Berenson: No evidence the first lockdown worked
'Unreported Truths' author Alex Berenson calls coronavirus lockdowns 'potentially unproductive.'
Recent developments in the coronavirus pandemic should confound supporters of strict lockdowns and other edicts meant to contain the spread of the disease, former New York Times reporter Alex Berenson told "Tucker Carlson Tonight" Tuesday.
"There is good reason to believe, if you look at some of the Sun Belt states, that maybe the worst of ... the second wave or the summer spike is behind us," said Berenson, the author of "Unreported Truths about COVID-19 and Lockdowns."
"Hospitalizations in places like Arizona and Florida and Texas are all declining ..." he added. "Other people in the media are going to be able to, probably, look at slightly rising death counts maybe for some period in the next few days and make hay with that if they want to, but if you actually look at hospitalizations, it looks like we are maybe past the worst of this in the Sun Belt."
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Berenson described the trend as "striking" since the "unreported truth" is that Florida and other parts of the southeast never really locked down again despite their spike in cases.
"And, it [the data] seems to show, they didn't have hospital overruns, they didn't have anything like the death counts in New York City and the Northeast in the spring," Berenson went on.
"If you're going to be someone in favor of lockdowns, you really have to grapple with that and explain to me ... why it is that lockdowns work so well if places that didn't lock down seem to have had a better outcome than people who locked down hard."
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Since the first U.S. stay-at-home orders took effect in mid-March, Berenson has drawn a substantial social media following and been a lightning rod for criticism due to his skepticism of the effectiveness of lockdowns.
"There are good, epidemiological reasons that lockdowns don't work," he told Carlson Tuesday, "which is why, for 15 years, experts on pandemics said this was not a good idea and all of a sudden in March they threw out everything they been saying."
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