WASHINGTON – In a questionable interview on BBC Newshour on Friday, the president’s new coronavirus adviser, Dr Scott Atlas, said the UNITED States had treated the coronavirus pandemic to a greater extent than Europe, which yielded a discredited statistic of unknown origin.
In recent days, Atlas eclipsed Dr. Anthony Fauci and Dr.Deborah Birx as the highest visual and highly trusted counselor on Trump’s coronavirus, who used her appearance on the BBC to protect facets of the president’s widely criticized reaction to COVID-19.
Atlas, affiliated with Stanford University’s conservative Hoover Institution, is a brain imaging expert who doesn’t like to respond to a pandemic, but turns out to have turned his usual Fox News appearances into a White House date.
Confronted through the BBC interviewer about his lack of experience, Atlas went crazy: “You know, I have to laugh at that,” he said, adding that it’s “a little ridiculous” to think that a virologist or immunologist needs to deal with the problem.Pandemic.
Before joining the Trump administration, Atlas made questioning statements about the virus and supported efforts by several Republican governors to reopen their states’ economies in early May, when those most responsible for public physical activity, adding Fauci , they suggested caution. states have reopened to see significant spikes in infections and deaths.
Atlas later tried to blame these spikes on anti-racist protests and immigrants from Mexico.The opinion of top public fitness experts is that when governors followed Atlas’ approach, restaurants, bars and other places temporarily went viral.
Atlas supported the debatable strategy of allowing the virus to spread naturally until a sufficient number of the population (about 60 or 70%, according to varying estimates) have been exposed to achieve so-called “collective immunity,” that is, the extent to which the epidemic end up possessing.This was Sweden’s goal in resisting the types of blockade that the maximum other countries had instituted.This strategy has failed.
Although he has explicitly defended and defended the technique of collective immunity, Atlas has denied being an advocate of collective immunity with the BBC, echoing a similar refusal he made on CNN this week.”I never, literally, ever begged The President United States to pursue a collective immunity strategy, to open doors and let others get infected,” he said.
Although the content of his recommendation to the president is unknown, his record of collective immunity is unequivocal.Writing in The Hill in April, Atlas stated that “other infected people without serious illnesses are the vehicle that should be had without delay to identify widespread immunity That was at the time that Trump and many Republican governors were getting rid of the locks for the first time, they had come into effect a few weeks earlier.
Atlas is a supporter of this view.” Knowledge is there: avoid panic and put an end to general isolation,” Hill’s publisher titled.
He did the same Friday, arguing that “the effect of prolonging the confinement is worse than the effect of the disease”, despite overwhelming evidence that the locks helped save lives and that even in non-fatal cases of COVID-19 it inflicts serious and potentially lasting damage to the center and other organs.
Atlas also estimates that nearly 190,000 Americans have died from coronavirus, the country is in a better position, relatively speaking, than many of its opposing numbers in Europe, where the virus has been widely contained.
At one point, BBC interviewer James Menendez noted that the United States had one of the world’s coronavirus mortality rates, a statistic from Johns Hopkins University.
“You can’t get away with it, can you?” Menendez asked.
“Excuse me, ” said Atlas irritated, “can.” He went on to say that Johns Hopkins’ number was “false” and “wrong.”It is not transparent which statistic is incorrect. Trump recently falsely claimed that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention drastically expanded the number of deaths.Atlas doesn’t seem to make the same argument.
Atlas stated that a greater comparison than that of “excess mortality,” a measure of the number of more people who died at a given time than expected, is based on older models.
“Europe has done 38% less than the United States in terms of mortality,” he said, “nobody talks about it.”
Trump and Republicans have continually claimed in recent weeks that excess mortality in Europe is 40% higher than in the United States.The biggest challenge with this is that it’s not true.Trump appears to have invented statistics and a fact-checking of the claim through the Annenberg Public Policy Center found it to be false.
It is known where the 38% figure cited through Atlas comes from.He responded to a request for comment from Yahoo News.The White House also responded to a request for explanation.
Like many supporters of the president and the president himself, Atlas selectively deploys statistics describing the nation’s pandemic as smoothly as possible, while minimizing outstanding mistakes and challenges.
“We’re doing much better,” he said in an interview with the BBC, which took a position the same day the US saw the day of more than 1,000 coronavirus deaths.
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