Tucker Carlson slammed the impact of extended lockdowns across the country as “insanity,” and brusquely dismissed their effect on “flattening the curve” of the Covid-19 death toll, despite numerous epidemiological and public health experts statements to the contrary.

Carlson began his broadside against the widespread quarantines on Monday night’s show by playing a clip of a Dr. Dan Erickson, from Bakersfield, California, who has compiled a data set of several thousand coronavirus test subjects. According to Erickson, only 340 of those tested were positive, which he claims is proof that the virus is much more common — and less deadly — than previously thought and that quickly reopening the economy poses a much lower risk.

“And these are serious people who have done this for a living for decades. They have and their hands the largest currently available data set on this question,” Carlson claimed. “The question they are asking after analyzing all of those numbers: Are the lockdowns worth it? So what is the answer to that?”

However, Carlson did not mention that Erickson is not a trained epidemiologist, but is a former emergency room doctor who now co-owns an urgent care facility. In fact, Erickson and his urgent care partner’s claims have been directly challenged by actual epidemiologists in his state, who have shot down the assumptions as being based on unfounded, unscientific logic.

“They’re advancing factual inaccuracies and playing off the esoteric nature of the mortality stats to make a case that the economy should be reopened,” Andrew Noymer, an associate professor of public health at UC Irvine, told Bakersfield.com last week. “I agree it should be reopened, but it should be opened deliberately, bit by bit, and informed by science. Not informed by a misreading of the mortality.”

Carlson did not note these serious disputes over Erickson’s conclusions during the segment, however. Instead, the Fox host said that elected officials are uninterested in listening to calls to reopen the economy as soon as possible.

“What is so striking is that so many politicians, the ones enforcing a lockdown don’t seem interested in asking it,” Carlson said, despite numerous state governors having announced partial re-openings and others having addressed that very question almost daily. “They’re bulling forward as if nothing has changed. The San Francisco Bay area announced it will be extending its lockdown until the end of May. That is five weeks from now. What is a scientific justification for doing that? They didn’t tell us, because there is none. None.”

Both California and San Francisco were among the earliest parts of the country to issue shelter-in-place rules, and have seen much lower rates of contagion and death than in areas that put those rules in place just weeks later, like New York City. The broader public also remains highly resistant to a rapid end of the coronavirus lockdowns, as public health officials have warned that, without sufficient testing, a premature return to normal could reignite the outbreak. According to a Reuters/Ipsos poll from last week, nearly three out of four adults supported continued shelter-in-place rules, including bipartisan majorities. And a recent AP/NORC poll found 61% of all adults — and majorities of Democrats and Republicans — think the restrictions put in place to “flatten the curve” so far were about right. Roughly one quarter felt that the restrictions didn’t go far enough, while only one in eight said the social distancing and lockdown rules went too far.

Carlson, on the other hand, brushed off those rigid self-quarantine measures as essentially worthless, despite comments from numerous public health experts, like the Trump administration’s CDC Director, Robert Redfield, saying otherwise.

“You may remember what they first told us in February and March. They told us we have to take radical steps in order to ‘flatten the curve,'” Carlson said. “Six weeks later, we are happy to say that curve has been a flattened, but it’s likely not because of the lockdown. The virus just isn’t nearly as deadly as we thought it was, all of us, including on this show, everybody thought it was, but it turned out not to be.”

As of Monday, more than 55,000 Americans had died since the first Covid-19 victim in March, making it one of the largest causes of death in the country now.

“Hospitals never collapsed. Outside a tiny number of places, they never came close to collapsing. Instead something remarkable happened, something amazing really without parallel to American history. The opposite happened,” Carlson said. “Politicians who couldn’t pass ninth-grade biology decided that practicing physicians should not be allowed to calculate the risk of transmitting the virus, they’re just not qualified. Unlike us. These politicians banned so-called nonessential procedures, many of which are essential. The results of this policy? In many hospitals, entire floors. Doctors and nurses are being furloughed in the middle of a pandemic. This is insanity. It weakens our health care system. Its effects will last for many years. That’s all from the lockdown.”

The Fox host then took a snarky shot at the Trump administration’s infectious diseases expert, Dr. Anthony Fauci, “who we are apparently required by law to respect no matter what he says” and “suggested, in fact, we may never be required to return to a normal life.” In the following clip, however, Fauci merely noted that a “normal” where the country acts as if coronavirus never happened and the threat is completely gone is not a reasonable expectation — a far cry from a recommendation for perpetual lockdowns.

“That is the same doctor, Dr. Fauci,” a clearly incredulous Carlson then added, “who announced that shaking hands, the ancient custom of shaking hands, should be done away with forever.”

Watch the video above, via Fox News.

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