Tucker Carlson seemed to reveal big news on his Thursday night show when he pointed to a raft of recent studies that found young children cannot spread the coronavirus — but that groundbreaking claim was, in fact, not true, and was debunked on his show by Fox News medical correspondent Dr. Marc Siegel less than 60 seconds later.

The Fox News primetime host began his segment on the latest coronavirus news by saying: “And now to the latest science. There is new evidence that young children do not spread the coronavirus. Not what we thought.”

Mere moments later, Carlson introduced Siegel to expound on the study — and, ultimately, correct the record that Carlson had just botched.

“Tucker, I want to cut through the news and get to the science of this, which is that 78 studies out of the United Kingdom show that children, especially under the age of 10, are not very likely to get Covid-19 or to spread it,” Siegel said, leading off.

“But one of the authors of that study says he’s being a little bit misinterpreted and the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) has said that one to two percent of the cases, looking at 150,000 cases, were children under the age of 18,” Siegel continued. “The real truth here is, and a China study showed that 90 percent of children have asymptomatic cases, so Tucker, they appear to have a protein in the lungs that protects them from severe disease and almost all of the children who get this are either asymptomatic or have mild cases.”

The doctor then matter-of-factly — but unmistakably — fact-checked Carlson’s inaccurate take on the Covid-19 studies from just a minute before.

“But it is not true that children don’t get it and it is not true that they can’t spread it. Just much less likely than adults,” Siegel confirmed, which elicited a brief “hmm” from Carlson as Siegel moved on to discuss the massive nationwide campaign in pursuit of a coronavirus vaccine.

When Siegel finally finished, Carlson politely thanked him, but did not acknowledge the potential misinformation that the doctor had just prevented from spreading.  The Fox News host then segued into a fact-checking segment, where he acknowledged previous errors made on his Wednesday night program.

Watch above, via Fox News.

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