Fox News primetime host Tucker Carlson railed against the “medical establishment” Thursday night — claiming that they have failed the country in handling the coronavirus.

In a fiery mid-show monologue, Carlson floated the idea of only the elderly being quarantined during the pandemic – which he billed as a way to combat the growing number of businesses shuttering and growing unemployment rate in the United States. He further argued that public health officials should not have been allowed to “put 10 million people out of work.”

The Fox News host began his argument by defending Dan Patrick, the lieutenant governor of Texas, who made a highly-criticized stop on Carlson’s show last week. Patrick, during his appearance, said that the elderly may need to make sacrifices for the betterment of the U.S. economy.

“Like most people in his position, he is worried about being infected,” Carlson said of Patrick. “You would be too. He doesn’t want to get sick or died. He also has other worries. He doesn’t want to see America destroyed. He wants his grandchildren to grow up in the same kind of entry that he did, prosperous, stable, employed.”

The Fox News host then moved to defend Patrick’s remarks on the elderly, making sacrifices to better their children’s lives and preserve America.

“He was vilified in dozens of news stories – saying he was trying to kill the elderly to boost Exxon share prices,” Carlson said.

Carlson went on to question whether the country should have been shut down last month, with only older adults being forced to quarantine instead.

“What would’ve happened, for example, if we adopted a more conventional response to this epidemic?” Carlson said. “What if we asked the elderly and immunocompromised and anyone else facing statistically higher rates of risk to stay inside…and then at the same time allow the rest of the population to use informed common sense and continue to work?

“What if we had done that a month ago? Would the death rate today be much higher than it is now?”

The Fox host replied to his own question, “Maybe, maybe not. We don’t know.”

“But it’s clearly a conversation we should’ve had before we locked the entire country down and put 10 million people out of work. But we didn’t have that conversation,” he stated. “Instead, we outsourced the decision to public health officials, and that is the strange irony of the moment we’re living through.”

Carlson went on to slam the World Health Organization (W.H.O.) — accusing them of colluding with China to underreport the impact of the virus in that nation.

“One of the main lessons of this crisis is at the public health establishment failed us badly. The World Health Organization (W.H.O.) colluded with the Chinese government to lie about critically relevant facts during the early days of the outbreak.”

Carlson continued by ripping into the CDC.

“Once the coronavirus reached our shores, the CDC couldn’t seem to produce working tests; those were disasters. Many people died because the people we trusted to protect our health didn’t do it. They have been thoroughly discredited. At the same time, though, we are being asked to trust these same people without hesitation, and for the most part, we are doing that.”

“In other words, the experts failed, yet the experts now have more power than ever before,” Carlson stated. “Turning to experts in crisis makes sense, and we should. And hopefully, we always will.”

He concluded, “We can’t allow experts to make the big decisions. That is not their job. This is a democracy. It is our job.”

Watch above, via Fox News.

This post has been updated with additional information.

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