California urgent care doctors make case for reopening America
Drs. Dan Erickson and Artin Massihi, owners of Accelerated Urgent Care in Bakersfield, join Laura Ingraham on 'The Ingraham Angle.'
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Dr. Dan Erickson and Dr. Artin Massihi, co-owners of Accelerated Urgent Care in Bakersfield, Calif., joined "The Ingraham Angle" Monday to discuss a series of videos questioning whether California's stay-at-home order is necessary.
"0.03 [percent] chance of dying from COVID in the state of California," Erickson says in a recent video. "Does that necessitate sheltering in place? Does that necessitate shutting down medical systems? Does that necessitate people being out of work?"
"When someone dies in this country right now, they're not talking about the high blood pressure, the diabetes, the stroke. They're saying 'Did they die from COVID?'" Erickson says in another video. "We've been to hundreds of autopsies. You don't talk about one thing, you talk about comorbidities. ER doctors now [say] 'It's interesting when I'm writing about my death report, I'm being pressured to add COVID. Why is that?
"Something else is going on here. This is not about science and it's not even about COVID. When [authorities] use the word 'safe' -- if you listen to the word 'safe', that's about controlling you."
Erickson told Ingraham Monday night he has looked to Sweden, where the restrictions imposed to fight the coronavirus have been far less sweeping than those instituted by Sweden's European neighbors.
"They've some basic social distancing and [a] doctor just finished doing a report where he said there's really not a lot of science backing these techniques," he said. "And if you look at their numbers: 200 deaths per million compared to ours, [which is] about the same. Italy's [is] about 400 per million and Spain is about 400 per million, so we are looking at this going, 'OK, they took a completely different approach and their results are basically the same.'"
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Erickson said Sweden's strategy relied on "herd immunity," wherein enough people in a community contract the virus and produce antibodies that inhibit a recurrence of infection.
"Once [the herd immunity rate] hits 70 or 80 percent, the virus has nowhere else to go and it burns out," Erickson said, later adding, " ... So I think the key is the vaccine helps get you to herd immunity, but also, you can get to herd immunity without a vaccine."