Tucker Carlson Fact-Checked Live on Own Show After Making Bogus Coronavirus Claim

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Fox News host Tucker Carlson claimed that “young children do not spread the coronavirus” and was fact-checked live on his own show by his guest, Fox News contributor Dr. Marc Siegel.

“And now to the latest science. There is new evidence that young children do not spread the coronavirus. Not what we thought,” Carlson said last night.

“Tucker, I want to cut through the news and get to the science of this, which is that 78 studies out of the United Kingdom show that children, especially under the age of 10, are not very likely to get Covid-19 or to spread it,” Siegel responded.

“But one of the authors of that study says he’s being a little bit misinterpreted and the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) has said that one to two percent of the cases, looking at 150,000 cases, were children under the age of 18,” Siegel continued. “The real truth here is, and a China study showed that 90 percent of children have asymptomatic cases, so Tucker, they appear to have a protein in the lungs that protects them from severe disease and almost all of the children who get this are either asymptomatic or have mild cases.”

Siegel concluded by saying that “it is not true that children don’t get it and it is not true that they can’t spread it. Just much less likely than adults.”

You can watch footage of the exchange below.

MSNBC host Chris Hayes criticized Carlson and Fox News as a whole this week for their disinformation and claims that the coronavirus isn’t that deadly, saying they amount to “coronavirus trutherism.” Carlson had said that the virus “just isn’t nearly as deadly as we thought it was” even as the death toll topped 60,000. (It now stands at nearly 64,000.) Carlson also claimed that social distancing guidelines had not actually helped reduce the death toll or the virus’s spread.

“There’s a concerted effort on the part of influential people at the network that we at All In call Trump TV right now to peddle dangerous misinformation about the coronavirus,” Hayes said. “Call it coronavirus trutherism.”

“There is a reason many of the employees of Fox News, which is based in New York, are working from home right now,” he later added. “At least someone there understands why it is important to continue to keep physical distance.”