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The biggest names from Fox News and other right-wing media have mocked how COVID-19 has been handled in Australia, a country that has suffered just 0.1% of the number of confirmed cases recorded in the United States.

Debate continues to rage over Australia’s strict public health restrictions as daily case numbers creep up in the 300s and much of the country is in lockdown.

With political leaders increasingly publicly acknowledging that an elimination strategy is untenable even in the short term, discussion is moving to how Australians can live with the virus while keeping deaths (which remain in the single digits nationally each day) and hospitalisations down.

In the US — where cases are peaking again with 120,000 cases and 500 deaths reported daily (taken from a seven-day average) — the biggest right-wing voices have recently latched on to Australia’s new lockdowns as proof of public health overreach. Last night Tucker Carlson took aim on his prime-time Fox News show at the severity of Sydney’s lockdown and the use of police and army to enforce “martial law”. He played a clip of NSW chief health officer Kerry Chant advising people to limit talking to each other in public.

“It’s humiliating in its cowardice and its lack of proportion,” he said, broadcasting from his Maine studio. (The state of Maine has had 64 deaths for every 100,000, compared with Australia’s 3.7.) The previous week he made similar comments in an interview with News Corp’s Sharri Markson: “Australia, and I’m sorry to say this, has become a sort of COVID dictatorship.”

The Fox News host said this as he broadcast from Hungary, a country that has lost its status as a democracy under Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s rule and has suffered more COVID-19 deaths per capita than any other European nation. 

Dan Bongino is a Fox News host and right-wing commentator who often has the most popular content on Facebook each day. He broadcasts from Florida, which has recorded 185 COVID-19 deaths for every 100,000. 

Last month a clip from him commenting on Chant’s comments went viral, racking up more than 1.4 million views: 

Watch the liberal totalitarians explain this away. Why? Because they’re totalitarians.

He said that in the video which was posted on the day that Florida became the state with the highest level of cases and death rates on a seven-day average. 

Popular podcaster Joe Rogan — who has used his exceedingly large platform to question the science of vaccines and give credence to other conspiracy theories — weighed in from Texas on Australia’s lockdowns. As state officials announced on August 4 that COVID-19 cases, hospitalisations and deaths were rising faster in Texas than ever before, Rogan spoke in disbelief about the restrictions from a state that’s had 50 times more deaths per capita than Australia:

There’s some crazy shit going on right now where the army is trying to keep people inside in Australia. 

Across the pond, GB News, the new right-wing news channel featuring former Sky News Australia’s Angelos Frangopoulos, invited Institute of Public Affairs research fellow James Bolt to talk about the “draconian” measures. Speaking to an audience from a country that’s recorded 6.1 million cases and 130,000 deaths compared with Australia’s 36,000 cases and 947 deaths, Bolt argued that Australia was in a much worse state than the UK:

We’re told to look to Britain as this post-apocalyptic hellscape of what COVID has done.