Sen. Pat Toomey Calls for Reopening America Faster: ‘Danger’ of Coronavirus to Most Americans Overstated

Sen. Pat Toomey (R-PA) told Breitbart News in an exclusive interview on Friday that American political leaders are “overstating the danger” of coronavirus to most Americans while “underestimating” the economic “carnage” that lockdowns nationwide are causing.

Toomey, a key U.S. senator from a Rust Belt battleground state, conducted this interview with Breitbart News after rolling out a plan to much more quickly reopen Pennsylvania than the plan the state’s Democrat Gov. Tom Wolf has begun. Toomey, a widely respected Republican who serves alongside a Democrat, Sen. Bob Casey (D-PA), is not known for making outlandish claims so his statements here that the panic driving policy decisions around the country instead of science—which shows the disease is much less severe than originally thought—are a huge step for the country as the conventional wisdom behind the lockdowns nationwide is challenged ever so more. He is the first U.S. senator to offer such criticism of the conventional wisdom that keeps much of the country—and much of Pennsylvania—in a state of perpetual pseudo-lockdown limbo. Toomey in recent days hosted a roundtable with medical and economic experts presenting for U.S. senators actual data about the virus, bringing together top medical and scientific officials from the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center (UPMC)—Pennsylvania’s largest hospital system—and Stanford University, Duke University, and New York University.

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