President Trump and Dr. Scott Atlas
Screenshot from Fox News/ MediaMatters
Reprinted with permission from MediaMatters
President Donald Trump announced this week that Dr. Scott Atlas, a senior fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution, will serve as a new "adviser" to the president on COVID-19. Atlas, whose background is in diagnostic radiology, is not an expert in infectious disease but rather a pundit and frequent Fox guest who has been repeatedly wrong about the pandemic.
Atlas, who has appeared 20 times on Fox News since the end of April, predicted in March that there would only be 10,000 deaths from COVID in America, said in April that the pandemic "appears to be entering the containment phase," and claimed in May that "the curves have been flattened." More recently, he has taken to making unproven claims downplaying the risk of COVID-19 in considering whether to reopen schools for in-person learning.
<p>But Fox News and other right-wing outlets have elevated his politically convenient though dubious commentary; and on August 12 he <a href="https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefings-statements/remarks-president-trump-press-briefing-081320/" target="_blank">gave brief remarks</a> during a White House press briefing after Trump asked him to come up to the podium.</p><p>Here is a noncomprehensive list of Atlas' false claims, incorrect predictions, and pro-Trump sycophancy that preceded his new role at the White House.</p><div class="inarticle_ad_placeholder" data-aa-adunit="/5931858/NatMemo_RM/NatMemo_Middle_Desktop_2" data-aaad="true"></div><ul class="ee-ul"><li>Atlas claimed in a <a href="https://twitter.com/SWAtlasHoover/status/1239741933192265728" target="_blank">March 16 tweet</a>, "Virus infections typically have seasons. This is temporary."</li><li>In a <a href="https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2020/mar/26/widespread-isolation-and-stopping-all-human-intera/" target="_blank">March 26 op-ed in The Washington Times</a>, Atlas wrote, "This virus could cause about 10,000 deaths in the United States overall." </li><li>In a <a href="https://www.hoover.org/research/scott-w-atlas-covid-19-and-health-care-hoover-virtual-policy-briefing-0" target="_blank">March 26 "Hoover Virtual Policy Briefing,"</a> Atlas claimed, "All reasonable numbers point to the fact that our number of severe outcomes will be peaking around three weeks or so."</li><li>In an <a href="https://thehill.com/opinion/healthcare/490582-the-case-for-optimism" target="_blank">April 1 op-ed in The Hill</a>, Atlas wrote that "Americans should not panic. The United States has the most advanced medical care in the world for situations like this."</li><li>As the <a href="https://covidtracking.com/data/charts/us-daily-deaths" target="_blank">national curve of daily deaths continued to rise</a>, Atlas wrote in an <a href="https://thehill.com/opinion/healthcare/492514-reentry-after-the-panic-paying-the-health-price-of-extreme-isolation" target="_blank">April 13 op-ed in The Hill</a> that "we now need to reenter normal life" and that "continuing full-population isolation and waiting for a vaccine would be doubling down and yielding to panic."</li><li>Atlas opened his <a href="https://thehill.com/opinion/healthcare/494034-the-data-are-in-stop-the-panic-and-end-the-total-isolation" target="_blank">April 22 op-ed in <em>The Hill</em></a><u><em> </em></u>by declaring, "The tragedy of the COVID-19 pandemic appears to be entering the containment phase."</li><li>In an <a href="https://www.mediamatters.org/media/3889721" target="_blank">April 26 appearance</a> on Fox News' <em>The Next Revolution with Steve Hilton</em>, Atlas told the host, "Young people under 18 have virtually no risk of serious illness or death, so it's logical to open most schools. It's logical to open most businesses."</li><li>Atlas claimed <a href="https://www.mediamatters.org/media/3889576" target="_blank">on the April 27 edition of Fox News' <em>Tucker Carlson Tonight</em></a>, "It's actually good news that the virus spreads widely and without high risk to the vast majority of people … because that means we have a better chance of developing population immunity." The Mayo Clinic <a href="https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/coronavirus/in-depth/herd-immunity-and-coronavirus/art-20486808" target="_blank">describes</a> "major problems" with the idea that herd immunity can be achieved through natural infection as it is unknown to what extent an individual is immune to further infection after exposure. Also, according to the Mayo clinic, even if it was possible for herd immunity to be achieved this way, it "could also lead to serious complications and millions of deaths, especially among older people and those who have chronic conditions."</li><li>On the <a href="https://www.mediamatters.org/media/3889581" target="_blank">May 11 edition of Fox News' <em>The Story with Martha MacCallum</em></a>, Atlas referenced the social distancing measures and claimed that "the cure is bigger than the disease at this point." He also told the audience that "the curves have been flattened."</li><li>On the <a href="https://www.mediamatters.org/media/3889556" target="_blank">June 8 edition of <em>The Story with Martha MacCallum</em></a>, Atlas <a href="https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-news/foxs-dangerous-efforts-downplay-covids-impact-kids-mirror-trumps-push-reopen-schools" target="_blank">falsely</a> claimed "there is really no risk to young people" when it comes to COVID-19.</li><li>On the <a href="https://www.mediamatters.org/media/3888966" target="_blank">June 22 edition of <em>The Story with Martha MacCallum</em></a>, host Martha MacCallum mentioned to Atlas former Food and Drug Adminstration Commissioner Scott Gottlieb's claim that 25% of hospitalizations in Texas are among people aged 20 to 29. Atlas responded that he didn't believe the number, saying, "I question if those people who are positive for COVID-19 and being hospitalized for something else are classified as COVID-19 hospitalizations. That's a big difference."</li><li>On the <a href="https://www.mediamatters.org/media/3889611" target="_blank">June 29 edition of Fox News' <em>Tucker Carlson Tonight</em></a>, Atlas falsely claimed young people "do not have a significant problem, they do not have the serious complications, they do not die" from COVID-19. (The data <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/25/us/coronavirus-cases-young-people.html" target="_blank">showed at the time</a> of this appearance and <a href="https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/article/young-people-are-dying-from-coronavirus-in-florida-too/" target="_blank">continues to show</a> that young people do in fact die or suffer serious complications from the virus.) He also said it's "fantastic news that we have a lot of cases," which common sense and real-time data show to be false.</li><li>On the <a href="https://www.mediamatters.org/media/3889551" target="_blank">July 6 edition of <em>The Story with Martha MacCallum</em></a>, Atlas repeated the falsehood that "it doesn't really matter how many cases, it only matters who gets the cases" because young people die at a lower rate than older people. But <a href="https://www.axios.com/coronavirus-young-people-spread-5a0cd9e0-1b25-4c42-9ef9-da9d9ebce367.html" target="_blank">increased caseloads lead to an increased strain on the capacity of health systems</a> and may spread the virus to people who are more vulnerable to serious complications from the disease, even if the vast majority of young people who make up the increased number of cases do not.</li><li>Atlas downplayed the potential risks that COVID-19 poses to people under 70 on the <a href="https://www.mediamatters.org/media/3889586" target="_blank">July 7 edition of Fox News' <em>The Ingraham Angle</em></a>, claiming, "The risk of this has been grossly overblown."</li><li>On the <a href="https://www.mediamatters.org/media/3888891" target="_blank">July 15 edition of <em>America's Newsroom</em></a>, Atlas <a href="https://www.kff.org/coronavirus-covid-19/issue-brief/what-do-we-know-about-children-and-coronavirus-transmission/" target="_blank">falsely claimed</a>, "It doesn't matter if children get the disease. ... The data shows that they do not significantly transmit to adults."</li><li>On the <a href="https://www.mediamatters.org/media/3889571" target="_blank">July 25 edition of Fox News' <em>Watters World</em></a>, Atlas uncritically shilled for the <a href="https://www.statnews.com/2020/07/14/fix-covid-19-dumpster-fire-us/" target="_blank">Trump's disastrous COVID-19 response</a>, saying, "I think the president's briefings that were done this week were excellent, and I think it's obvious to everyone that there's a focus on the data, that they're closely monitoring the situation." He also falsely claimed that it's been "established" that " children are not significant spreaders," when in fact the science on this issue <a href="https://healthblog.uofmhealth.org/childrens-health/why-relationship-between-kids-and-spread-of-covid-remains-unclear" target="_blank">remains unsettled</a>.</li></ul><p><strong><em>Correction (8/13/20)</em></strong><em><strong>:</strong> </em><em>This post originally misidentified a July 15 appearance from Atlas as happening on </em>The Story with Martha MacCallum<em>. The appearance was on the July 15 edition of </em>America's Newsroom<em>.</em></p>
From Your Site Articles
Related Articles Around the Web
Keep reading...
Show less
Know First.
The stories you want. The opinions that matter. Delivered to your inbox every morning.
Sen. Kamala Harris
Photo by Gage Skidmore/ CC BY-SA 2.0
For months, I've adhered to the conventional wisdom that Joe Biden was most likely to pick Sen. Kamala Harris as his running mate. She's highly qualified, young but not inexperienced, a woman of color, a talented public speaker, not afraid of a fight, perceived as relatively moderate, and has been through the rigors of a national campaign. Her appeal to Biden was impossible to miss.
And yet somehow, the defenders of President Donald Trump seemed totally caught off guard when the choice came down on Tuesday. They have no unified strategy of how to attack the California senator.
<p>They weren't exactly unprepared, of course. As soon as she was announced as the running mate, Trump tweeted out a campaign video depicting her as controlled by the far left, a line he's used frequently against Biden. He called her "phony," for some reason that wasn't entirely clear.</p><script id="3d14008d7e044c36b256c61ff82728bb">
if(cnxFlag){
cnxFlag=false;
cnx.cmd.push(function() {
cnx({
playerId: '5573e7ba-804a-4971-a00f-3e2eeec6c0a9'
}).render('3d14008d7e044c36b256c61ff82728bb');
});
}
</script><p>But then when he was asked about her during his press briefing the same day, he had a new line. She was "nasty" — an epithet he seems to reserve for women. He condemned her in personal terms, complaining about the way she treated Justice Brett Kavanaugh during his confirmation hearings. She even said she was too mean to Biden.</p><div class="inarticle_ad_placeholder" data-aa-adunit="/5931858/NatMemo_RM/NatMemo_Middle_Desktop_2" data-aaad="true"></div><p>Campaigns can succeed best when they have a simple message to convey about their opponents, but Trump had no defined attack on Harris ready to go. Some Trump-friendly reporters even offered him suggested lines of attack — her supposed hypocrisy on marijuana, for instance — but he largely batted them away.</p><p>Yet the real trouble is arising for Trump defenders when attacking Harris on her past as a prosecutor. Harris has rightly come under scrutiny from the left, as many argue that she participated in far too many of the worst aspects of the criminal justice system during her time as a prosecutor and attorney general in California. She defended the death penalty in court, for example, even while saying she personally opposed it. And she fought to keep a man in prison even as evidence was emerging of his innocence. (At other times, though, she did try to push law enforcement in a more progressive direction.)</p><p>Katrina Pierson, a senior adviser to the Trump campaign, tried to capitalize on the criticisms of her record in a statement.</p><p>"Clearly, Phony Kamala will abandon her own morals, as well as try to bury her record as a prosecutor, in order to appease the anti-police extremists controlling the Democrat Party," she said. "In her failed attempt at running for president, Kamala Harris gleefully embraced the left's radical manifesto, calling for trillions of dollars in new taxes and backing Bernie Sanders' government takeover of health care."</p><p>Even in this single statement, though, there were two ideas at play. Does Harris have a dark past as a prosecutor to hide? Or is she a tool of the anti-police left? These ideas are clearly in tension, and it's not clear if we're supposed to be afraid that she'll lock everybody up or fire all the cops.</p><div class="inarticle_ad_placeholder" data-aa-adunit="/5931858/NatMemo_RM/NatMemo_Middle_Desktop_3" data-aaad="true"></div><p><iframe __idm_frm__="4791" style="outline: none; margin-bottom: 0px; border-width: 0px; border-style: initial; max-width: none; overflow: hidden; width: 1px; height: 1px; vertical-align: bottom; box-sizing: border-box !important;"></iframe></p><p>Kellyanne Conway, Trump's White House counselor — and, therefore, someone who legally should not be engaging in campaigning for the president — tried to square these conflicting messages in remarks to reporters Wednesday morning.</p><p>"She called herself a criminal reformer, and she also called herself a top cop," Conway said, claiming that Harris "left nobody happy when it came to law and order."</p><p>They're trying to have it both ways, attacking Harris both from the left and the right on law and order. While this may work for people already inclined to support the president, it's hard to see how it wins anyone over who's not already disposed to distrust Harris. These mixed attacks could end up portraying Harris as someone who's been a moderate on criminal justice with a mixed record, which may not be scary to people at all and may, in fact, sound reasonable.</p><p>More broadly, Trump allies are finding it hard to strike a consistent note. Per <em>The Guardian</em>, <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/aug/12/donald-trump-and-his-campaign-launch-scattergun-attacks-on-kamala-harris" target="_blank">Sen. Marsha Blackburn</a> (R-TN) told reporters:</p><blockquote>This has completed the leftist takeover of the party and of their radical agenda. Kamala Harris will be the most liberal leftist nominee for VP that our country has ever seen. If you want to find proof of where she has moved left, you can start with looking at her support for Bernie Sanders' health care takeover.</blockquote><p>But Republican Sen. Josh Hawley (MO), on the other hand, warned that this radical leftist socialist is also… beloved of two major capitalist centers of power, Wall Street and big tech:</p><p><br/></p><p><br/></p><div class="rm-shortcode" data-rm-shortcode-id="f7fcbaba0937ade692f3909a41b14658" id="1f5c6"><blockquote class="twitter-tweet twitter-custom-tweet" data-partner="rebelmouse" data-twitter-tweet-id="1293363881314852864"><div style="margin:1em 0">Of course Wall Street is delighted with Biden/Harris. Right back to the #China appeasement, unfettered globalism, a… https://t.co/OA8WiHHBrY</div> — Josh Hawley (@Josh Hawley)<a href="https://twitter.com/HawleyMO/statuses/1293363881314852864">1597196953.0</a></blockquote></div><p><br/></p><p>Meanwhile, as some struggle to define Harris as either top left or too right on criminal justice and economics, others — including Trump himself — seem to be blowing a gasket over facing a VP nominee of color.</p><p><iframe __idm_frm__="4794" style="outline: none; margin-bottom: 0px; border-width: 0px; border-style: initial; max-width: none; overflow: hidden; width: 1px; height: 1px; vertical-align: bottom; box-sizing: border-box !important;"></iframe></p><p>Mark Levin of Fox News went off on a spectacularly uninformed tangent claiming that Harris can't be African-American because her father was Jamaican:</p><p>Fox News host Tucker Carlson's reaction to the Harris announcement was likewise revealing. In a widely noted segment, he became flustered and agitated when he was corrected on his mispronunciation of "Kamala."</p><p>"So it begins!" Carlson declared, in a clear demonstration of white grievance. His belabored performance made it seem it was an incredible burden on him to insist he pronounce a person of color's name correctly — even though getting such facts right is a basic part of journalism.</p><p>But it wasn't just that extreme instance that revealed his racist resentment. He criticized Harris for having called Joe Biden a racist during the Democratic primary — even though, as the clip he subsequently showed proved — she explicitly told Biden: "I do not believe you are a racist."</p><div class="rm-shortcode" data-rm-shortcode-id="7dc6b827b8df69b9d69e3e284e3b94d4" id="ffa13"><blockquote class="twitter-tweet twitter-custom-tweet" data-partner="rebelmouse" data-twitter-tweet-id="1293338657449967616"><div style="margin:1em 0">Tucker Carlson: Kamala Harris called Joe Biden a racist
[clip starts]
Kamala Harris to Joe Biden: You're not a ra… https://t.co/DG537i0vjV</div> — Andrew Lawrence (@Andrew Lawrence)<a href="https://twitter.com/ndrew_lawrence/statuses/1293338657449967616">1597190939.0</a></blockquote></div><p>Any criticism of a white person on the issue of race is so anathema for Carlson that a person of color can't even soften the blow by directly saying she's not lobbing an accusation of racism.</p><p>And on Wednesday night, Carlson fanned the flames of white racism again, absurdly twisting Harris's concerns about the racial health disparities into the idea that she wants to make sure "only people of a certain skin color get the [COVID-19] vaccine," even though she said no such thing.</p><p><br/></p><div class="rm-shortcode" data-rm-shortcode-id="72279df9c69b2a1c490440fe7d8c3c95" id="ead40"><blockquote class="twitter-tweet twitter-custom-tweet" data-partner="rebelmouse" data-twitter-tweet-id="1293701730371330050"><div style="margin:1em 0">Tucker says Kamala doesn't want white people to get the coronavirus vaccine (also, this video he showed of her look… https://t.co/4aAKtBfIqW</div> — Andrew Lawrence (@Andrew Lawrence)<a href="https://twitter.com/ndrew_lawrence/statuses/1293701730371330050">1597277502.0</a></blockquote></div><p>Trump was no less subtle. In one of his most egregiously racist tweets in recent memories, the president lashed out against the Biden-Harris campaign the day after the VP announcement. For good measure, he implied that Sen. Cory Booker, the only other Black Democratic senator, would literally be in charge of invading suburban neighborhoods.</p><div class="rm-shortcode" data-rm-shortcode-id="3b96ebca2ebd982d817a292084b1dc32" id="3a121"><blockquote class="twitter-tweet twitter-custom-tweet" data-partner="rebelmouse" data-twitter-tweet-id="1293587655079473164"><div style="margin:1em 0">Donaled, your racism is showing.
-Cory https://t.co/jrHIoqJ8A2</div> — Cory Booker (@Cory Booker)<a href="https://twitter.com/CoryBooker/statuses/1293587655079473164">1597250305.0</a></blockquote></div><p>But there's rally no surprise here. With all the other messaging about Harris in shambles, reverting back to blatantly racist rhetoric may be the easiest way for Team Trump to stick to the party line.<br/></p>
From Your Site Articles
- Dropping Pandemic Denial, Far Right Shifts To Racist Xenophobia ... ›
- New Poll: Black Voters Say Trump Has Made Racism Worse ... ›
- Kamala Harris Grills DHS Chief On Racist Remarks And White ... ›
Related Articles Around the Web
Keep reading...
Show less
