President Donald Trump has just hired another adviser to the President, a medical doctor who frequently appears on Fox News, has been an advisor to Rudy Giuliani’s presidential campaign, and calls the movement to not re-open schools “hysteria.”
Dr. Scott Atlas is also the physician press secretary Kayleigh McEnany quoted when she made her infamous remarks, saying, “science should not stand in the way” of re-opening schools.
CNN reports that “unlike the government’s medical experts who have advised Trump until now,” Dr. Atlas “has adopted a public stance on the virus much closer to Trump’s.”
Trump told reporters earlier this week that Atlas is “working with us and will be working with us on the coronavirus.”
“And he has many great ideas. And he thinks what we’ve done is really good, and now we’ll take it to a new level.”
Telling Trump what he’s done is really good and adopting a public stance much closer to the president’s seems to be a prerequisite to getting a White House job in this administration.
But if all that weren’t enough, Atlas has been “pushing for the resumption of college sports.”
CNN notes that President Trump “first noticed Atlas on Fox News, where he asserted it doesn’t matter ‘how many cases’ there are in the US, wrongly claimed those under 18 years old have ‘essentially no risk of dying,’ implied teachers who are at high risk for contracting Covid-19 should ‘know how to protect themselves,’ baselessly claimed ‘children almost never transmit the disease’ and without evidence blamed a rise in cases in southern states on protests and border crossings.”
Just five weeks ago San Diego’s KUSI reported Dr. Atlas is a “a critic of the fear mongering tactics health officials have been using when it comes to reporting data from the coronavirus pandemic.”
Atlas pushed back “against a recent model from the University of Washington’s Institute of Health Metrics and Evaluation that projects over 134,000 Americans will die of COVID-19 by August 4th.”
Dr. Atlas said “we should look at the evidence. We don’t need to rely on hypothetical projections.”
He was correct – the projections were wrong. The actual death totals were much higher. One week later, the U.S. death toll now stands at 168,417.
Atlas was even mire wrong than the projections