatten the curve,” meaning to help prevent the American health care system from being overwhelmed by COVID-19 patients.
“I think there’s a lot of interest in doing another stimulus, but let me say this about the coronavirus: People are looking at the wrong metrics,” he said. “At the very beginning of this, we were told that on the worst end, there could be over 2 million deaths, on the best end they said over 500,000. They were fearful our health care system would collapse like it did in Italy, and they were saying 30-to-40% unemployment. Do you remember all of that?”
“So, we’ve got to flatten the curve to keep our health care system from collapsing and reduce the number of deaths,” Palmer continued. “Nobody ever said nobody will die. We’ve all known that this was a horrible virus, and people would die. But we didn’t want to have half-a-million people die. We’re not going to have half-a-million people die. We didn’t want to have our health care system collapse. It is not going to collapse. And the unemployment rate is probably right around 12% now — somewhere in that range, and it would be lower if we weren’t paying people not to work.”
Palmer also expressed his frustration with National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Director Dr. Anthony Fauci, who he indicated was reluctant to embrace hydroxychloroquine and other therapeutics, which would mitigate the impact of the virus.
“The other thing about it is, I’ve really been frustrated with Dr. Fauci,” Palmer said. “And I’ve brought this up to him in a conference call: Hydroxychloroquine when the evidence is extremely strong that it works when you give it to people in the early stages of COVID-19. You can’t wait until they go to the hospital. If we get our act together on the therapeutics like hydroxychloroquine, come up with a vaccine, and there is other things out there that I’m hearing about, I think we could get back to normal.”
The Alabama Republican lawmaker also said it was his belief there was an incentive for those to “change the goalposts” regarding the threat of the virus, which he said to a constant state of fear.
“But what they’ve done is they’ve scared people to death with these numbers, as though we didn’t expect anybody to die,” he continued. “And you’ve got all this testing now. When you’re doing all this testing now, of course, you’re going to have more people test positive. But the death rate? I was talking to a member of Congress from Arkansas yesterday, and he said the death rate is down to about 1%. That is not what everybody thought at the beginning. But they keep trying to change the goalposts on us, and they keep trying to keep people in a constant state of fear because fear sells and fear gives you the ability to control people when I think a lot of that is what is going — particularly these the blue states.
Follow Jeff Poor on Twitter @jeff_poor
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