Sunday during his show’s opening monologue, Fox News Channel’s Steve Hilton contended the economic burden of the shutdown done in the name of preventing the spread of coronavirus was more of a threat than the virus itself.

Hilton also took issue with those defending the shutdown regardless of those consequences, arguing they were wedded to ideology, not science.

Partial transcript as follows:

HILTON: Economic hardship causes death. Here’s what else causes death. Millions of medical procedures cancelled because of wildly inaccurate coronavirus projections. Just one example, in the State of Arkansas recently, 80 people in hospital with coronavirus, 8,000 empty beds. This insanity has to stop. We know who’s most vulnerable and how to protect them. Twenty percent of U.S. coronavirus deaths are in nursing homes. In some states, it’s over half. So, what are our leaders doing about that? They’re making it worse.

For weeks, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, instead of sending nursing home coronavirus patients to the nearly empty Navy hospital ship, sent them back into nursing homes. With that one demented decision, he is responsible for a big part of America’s death toll. We know who’s at risk and how to protect them. Why aren’t our leaders surging medical capacity and equipment to our nursing homes and care facilities where the greatest generation is so obviously vulnerable?

I’ll tell you why. Because they’re too busy putting sand in skate parks, flying creepy surveillance drones and worst of all, hiring armies of busy body contact traitors to implement this idiotic, unscientific reckless establishment groupthink that the only way we can open up is widespread testing, contact tracing and isolating.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

REP. STENY HOYER (D-MD): We need to test. We need to isolate those who test positive. We then need to contact trace.

CHRIS HAYES, MSNBC HOST: We cannot truly reopen the economy without widespread testing.

ANDERSON COOPER, CNN ANCHOR: Testing, testing, contact tracing, testing, contact tracing. Different forms of testing, antibody testing. You know, testing people who are asymptomatic in order to get the country back to work.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

HILTON: MSNBC had a two-hour special this week entirely based on this misinformation. It was literally called “Testing and the Road to Reopening.” Testing, contact tracing and isolating are great if you’re trying to contain an outbreak at the start, where you have hundreds of cases. It is totally absurd, after a pandemic with millions infected where you’ll miss most of them anyway because they have no symptoms.

And the absurdity rises to a level of grave danger if you’re making this a condition for reopening knowing that every day you delay will kill more Americans. Last week we set up questions for Dr. Fauci. Well, he may not care about being accountable to you, but our state and local leaders do listen to him. He’s the one that started this nonsense, still using an old playbook even though the facts have changed.

I beg you, Dr. Fauci, tell the governors, tell the mayors how to protect the vulnerable in our nursing homes who are dying in droves because of inadequate infection control. Tell them that if we properly protect the vulnerable, we don’t need the costly, complicated, technocratic nightmare of testing and contact tracing and tell the American people so terrified by months of misinformation that many are scared to go out even if states do reopen, tell them that most Americans, according to the data have nothing to fear from coronavirus.

That there is no scientific basis as long as we properly protect the vulnerable for this shutdown. The mindset of the shutdown zealots is the opposite of science. Instead of adapting their thinking in the light of new information, they cling to their old position, despite new information. It’s not science, it’s ideology. It’s not based on data, but dogma.

Dr. Fauci, tell the world that based on the data, based on the science, we must protect the vulnerable and the shutdown and save lives now.