Dr Phil rattles The View hosts with rant against Covid closures

Host Whoopi Goldberg hit back: ‘They were trying to save kids’ lives’

Dr Phil McGraw has criticised school closures during the Covid pandemic while appearing on The View, drawing the ire of the talk show’s hosts.

The TV personality and author, 73, was initially asked about how he addresses social media in his new book, We’ve Got Issues.

“In, like, ’08, ’09, smartphones came on, and kids started, they stopped living their lives and starting watching people live their lives, and so we saw the biggest spike and the highest levels of depression, anxiety, loneliness, and suicidality, since records have ever been kept, and it’s just continued on and on and on,” McGraw replied.

He then added: “And then Covid hits 10 years later, and the same agencies that knew that, are the agencies that shut down the schools for two years. Who does that? Who takes away the support system for these children? Who takes it away and shuts it down?

“And by the way, when they shut it down, they stopped the mandated reporters from being able to see children that were being abused and sexually molested and, in fact, sent them home and abandoned them to their abusers with no way to watch and referrals dropped 50 per cent to 60 per cent.”

Dr Phil appearing on The View (ABC)

The View co-host Sunny Hostin pushed back against McGraw’s narrative, pointing out: “There was also a pandemic going on...”

Whoopi Goldberg added: “They were trying to save kids’ lives. We know a lot of folks who died during this...”

McGraw then replied: “Not school children.” When challenged by Ana Navarro as to whether he was claiming no school children had died because of Covid, McGraw clarified: “I’m saying it was the safest group. They were the less vulnerable group, and they suffered and will suffer more from the mismanagement of Covid than they will from the exposure to Covid, and that’s not an opinion. That’s a fact.”

This is not the first time that McGraw has claimed that the lockdown was deadlier than Covid. In 2020, not long after the first lockdown had begun, he appeared on Fox News and shared inaccurate statistics about non-contagious causes of death, and asked why the country was not shut down for them.

He criticised the lockdown saying it would “create more destruction and actually more death across time than the actual virus will itself”.

“The fact of the matter is we have people dying — 45,000 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?” he said.