Trump lashes out at scientists whose findings contradict him
“A TRUMP enemy statement,” he said of one study.
“A political hit job,” he said of another.
Twice this week, US President Donald Trump has not only dismissed the findings of coronavirus studies but suggested – without evidence – that their authors were motivated by politics and out to undermine his efforts to roll back coronavirus restrictions.
First it was a study funded in part by his own government’s National Institutes of Health that raised alarms about the use of hydroxychloroquine, finding higher mortality in coronavirus patients who took the drug while in Veterans’ Administration hospitals.
Trump and many of his allies had been trumpeting the drug as a miracle cure and Trump this week revealed that he has been taking it to try to ward off the virus.
“If you look at the one survey, the only bad survey, they were giving it to people that were in very bad shape. They were very old, almost dead,” Trump told reporters on Tuesday. “It was a Trump enemy statement.”
He offered similar pushback on Thursday to a new study from Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health. It found that more than 61% of Covid-19 infections and 55% of reported deaths – nearly 36 000 people – could have been been prevented had social distancing measures been put in place one week sooner.
Trump has repeatedly defended his administration’s handling of the virus in the face of persistent criticism that he acted too slowly.
“Columbia’s an institution that’s very liberal,” Trump told reporters. “I think it’s just a political hit job, you want to know the truth.”
“If the president is politicising science, if he’s discounting health experts, then the public is going to be fearful and confused,” said Larry Gostin, a Georgetown University law professor who is an expert in public health, calling it “dismaying”.
The White House rejected that thinking. | AP