Dr. Phil joins stampede of morons on Fox News who spew misleading nonsense about the coronavirus pandemic, essentially claiming it’s all a hoax

With hosts like Laura Ingraham and Sean Hannity — neither of whom seems to have a clue about infectious disease — Fox News has become a stampede of morons who embarrass themselves almost daily with Idiocracy-class nonsense that tries to claim the coronavirus is no big deal. The latest idiot to join the stampede is Dr. Phil McGraw. He joined Laura Ingraham on Fox News last night, unleashing what Mediaite called, “a wild ride of illogic, misinformation, and just plain stupidity.”

We hereby declare Dr. Phil is inducted into the “stupid-19” Hall of Shame for his science illiteracy and horrible misinformation.

During the segment, Dr. Phil claimed no coronavirus lockdown was necessary, claiming that 360,000 Americans die every year in “swimming pool deaths.”

According to the CDC, around 3,500 people die from accidental drowning in the United States each year. That’s about 10 deaths per day.

Just three days ago in America, the coronavirus killed over 2,400 people, or more than 20 times the number who died from accidental drowning. See this chart for clarity:

Dr. Phil then declared “we don’t shut the country down” for drowning deaths.

Somebody please tell Dr. Phil that drowning to death is not an infectious disease.

Scientifically illiterate people keep comparing covid-19 deaths to things that aren’t infectious disease in order to claim the covid-19 deaths aren’t that large

This has been a point that seemingly no conservatives are able to understand, as they keep comparing covid-19 with abortions, obesity, heart attacks, car crashes and other causes of deaths that aren’t transmitted from one person to another. Both Michael Savage and myself have been the two most prominent voices calling out the scientific illiteracy of conservative talking heads who seem to be suffering from some kind of shared brain-eating amoeba that has consumed the number-crunching circuits inside their skulls.

“Two hundred and fifty people a year die from poverty,” Dr. Phil (McGraw) told Ingraham, raising eyebrows about where he’s getting such numbers, given that poverty is actually associated with hundreds of thousands of deaths per year, yet isn’t a transmissible disease. So Dr. Phil is wrong on both the numbers and the category of the condition.

Dr. Phil went on to claim that automobile accidents kill 45,000 people a year in the United States, once again failing to understand why lockdowns help control an infectious disease but aren’t a necessary strategy for non-infectious accidents and other causes of accidental death.

It was like a scene ripped right out of Idiocracy.

On a similar note, Dr. Oz recently apologized after appearing on Fox News with Sean Hannity, where he seemed to say that schools should be reopened nationwide because doing so would “only” kill 2 to 3% of children.

“I tell ya, schools are a very appetizing opportunity,” Dr. Oz said. “I just saw a nice piece in The Lancet arguing that the opening of schools may only cost us 2 to 3% in terms of total mortality.”

The Lancet study he was citing actually explained that closing schools would prevent 2-4% of deaths across the entire adult population, which is millions of people. It seemed that Dr. Oz was suggesting it’s worth millions of deaths across America to put children back in school right away.

That prompted one observer to comment, “The Hippocratic Oath – Dr. Oz edition: First, do 2 to 3 % harm.”

Dr. Oz later apologized, saying, “I’ve realized my comments on risks around opening schools have confused and upset people, which was never my intention. I misspoke.”

Fox News, it seems, has become a hub of coronavirus disinformation from ignorant hosts and guests who, on a daily basis, demonstrate to the world that their brains don’t work and they shouldn’t be trusted to offer intelligent opinions about anything at all.

If you want honest, independent, scientifically literate analysis of the coronavirus pandemic, read Pandemic.news.