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CNBC’s Rick Santelli suggests giving everyone coronavirus to spare the economy

Chicago markets correspondent concedes Friday that his Thursday remark was insensitive and inappropriate

Everyone in America should be given the coronavirus so the economic impact of the outbreak can be lessened, CNBC on-air editor Rick Santelli suggested Thursday.

But what he left unsaid was that such an approach could result in more than 11 million Americans dead.

Santelli, who is widely credited with helping spark the so-called tea party movement in 2009, made the attention-grabbing COVID-19 comments in a conversation with “The Exchange” anchor Kelly Evans, who asked the volatile, Chicago-based Santelli what the catalyst had been for the recent chaos on Wall Street.

“The catalyst? Just watch your local news. There’s your catalyst,” Santelli said, according to a transcript.

“True,” said Evans.

Santelli continued: “Of course, people are getting nervous. And listen, I’m not a doctor. I’m not a doctor. All I know is, think about how the world would be if you tried to quarantine everybody because of the generic-type flu. Now I’m not saying this is the generic-type flu. But maybe we’d be just better off if we gave it to everybody, and then in a month it would be over because the mortality rate of this probably isn’t going to be any different if we did it that way than the long-term picture, but the difference is we’re wreaking havoc on global and domestic economies.”

Of course, infecting the entire population at once would overwhelm hospitals and doom those who could have been saved by a future vaccine, or never caught the coronavirus-borne disease at all.

CNBC did not immediately respond when asked to comment on Santelli’s remarks late Thursday.

World Health Organization Director-General Tedros Adhanom said Tuesday that the coronavirus disease COVID-19 has killed 3.4% of those with reported cases, compared with the seasonal flu’s mortality rate of far below 1%.

At that rate, if all 329 million Americans were infected at once, as Santelli suggested, the death toll would top 11 million. Even a fatality rate of 1.4%, which a February New England Journal of Medicine study suggested, based on cases in China, would result in 4.6 million deaths if every American was infected. (One leading epidemiology professor has suggested 40% to 70% of the world’s population will catch it this year, though most will have a mild reaction.)

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To put that in perspective, an estimated 16,000 Americans have died from the seasonal flu this year. And the 1918 flu pandemic, in which at least 50 million people died worldwide, killed about 675,000 Americans.

Response on social media was quick and unsparing, with some calling for Santelli to be fired for having said something so irresponsible:

By Friday morning, Santelli had apologized on the air of the Comcast-owned CMCSA-2.63% news channel. His Thursday remarks, he said, had been “stupid,” “insensitive” and “not appropriate in this instance.”

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