A group of 78 researchers and doctors from Stanford Medical School issued a letter on Wednesday that rebuked Dr. Scott Atlas, who President Trump appointed to the White House coronavirus task force last month, for peddling “falsehoods and misrepresentations of science.”
We need more of this type of action. The Republican Party has tried to marginalized expertise for the past 30+ years, and such organizations need to push back hard. It is no longer your opinion is as good as mine, people have died (≈ 115,000) as a consequence of President Trump’s poor judgement based on politics and his ego rather than science. The professions need to re-establish their credibility by speaking out and pushing against the Administration members who appear to be in it purely for the graft (see latest on former Energy Secretary Perry for instance, but any one of the Cabinet members can be selected and shown to be dishonest).
Atlas was definitely still being paid as a fellow at the Hoover Institute at the time of those tweets. I assume he got paid for a bunch of his RWNJ media appearances too. His entire schtick is free markets for health care and legal immunity for businesses that get their workers sick.
ETA: And he hasn’t practiced medicine for the better part of a decade. I doubt he’s still licensed.
I am shocked at this criticism. This guy should be right up there with Pasteur and Salk in the pantheon of medical geniuses. He is, after all, the guy who discovered that COVID is transmitted primarily by Mexicans and protesters:
As a Californian, and I mean this with all sincerity, the best thing that could happen to the state would be for a meteor to wipe out the Hoover Institution. What brought us the Tea Party and Donald Trump, and so is directly responsible for the lack of a national public health strategy of the kind that would have averted most of the problems that this Hoover nimrod is trying to blame the state for? Decades of doctrinaire free market preaching from outfits like Hoover. All in the service of corporate donors who want to cripple the government.
So they’ve crippled it. Now they don’t like the consequences, and so have a new pack of lies about medicine and claim that in an epidemic, too, the free market will take care of the situation through herd immunity! Seriously, the Hippocratic Oath needs to be amended to say that “one treats people in need, except if they’re Scott Atlas, who believes that diseases are best left to cure themselves.”