During a long, angry rant Tuesday morning, Brian Kilmeade not only criticized Dr. Anthony Fauci’s messaging on COVID-19 but also decided to take it upon himself to give some unsolicited medical advice to the thousands of elderly Fox & Friends viewers out there.
“Unbelievable what is happening,” Kilmeade said after his co-host Steve Doocy shared his own frustrations that so much about the virus is still unknown one year into the pandemic. “My parents are 80 years old, they got vaccinated. Can they go see their grandkids? You know what the answer is? Yes!”
Doing his own math for viewers, Kilmeade explained that because the vaccine is 94 percent effective and “the chances of a kid getting it and falling ill are infinitesimal,” then there is virtually nothing to worry about. “You go over there and do it,” he said, accusing Fauci of discounting “the psychological damage done by not going to school, by not seeing your grandkids, by not playing sports, by not going to work, by losing your job,” adding, “All he sees is a bunch of graphs.”
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From there, Kilmeade proceeded to go off on Fauci for going on The Rachel Maddow Show, calling him a “political person” whose “better days are clearly in the rearview mirror.” Growing more agitated, he shouted, “Why people give him a pass when he’s been so wrong so often on things that matter so much is one of the great mysteries of this last year!”
Doocy tried to help by telling Kilmeade, “I think regarding grandparents hugging their kids, I think the worry is that the kids could be asymptomatic and infect the grandparents, who have gotten the vaccine.”
But even that wasn’t quite right. The larger concern for scientists seems to be that vaccinated grandparents could still spread the virus asymptomatically to unvaccinated grandchildren, who are far less likely to get seriously ill but are not incapable of getting and spreading it as Ainsley Earhardt learned last August and Kilmeade still doesn’t seem to grasp.
Either way, Fauci did not say during this past Sunday’s CNN interview that vaccinated grandparents can’t visit their grandchildren, he just said the science was not quite there yet to make a public recommendation.
So instead, Fox News has filled the void.
Urging viewers to make their own choices, Kilmeade said, “Nothing’s perfect! There’s no guarantee I’m not going to get hit by a car right now.”
When Doocy tried to end the segment by resignedly acknowledging that it’s “going to be a while” before life is fully back to normal, Kilmeade got the last word: “I don’t think so. We’ve got to get past it soon. It’s got to be happening now or else we have no country left.”
