Fox News host Tucker Carlson said that he was “embarrassed” he didn’t consider the economic incentives for the lockdowns to continue.
“I’m embarrassed, as you said … we haven’t spent enough time on this show looking at the economic incentives to continue this. But that, that is profound, we’re spending a billion dollars a week [on testing]. So what you’re saying is there are a lot of reasons people would want this to continue for a long time?” he asked his guest, former New York Times reporter Alex Berenson.
The United States has tested up to 1.1 million patients for the coronavirus in a single day, and the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services set the price of COVID-19 tests between $35 and $51.
Berenson told Carlson that Ezekiel Emanuel, the architect of the Affordable Care Act, personally profits from lockdowns by giving businesses recommendations about “how to get around and get past the lockdown advice that he’s, you know, pushing, the lockdowns that he’s pushing.”
Emanuel is a consultant for COVID-19 RECoVERY Consulting, a company that charges fees for providing advice to businesses on reopening.
Health insurance companies have been profiting off of the pandemic, with CVS Health, which owns Aetna, making $1 billion more than 2019’s second-quarter profits. The net profits of United Health doubled from $3.4 billion in the second quarter of 2019 to $6.7 billion in 2020. An analyst has estimated a COVID-19 vaccine could net manufacturers $40 billion in profits.
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