Not all doctors are created equal — or know what they’re doing
We live in a very dangerous time, when America and countries around the globe are facing illness and death from a worldwide viral pandemic.
It’s in times like these that any president would want the most experienced advice he can find about a virus that has infected more than 8.3 million Americans and killed more than 222,000 among us.
But President Donald Trump isn’t like the presidents who governed us when we faced similar medical pandemics.
Up until now, he has received advice -- some of it unwanted -- from one our country’s finest medical specialists, Dr. Anthony Fauci, an American physician and immunologist who is the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.
Fauci, who is widely respected around the world, has been a policy adviser to every U.S. president since Ronald Reagan.
But Fauci’s early forecasts on the pandemic -- that there would be a surge in coronavirus cases across the country -- wasn’t what Trump wanted to hear.
The president, who has no medical training or knowledge whatsoever, told us that the pandemic was subsiding, cases shrinking, and that it would, eventually, miraculously, go away by itself.
Trump pushed to reopen our economy, including bars, restaurants and other gathering places, and put down anyone who wore a mask, especially Fauci and his political opponent, former Vice President Joe Biden. He also pushed school jurisdictions to send their kids back to school.
But after several packed, maskless, shoulder-to-shoulder Trump rallies, the surge that Fauci had forecast has begun, just as he said it would.
Cases have shot up across the country, and Fauci branded a White House gathering as a “superspreader” event after it was reported that multiple attendees and even members of Trump’s own West Wing staff had contracted the virus.
Trump angrily shot back on Monday, calling the respected infectious disease expert a “disaster.”
“People are tired of hearing Fauci and all these idiots,” Trump said in a telephone call with his campaign staff Monday, according to multiple news outlets.
Then Trump falsely suggested that Fauci’s advice on how to deal with the rising virus cases would have resulted in hundreds of thousands of more deaths.
On Tuesday, it was further reported that Trump has turned to another medical adviser: Scott Atlas, a neuroradiologist who is trained to treat abnormalities in the nervous system, spine, head and neck, but has little or no background in viral diseases.
Trump recruited Atlas after he heard him deliver a commentary on Fox News, otherwise known as the “Trump channel” in the White House.
Since then, Atlas has criticized expanded testing, and Trump has recruited him into the White House with the responsibility of responding to the pandemic.
He has called social distancing and wearing masks meaningless, and has advocated that infections should be allowed to spread naturally among the population at large, while treating the most vulnerable and those in nursing homes.
He maintains, like Trump, that the pandemic is almost over.
Needless to say, Atlas has sparked bitter infighting within the White House over policy. We’re in for a long and deadly medical battle.