With the Covid-19 pandemic again surging in the U.S. and much of the world, President Trump’s latest most-favored health expert is sowing discord in the White House, reports the Washington Post.
Scott Atlas, a neuroradiologist, drew Trump’s attention last summer when he was interviewed on Fox News; in August he was hired as an adviser to the White House Coronavirus Task Force.
Atlas is not an expert on infectious diseases.
His views on fighting Covid-19 line up squarely with those of the president and certain other top aides concerned more with politics than the pandemic — but not with those of genuine experts like Drs. Anthony Fauci, Deborah Birx, or Robert Redfield, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Atlas “routinely has challenged” other doctors “with what [they] considered junk science, according to three senior administration officials,” the Post says.
“The result has been a U.S. response increasingly plagued by distrust, infighting and lethargy, just as experts predict coronavirus cases could surge this winter and deaths could reach 400,000 by year’s end,” the Post says.
To Trump, it seems, all this amounts to little more than election politics.
On arriving at the White House, Atlas moved quickly to take over the Trump administration’s response to the pandemic.
“Atlas shot down attempts to expand testing. He openly feuded with other doctors on the coronavirus task force and succeeded in largely sidelining them. He advanced fringe theories, such as that social distancing and mask-wearing were meaningless and would not have changed the course of the virus in several hard-hit areas,” the Post says.
Atlas is also said to have advocated allowing the coronavirus to spread among Americans in hopes of achieving “herd immunity” — which basically means ignoring the numbers of cases and deaths until there are enough naturally immune survivors to stop the virus,” says the Post, citing “three current and former senior administration officials.”
Atlas denies this, but in the past has made statements favoring the herd-immunity approach.
It’s impossible to calculate how Atlas’s influence with the president — essentially telling Trump what he wants to hear — may have contributed to the recent surge in cases, but there’s no doubt that the latest outbreaks are real.
As of Monday morning, the Johns Hopkins Covid-19 Tracker put the number of positive tests in the U.S. at well over 8 million (8,156,970) and the number of deaths at nearly 220,000 (219,681). Both numbers are the highest in the world.
“Health experts say the predicted fall surge is here, and rising cases across the US appear to bear that out. The US is averaging more than 55,000 new cases a day, and 10 states reported their highest single-day case counts on Friday,” says CNN.
According to some experts, things will get worse — much worse — in weeks and months to come.
“The next six to 12 weeks are going to be the darkest of the entire pandemic,” Michael Osterholm, director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota, told NBC’s “Meet the Press” on Sunday.
There’s been pushback against Atlas from other members of the Task Force, to no avail.
“Birx recently confronted the office of Vice President Pence, who chairs the task force, about the acrimony, according to two people familiar with the meeting,” the Post says.
“Birx, whose profile and influence has eroded considerably since Atlas’s arrival, told Pence’s office that she does not trust Atlas, does not believe he is giving Trump sound advice and wants him removed from the task force, the two people told the Post.
“In one recent encounter, Pence did not take sides between Atlas and Birx, but rather told them to bring data bolstering their perspectives to the task force and to work out their disagreements themselves,” the Post says, citing two senior administration officials.
