The Brit Hume Pro-Death Train chugged along on Fox News last night with his demands that Joe Biden “get on with life” by debating Donald Trump in person, even though he may still be contagious.

Hume began by claiming that “nearly everybody involved” has made “mistakes along the way” with the pandemic and noting that “politically speaking” Trump catching COVID-19 is “not a good situation.”

“However, when it comes to the disease and whether we should let it dominate our lives, I think [Trump's] on the right track,” Hume said, from his own remote location. Then he launched into an implicit validation of Trump’s ludicrous and dangerous suggestion that he bravely contracted coronavirus to show the public it should not be afraid of coronavirus and should not let it dominate our lives. MacCallum looked on with admiration and periodically murmured her agreement.

HUME: I mean, everything we now know about who gets this disease and how sick they get tells us that for people 65 and older, it’s quite dangerous. But even there, according to the CDC, the survival rate is at almost 95%. And for every other age group, it’s 99% and above. And we’re now seeing, you know, that they’ve had all these waves and batteries of tests at colleges, lots and lots of cases, virtually no hospitalizations, and in the 50 colleges surveyed, nobody died. Now that’s remarkable and for that, we have this wave of shutdowns that has done such terrible damage to our economy that doctors are now warning have been very hard on people’s health because of health care foregone during the worst of it and very grave harm to children’s mental health and so on.

As Hume should know and Fox’s “ultimate journalist” MacCallum should have told viewers, nearly 40,000 Americans under age 65 have died from coronavirus, according to the CDC. If that’s a negligible number, then I guess 9/11, when fewer than 3,000 Americans died, was a total nothingburger. More importantly, surviving coronavirus is not the same as completely recovering from it. As I previously noted when Fox’s Dr. Marc Siegel spewed this misleading spin, many who survive have very serious long-term problems.

But MacCallum helped validate the Happy COVID Talk by providing the (presumably) precise survival rates but leaving out the far-less reassuring numbers of deaths.

All that downplaying of the illness served as a pretext for attacking Biden for saying he’s “looking forward to being able to debate” Trump but “if he still has COVID, we shouldn’t have a debate.” Experts do not know for sure how long a COVID-19 patient is contagious but it could be up to 20 days after symptoms appear, especially for hospitalized patients. Trump probably became symptomatic last Thursday, October 1. The next presidential debate is scheduled for October 15.

HUME: Well look, have we been, haven't the medical authorities been telling us all this time that to avoid infection, you stay a certain distance apart and you wear masks and then even in certain circumstances you might have a partition that separates you from others and that that way you could get on with life.

There's a real need in this country to get on with life. And presidential and vice presidential debates are a part of that. So, the idea that if the president is still potentially infected in some way, that you couldn't stage an in-person debate I think flies in the face of all that we've been told about this disease. Now, if we are now to believe –

Fox’s online video edited out the rest of Hume’s remarks to make it look as though MacCallum interrupted at that moment to end the discussion.

But on the air, as Media Matters’ video shows, Hume went further:

HUME: - that all the precautionary measures that we've talked about, that people who have, that are carrying the virus can transmit it despite distancing and despite masks and other precautionary measures, then we’re in a whole new ball game. I don't think we are. 

Hume has quite a history of promoting contagion and death on Fox News. In March, he characterized Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick's call for seniors to die of COVID-19 for the sake of the (Trump) economy, an “entirely reasonable viewpoint;” Hume repeatedly mocked Biden for wearing a face mask; last month, he shrugged off 100,000 American deaths and blamed Trump’s poor polling on handling of the coronavirus on messaging, alone, saying, “he has a quite defensible case to make about his actions and policies on coronavirus.”

You can watch Hume suggest that Biden should risk his life below, from the October 6, 2020 The Real Story with Martha MacCallum. The first video, via Fox News, has the almost complete discussion with Hume’s final comments edited out. Underneath that is Media Matters’ video that shows what Fox disappeared.