Dr. Phil McGraw (who isn’t really a doctor) said Thursday evening on Fox News that the national shutdown imposed to slow the spread of coronavirus is more dangerous than the virus itself, which has so far killed nearly 35,000 Americans.

During an appearance on “The Ingraham Angle,” McGraw told host Laura Ingraham that the shelter-in-place order imposed in many states will “create more destruction and actually more death across time than the actual virus will itself.” He then added:

“Forty-five thousand 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. But yet we’re doing it for this?”

As HuffPost notes, McGraw’s statistics are not even the least bit accurate:

“According to the CDC, there are about 3,500 fatal unintentional drownings per year in the United States; another 32,000 are killed in motor vehicle accidents.

“Swimming deaths and traffic fatalities are also not contagious.”

But despite having his so-called “facts” way off base, McGraw doubled down, continuing to assert that a national lockdown is much worse than COVID-19:

“It’s not just that it’s psychological, their bodies actually start breaking down.

“We think we’re protecting people’s lives by keeping them locked up. You keep them locked up long enough, there’s a paradoxical effect, you actually destroy more lives than you do by letting them go out and protect themselves and opt into their lives to fight for what they believe in.”

Later in the segment, McGraw took questions via Twitter from viewers, and once again he rattled off his absurd theory that shutting down the country was more dangerous than coronavirus:

“This will end soon. We probably shouldn’t have ever started this, but just realize there’s a light at the end of the tunnel.”

For the record, Dr. Phil holds MA and PhD degrees from the University of North Texas. He is NOT a medical doctor. He also holds no license to practice psychology in any U.S. state or territory.

Leave it to Fox News to give a platform to a quack who isn’t even sharp enough to hold a license for the thing he’s supposed to be good at.

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