Former NYT reporter Alex Berenson slams lockdown governors: ‘They are fools who haven’t read the data’

In an interview Tuesday night with Fox News host Tucker Carlson, former New York Times reporter Alex Berenson went after proponents of continued lockdown measures, including state and local leaders, calling them "fools who haven't read the data."

What did he say?

"I'm getting sick of people saying, 'We don't know much about this virus, we don't know enough to know what the right steps are,'" Berenson said. "If that's true, why have we shut down the world?

"We do know a lot about this virus," he insisted. "We know the average age of death in the United States and worldwide is probably about 80 or 82, and we know about half, if not more, of the people who die in the United States die in nursing homes."

But instead of focusing on protecting nursing home residents, Berenson argued that "our leaders are spending time haranguing us about masks and destroying the economy with lockdowns and every day it makes less sense and every day it's more infuriating."

He went on to suggest that state and local leaders should lift restrictions to get the economy going while protecting the most vulnerable populations, rather than continuing measures that are unnecessarily destroying society.

When Carlson asked if he thought lockdown proponents were knowingly enacting unnecessary measures, Berenson responded by saying, "If they don't know, they are fools and haven't read the data which is publicly available, which is available on their own government websites."

Crazy Hypocrisy Of Leading Scientist In Favor Of Lockdowns Exposed By Tucker Carlson & Alex Berensonwww.youtube.com

Berenson has been a leading anti-lockdown voice

Berenson, who worked for the Times from 1999-2010, has been one of the leading voices speaking out against draconian lockdown measures amid the coronavirus pandemic.

In early April, he sounded the alarm about the flawed coronavirus models that he said were leading the economy into a "freefall" by driving state and local officials to outdo one another in enacting stricter and stricter measures.

In late March, he also brought attention to Dr. Neil Ferguson, the leading epidemiologist at Imperial College London, after Ferguson drastically revised his doomsday models from 500,000 deaths in the United Kingdom to just 20,000. The same model projected 2.2 million deaths in the United States. The Imperial College model was the model that propelled the U.S. and U.K. governments to enact lockdown measures to combat the virus.

Ferguson has since stepped down from his role advising the government in emergencies after he was caught breaking his own social distancing rules to cheat with a married woman.