Fox News Host Tells Viewers to “Go to Work” and “Live With” COVID While Avoiding His Own Coworkers

One of the most important takeaways from the COVID-19 pandemic, now entering its third year, is that on matters of health, one should take advice from actual doctors and not, say, Fox News hosts. Not because the right-wing network’s talking heads didn’t attend medical school followed by years of rotations and various fellowships—though you may be surprised to learn Tucker Carlson didn’t!—but because said hosts are in the business of lying to their viewers, who they think are very stupid. For instance, for the last nearly 22 months, Fox stars have told people that masks and vaccines are the devil’s plot while following strict company-mandated COVID protocols off the air. And now, as new cases in the U.S. have hit a million in one day, they’re demanding people return to the office and schools and be one with a highly contagious disease while—surprise!—being much more cautious when it comes to their own health.

Yes, on Tuesday morning, Fox & Friends’ Brian Kilmeade went on a rant about the news that teachers have the audacity to want to work remotely amid the current surge, telling anyone afraid of getting COVID and dying to get over it. “It’s called live with it,” Kilmeade said. “Go to work. Live with it. Get on a train, get on a bus, get on a plane. How do we live with it? We can no longer hide from it.” Not mentioned in his rant was the fact that Fox & Friends famously broadcasts with its three hosts sitting side by side on a couch, yet on Tuesday, Kilmeade beamed into people’s homes very much alone, a point that for some reason did not make it into his “go to work…live with it” mandate.

Naturally, Kilmeade isn’t the only Fox employee telling viewers to grow a pair and expose themselves to the virus while personally taking sensible precautionary measures being implemented at offices across the country. On Monday, the hosts and guests of The Five appeared in five separate boxes while denouncing distance learning. Referring to teachers’ “demands” to not be thrown into a COVID petri dish as though they were asking for something crazy, like for their lives to matter, host Jesse Watters snarled: “Liberal teachers unions at it again, eyeballing a return to remote learning during the omicron surge. Members of the Chicago Teachers Union threatening to strike if their demands aren’t met and other groups across the country testing the waters for their own departures from the classroom. But once again the science isn’t on their side.”

As for the risk of having kids go to school in person during the omicron surge, Watters did not have anything to say about the fact that children are being hospitalized with COVID in “record” numbers. Or that, as Dr. Mark Kline put it to NBC News, “people have tried to downplay the significance of the disease in children. We’ve spent two years rebutting myths pertaining to COVID and children, that it’s ‘harmless’ for children. It’s not.”

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