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Tucker Carlson opened his eponymous Fox News program Monday night by criticizing the push to extend blanket restrictions in response to the ongoing coronavirus pandemic.

"For reasons that still are not clear, the models that our authorities used to make key public policy decisions ... those models turned out to be wildly inaccurate," the "Tucker Carlson Tonight" host said. "They massively overstated the number of patients who would need hospital beds. In some cases their estimates were off by nearly a full order of magnitude. That error was great news for the country, it was an unexpected blessing in the middle of an unfolding disaster. But it was also a moment to rethink the policies we had based on those models, the ones that were wrong.

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"We never did. Instead, our leaders pulled a bait-and-switch without ever acknowledging the change," Carlson added. "They begin to tell us that the real point of quarantine was to defeat the virus itself."

Carlson called for policy to be driven by science and asked, "How afraid of this pandemic should you be?" He addressed the mortality rates and used information from New York to determine the elderly and those with underlying health conditions were most at risk.

"So in the face of that evidence, and it's fairly constant across countries, why don't we let science drive policy and proceed with that in mind instead of locking down the entire country?" Carlson said. "Why not spend our time and our money working to protect those we know are vulnerable? That's how rational countries behave in the face of risk. In fact, it's normally how this country behaves."

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The host concluded his monologue by calling for leaders to take a clear-eyed look at the crisis.

"A crisis like this requires rational decision making," Carlson said. "And so far, our leaders are clearly not capable of rational decision making and that's bad."