Two senior US public health experts have raised concerns that White House adviser Scott Atlas is providing misleading or incorrect information on the COVID-19 pandemic to US President Donald Trump, media reports said on Monday.
The top US infectious diseases expert, Anthony Fauci, told CNN he was concerned that information given by Atlas was “really taken either out of context or actually incorrect.”
Earlier, US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) Director Robert Redfield shared similar concerns.
“Everything he says is false,” Redfield was quoted as saying during a telephone call on Friday last week while on a plane from Atlanta to Washington, NBC reported.
Redfield later told NBC that he was speaking about Atlas.
Atlas, a neuroradiologist, has faced scrutiny for downplaying the importance of masks and his reported views on “herd immunity,” an approach that holds that once enough individuals have been infected and become immune, others are less likely to be infected.
The White House and Altas have said that they are not pursuing such a strategy.
Atlas’ views on handling the pandemic have been denounced by his peers at Stanford University’s medical school and other health experts.
Atlas on Monday defended his advice to the president.
“Everything I have said is directly from the data and the science,” he said in a statement.
In a separate statement, the CDC said that comments about Atlas overheard by NBC were just one side of a “private discussion regarding a number of points he has made publicly about COVID-19.”
The agency said that Redfield differed with Atlas on mask wearing, COVID-19 infections among young people and herd immunity status, but agreed with him on many other issues.
White House spokeswoman Sarah Matthews said that Trump’s advisers sometimes disagreed, and that the president made policy decisions based on all the information he received.
At a White House Rose Garden event on Monday, Trump hailed plans to ship 150 million rapid tests to US states.
At the event, Atlas said that increased social mingling and testing were causing a rise in COVID-19 cases in parts of the country, but predicted changes with a vaccine to be finalized and rolled out.
“Fear is not the issue here,” he said. “We really have a handle on what’s going on.”
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