Alex Berenson’s Dangerous Covid-Vaccine Claims on Tucker Carlson Tonight

O n Tuesday, a Tucker Carlson Tonight guest painted a wildly misleading picture of Covid vaccines, telling viewers that the mRNA shots are a “dangerous and ineffective product at this point against Omicron,” and “no one should get them.”

“It is completely clear now that the vaccines don’t really work at all against Omicron. In these highly vaccinated and highly boosted countries, rates of infection are incredibly high, and rates of serious disease and death are also rising,” former New York Times writer Alex Berenson told Carlson. “The mRNA Covid vaccines need to be withdrawn from the market now. No one should get them. No one should get boosted. No one should get double boosted. They are a dangerous and ineffective product at this point against Omicron.”

In fact, data coming from country after country have shown that although vaccines are now far less effective than they previously were at preventing Covid infections, they are still highly effective at preventing Covid-related deaths and hospitalizations:

But at no point during Berenson’s appearance did either Berenson or Carlson discuss the different rates of hospitalization and death among vaccinated and unvaccinated people.

“They’re reporting that — again in Israel — that their ICUs are under immense pressure. So I don’t know what the logic is right now, but I know that in any rational world every public-health authority would be calling for an immediate halt to mRNA vaccinations for Covid until we know what’s going on,” Berenson said.

“This is just a completely scary thing to hear,” Carlson replied. “You can look up the data. It’s on Berenson’s Substack. It’s also publicly available.”

Haaretz reported on January 13 that only 14 percent of Israeli adults are unvaccinated, but, as one professor told the paper, “81 percent of patients in the hospital on ventilators are either not vaccinated at all or only partially vaccinated.”

“The differences are even more stark when examined based on patients’ age groups,” the Haaretz report added. “Among Israelis between the ages 60-69, there are 40 severe cases per 100,000 people among the unvaccinated, but only 2.8 severe cases per 100,000 people among the vaccinated. Among those aged 70-79, the ratio is 46.6 severe cases per 100,000 people among unvaccinated, versus 6.8 among the vaccinated.”

It only requires the most cursory knowledge of Covid-related news to know that rates of death and hospitalization have remained far higher among the unvaccinated than among the vaccinated during the Omicron wave. And after somewhere around 250 million Americans have been vaccinated, it remains clear the Covid vaccines are safe for almost all people.

So why didn’t Carlson correct Berenson’s wildly misleading claims? I don’t know the answer, but this isn’t the first time Carlson or one of his guests has spread misinformation about Covid vaccines:

Carlson, like the previous host of Fox News’s 8 p.m. hour, has one of the highest-rated cable-news programs in America. The overwhelming majority of Carlson’s 3,200,000 nightly viewers surely have not made and will not make their decisions about whether to get vaccinated (or boosted) against Covid because of what they see on his show. But if even a few thousand do, some of them are likely to end up in the hospital or the morgue as a result.

Carlson’s millions of loyal viewers, even the ones who simply want their views validated, deserve better than that. They deserve the truth.