CNN’s Fareed Zakaria Slams Government For Being Too Cautious, Argues Schools Should Reopen

CNN’s Fareed Zakaria, opened his Sunday show with a monologue that slammed the government for playing it too safe on Covid-19 vaccines and school re-openings.

Zakaria argued that the caution from the government does not have citizens’ best interests at heart.

“Politicians and governments are much too worried about the chance of something bad happening on their watch, no matter how unlikely,” Zakaria said. “There has been a reluctance to send children back to school even though numerous studies have found the risk quite low if precautions are taken. And while the dangers are exaggerated, few people think about massive benefits to society, to children, to parents, to the economy as a whole if schools would reopen fast.”

Zakaria referred to an Atlantic piece that referred to these precautions as “hygiene theater.” He continued by likening the overly precautious Covid-19 measures to post-9/11 reactions to terrorism.

The obsession with the dangers of terrorism, even after 9/11 were actually quite low, led us to build a massive new homeland security industrial complex and launch across the globe and curtail civil liberties as home just to try to reduce the incidents of terrorism to as close to zero as possible.

Zakaria also spoke about the halting of the Johnson & Johnson and the AstraZeneca vaccines due to isolated incidents of blood clots. Zakaria crunched the numbers on vaccine safety versus Covid-19 survivability as “7 million Americans have already safely received the vaccine. That is 0.0002% of a chance of a blood clot. Meanwhile, 1.5% of Covid patients still die from the virus.”

“We’ve wasted time when the crucial imperative is to get people vaccinated and fast,” Zakaria concluded as he summed up the risk-reward scenario.

You can watch above, via CNN.