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Victor Davis Hanson: The ‘Credentialed Class’ Keeps Getting It Wrong On COVID-19

   DailyWire.com
(L-R) Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Anthony Fauci, Response coordinator for White House Coronavirus Task Force Deborah Birx and CDC Director Robert R. Redfield attend the daily briefing on the novel coronavirus, COVID-19, in the Brady Briefing Room at the White House on April 8, 2020, in Washington, DC.
MANDEL NGAN/AFP via Getty Images

Conservative commentator Victor Davis Hanson scolded the expert elite for essentially getting everything wrong during the COVID-19 pandemic, destroying the world economy and countless lives as a result.

Speaking with Laura Ingraham of Fox News, Hanson said that it makes no sense that the United States adopted a one-size-fits-all approach to the pandemic considering that none of the models have turned out as predicted and just three states – New York, New Jersey, and Massachusetts – account for most of the country’s deaths.

“I think people realize something that their officials don’t. I’m speaking from California where next week we are supposed to have 25 million cases and 1 million dead; we have only 50,000 cases and 2,200 dead; it’s off by a huge magnitude,” Hanson began. “One size does not fit all. Even the monstrosities of the bureaucracies in Europe, the EU, doesn’t try to say that Germany’s policy will apply to Spain or Italy’s policies will apply to Germany. It doesn’t work that way. And we are a very diverse country.”

“Just three states: Massachusetts, New York, and New Jersey account for about 55% of all the deaths and, yet, they only have about 11% of the population,” he continued. “But California and Texas and Florida, they have about 30% of all the people in the United States and they’ve had about 5,500 deaths, so they are just radically different situations. This one-size-fits-all doesn’t work.”

Victor Davis Hanson added that the experts need to stop with the generalizations about the whole country and instead start focusing on why the outbreak hit those three states so badly.

“We need to focus on those three states and ask ourselves why 11 or 12% of the population has suffered 55% of the fatalities,” he said. “Is it the weather? Is it population density? Is it elevators and subways? The credentialed class has been wrong on almost everything and the people have lost confidence because they don’t address these basic practical questions that people want answered for.”

Furthermore, Victor Davis Hanson noted that the hypocrisy of the expert elite has severely hampered people’s confidence in their abilities, from U.K. professor Neil Ferguson violating his own lockdown order for an extramarital affair to billionaire Bill Gates telling the United States to ease its criticism of China.

“We have this other hypocrisy problem; we saw that with Neil Ferguson in the UK today,” said Hanson. “Bill Gates, I think he has done a lot of great things, but he is deeply embedded with the China project. He’s got commercial ties there, he’s got huge financial interests, he’s not a credible observer of the Chinese role in this, and when he says we are criticizing China too much …  I don’t think people should be so haughty given their record.”

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