The hosts of Fox & Friends aren’t always friendly. At the start of the year, Steve Doocy — proud father of the reporter President Joe Biden recently called a “stupid son of a bitch” over a hot mic — caught COVID amidst the emergence of the Omicron variant. He got really sick; he could have died. But when he returned to hosting duties, hoping to warn their unvaxxed viewers — who are overwhelmingly the ones hospitalized and dying from COVID — he was met with hostility from co-host Brian Kilmeade.
Now the two are at it again. On Wednesday, the team belatedly discussed one of the big controversies from last weekend: Bill Maher and former New York Times reporter Bari Weiss saying they were “done” with COVID, despite it currently killing over 2,000 Americans a day. Doocy thought that was dumb. Kilmeade did not. And so things got a little testy.
“The survivability is 98 percent. And you want to live your life running around hiding for two and a half years? Are you kidding? She’s 100 percent right,” Kilmeade said about Maher and Weiss’ reckless attacks on mandates and restrictions.
Doocy attempted to be measured. “I’m certainly not hiding, I’m just being careful,” he replied. “A lot of people, I’m in my 60s, a lot of people over 60 are being careful because they don’t want it and it’s killing 10,000 people a week.”
Kilmeade, who hosts a show where he just yaps about whatever, claimed that health experts “don’t know what the hell they’re talking about,” saying that they “change the rules and never acknowledge that they told us the wrong stuff.” (He didn’t mention that their rules change because our understanding of a constantly evolving virus is itself changing.) Kilmeade suggested that Biden’s message should be about “living with it, not running from it.” (Again, over 2,000 Americans — almost all unvaccinated people, who may be listening to people like Kilmeade and Tucker Carlson — are dying every day.)
When Doocy offered an olive branch, saying “you got to be careful,” Kilmeade shot back.
“In what way?” he replied, not letting him answer. “What mask? Does the mask work being careful? Then they tell us the cloth mask doesn’t work. Really? Two and a half years later I’m wearing a mask that doesn’t work?”
Then Doocy pointed out, “Brian, everybody in this building for the most part except us is wearing a mask,” alluding to the building’s strict vaccine mandate for on-site workers.
You can watch the full exchange on Mediaite.