Dr. Phil stirred controversy while appearing on Fox News' "The Ingraham Angle" on Thursday (April 16), when he stated that the country doesn't shutdown over every day deaths that result from car accidents or smoking.
"Two hundred fifty people a year die from poverty, and the poverty line is getting such that more and more people are going to fall below that because the economy is crashing around us, and they’re doing that because people are dying from the coronavirus. I get that. 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? And the fallout is going to last for years because people’s lives are being destroyed."
Dr. Phil addressed the controversy during a Facebook Live session on Friday, stating, "What I believe, regardless of what I may have come across as saying, is we need widespread testing and continued protection of the high risk portion of the population. Last night I said we as a society have chosen to live with certain controllable deadly risk everyday, smoking, auto crashes, swimming and yes I know that those are not contagious, so probably bad examples."
