Laura Ingraham turned to unlicensed psychologist “Dr.” Phil McGraw to help con financially struggling viewers into “freely” catching and spreading coronavirus.

On Thursday’s The Ingraham Angle, McGraw suggested, without any challenge from Ingraham, that coronavirus is no biggie compared to poverty, car accidents cigarette smoking and swimming. Stay-at-home rules, on the other hand, will “actually create more destruction and actually more death across time than the actual virus will itself,” he claimed.

“250 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 of the coronavirus, I get that,” McGraw continued.

“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,” McGraw added.

As Media Matters pointed out, the difference is that those fatalities are not contagious.

But even there, McGraw got his facts wrong. In an aptly titled article, “Why Is Anyone Still Asking Dr. Phil for His Opinion?” Rolling Stone notes that, according to the National Safety Council, 38,800 people (not 45,000) died from car crashes last year. According to the Centers for Disease Control, there are a little more than 3,500 non-boating-related drowning deaths each year and not all of them are in swimming pools.

“The fallout is going to last for years because people’s lives are being destroyed,” McGraw said.

Ingraham did not challenge a word. Nor did she tell viewers that McGraw let his license to practice expire in 2006. He has also accumulated “a litany of serious complaints" against him and his show, as Media Matters put it. Furthermore, McGraw has no special knowledge about the politics, science or economics of the shutdown.

But if you think that freedom to catch and spread coronavirus means more to supposedly "pro-life" Ingraham than life itself, think again. Ingraham was broadcasting from a remote location, as was McGraw. Yet she claimed she can’t sleep because she’s so worried about the country. Yet she said nothing about volunteering at a food bank, donating money or food for those struggling, out-of-work people keeping her up at night,

Watch Ingraham promote dying for thee but not for me below, from the April 16, 2020 The Ingraham Angle.