Posted by Jay Livingston
My post of January 4 (here) had the title “I Do Not Like Thee Doctor Phil,” a variant on a nursery rhyme that’s not as well known here as in Britain. It begins,
I do not like thee Dr. Fell.I have almost never watched Dr. Phil, so I really did not know the reason why I didn’t like him. Now I do. He is dangerously stupid, at least when it comes to public health.
The reason why I cannot tell.
Last week, he was on TV pushing the idea that businesses should re-open soon despite the pandemic.
If the businesses remain closed, he said, “There’s a point at which lockdown will create more destruction and more death than the actual virus will.”
He said this on Fox News, of course, on Laura Ingraham’s show. He continued,
| People are dying from the coronavirus. I get that. But look, the fact of the matter is we have people dying, 45,000 people a year die from automobile accidents, 480,000 from cigarettes, 360,000 a year from swimming pools,* but we don’t shut the country down for that. |
As several people pointed out, the swimming pool figure is more than one hundred times the actual number. All drownings, not just swimming pools, account for less than 4000 deaths.
Dr. Phil’s logic is just as wrong as his statistics. Swimming pools, traffic accidents, and cigarettes are not contagious. As John Oliver said last night, “If swimming pools were killing 360,000 people a year, and you could contract a swimming pool on a trip to the grocery store, we might want to think about shutting them down until we worked out what the fuck was going on.”
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* Right wingers love swimming-pool deaths, especially when the victim is a child. Ditto for traffic deaths. Tea Party types frequently use these mortality statistics in arguing for the removal of all restrictions on guns. The logic there is just as shoddy as it is in regards to Covid-19. (See this 2016 post “A Gun Is Not a Swimming Pool.”)
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