Fox News contributor: I'm seeing videos on Twitter of empty hospital parking lots
Fox News panel questions how many deaths are really being caused by COVID-19 and whether hospitals are really full
Published
Citation From the March 29, 2020, edition of Fox News' The Next Revolution
STEVE HILTON (HOST): Welcome back. You may think there's free speech in this country but not when it comes to coronavirus. There is an official view and you'd better agree with it otherwise they'll accuse you of wanting people to die. What is going on with this groupthink? Lisa, you mentioned this last week and I wanted to discuss it with everyone this week. What are your latest thoughts on this point?
LISA BOOTHE (FOX NEWS CONTRIBUTOR): Well, I think one of the biggest challenges, in order to be completely informed you have to hear different schools of thought. Obviously, from credible individuals but we don't hear as much, at least in mainstream media or in television networks, I'm not seeing people like Dr. John Ioannidis out there, who has questioned the data that we have, saying that we're probably operating off of bad data. There was also two other professors from Stanford who recently wrote in The Wall Street Journal, saying that millions of people probably already have been infected in the United States, and we don't really hear from those people as much, and I think that's a challenge. Because we really do need to hear from everyone in order to, you know, to see the full picture.
And another challenge as well I've seen is that if anyone raises questions and concerns about the economy and the realization that we already have 3.3 million unemployment claims. We have $2 trillion that's already been -- that Congress is going to be spending -- and we're not even on day 15. So that track is unsustainable. But somehow if you raise these questions, you don't care about your fellow Americans. But you can have two schools of thoughts of caring about that and also not wanting anyone to die and caring about every American because every life has value.
HILTON: I -- yeah, I think that's such a -- exactly right. Jason, I mean, another example of what Lisa is talking about is, in terms of questioning the data, there's a piece that really caught my eye, and a lot of other people, by a guy called John Lee, in The Spectator, the U.S. version of The Spectator online. And he was really, you know, another expert, a doctor, looking into the data, saying, for example, when we see people, when we see these death rates in Italy and elsewhere, how do we know that all those people actually died of coronavirus rather than, for example in Italy, they have a very high rate of hospital-acquired infections. And so how do we know that these numbers are accurate. And you raise these questions and people jumped down your throat straight away.
JASON CHAFFETZ (FOX NEWS CONTRIBUTOR): Yeah, I think it's fair to ask some of these questions. I would love to see statistics, for instance, on how full our hospitals really are. I mean, I see these passionate -- you know, these people coming out of caring for these people, and it's hard to watch and I believe them from their heart -- but I would love to know what those real numbers are. And it's hard to gather all this data in real time while everything is happening in such a rapid pace, but at the same time, if you question for instance, the stimulus and rescue package, $2 trillion, and I asked the question once, “Is there someone else in the budget that we could cut to help move those dollars?" Oh my goodness, you would think that I asked something that was just totally untenable. How dare we cut somewhere else in the federal budget to help the men and women who actually need the help across this country. We need to ask and be able to have an adult conversation on those topics.
HILTON: Exactly. Great. Really well put. Sara, quick thought from you on this.
SARA CARTER (FOX NEWS CONTRIBUTOR): Well, absolutely. As journalists, even as regular citizens, we have the right to ask questions. We have the right to understand what's happening here. And unfortunately, that's not happening. You can see it on Twitter, Steve. People are saying, “Film your hospital," people are driving by their hospitals and they're not seeing -- in the ones that I'm seeing -- they're not seeing anybody in the parking lots. They're not seeing anybody drive up. So, people are wondering what's going inside the hospital. How many people are actually in the hospitals that are suffering from coronavirus, how many ventilators, are the ICUs really being filled, how full are they, what's happening in my home town? So people have questions and they need answers. And that's very important. And we should be questioning the numbers all over the world, we should be questioning the stats, and we should be hearing from all doctors. And that's not saying that what's happening right now isn't serious and very real.
HILTON: Exactly. And we've got to leave it there, but I mean, the point is it's precisely because it's so serious that we've got to have good information to support those heroic doctors and nurses and everything they are doing, and make sure we get everything right. So there we are. Great points all around.