A co-founder of The Home Depot suggested the national media has unnecessarily scared people about the dangers of the coronavirus and advocated for fully reopening all sections of the country following the pandemic.
“I think the media has done a wonderful job of frightening America,” Bernie Marcus said Monday on Fox News. “The truth of the matter is, what Gov. [Ron] DeSantis did here and the governor did in Georgia is an example … of understanding that people needed to get back, needed to get out of the house, needed to start their businesses again, needed to go to work again.”
DeSantis and Gov. Brian Kemp of Georgia were two of the slowest in the country to institute statewide lockdowns to slow the spread of the virus. Kemp was the first to announce partial reopenings in his state.
President Trump has praised DeSantis’s response to the virus but disagreed publicly with Kemp’s opening policies. Virtually every state has partially reopened as the national trajectory of cases and deaths flattens.
Both DeSantis and Kemp were chided by media pundits and some medical experts for not taking the virus seriously enough.
Marcus said the reason for this is “a lot of these rules are made by bureaucrats, government employees, people who get paid no matter what happens.”
Marcus, who is more than 90 years old, repeated a familiar line given by pundits downplaying the virus saying his age bracket is the only one that needs to be careful.
“My age bracket is really the problem,” he said. “If we take care of my age bracket, that is 70 or above, I think that we can end a lot of the problems that are out there. People that are 70 or above have to be so careful because you are compromised in many different ways. But we’re only a small portion of the population, and we’re closing down everybody in addition to the schools.”
