Dr. Scott Atlas, the newest adviser to President Trump, insisted that he has not taken the place of other government health experts on the coronavirus task force despite becoming a fixture at recent White House press events.
“I was brought in as a special adviser to the president and work with the people that are there on the task force and others who are working extremely hard on this pandemic,” Atlas told the Washington Examiner. “So, I’m not here to replace anyone. … I’m here to work with everyone.”
Trump introduced Atlas at a press briefing last week, prompting an outcry from public health experts who feared that Atlas would replace Dr. Anthony Fauci, the government’s top infectious disease expert. For instance, Kavita Patel, a primary care physician and health policy expert who served in the Obama administration, called Trump’s hiring decision “partisan bias” that would “ultimately dilute the role of science.”
Atlas insisted, however, that members of the coronavirus task force, including Fauci, “all work very closely and frequently” with one another. He added that he is “helping out on the task force and [working] with all the people that are involved.”
“There’s no question that what’s going on here in the administration, in both the task force and in the White House, is a focus on using the data and the sciences. That’s the whole focus of everyone here,” Atlas said.
He did not say whether he had clashed with Fauci or Dr. Deborah Birx, the coronavirus task force’s coordinator. Politico reported Monday that, in private meetings, Atlas told Fauci that scientific evidence does not support mask mandates. The two were set to meet with one another Tuesday to “get a feel of where we are with regard to these issues, and do we differ and if so, how much,” Fauci said, according to Bloomberg.
Atlas, 65, is the former chief of neuroradiology at Stanford University Medical Center and currently a healthcare policy fellow at the Hoover Institution, a right-leaning think tank. He caught Trump’s attention after making several media appearances in which he stressed the harms of shuttering businesses and keeping schools closed. Before joining the coronavirus task force, Atlas had become one of the most prominent non-government health experts criticizing states for instituting shelter-in-place orders and putting people in isolation, which he has pointed out has led to increased rates of substance abuse and mental health crises.
Atlas’s hiring comes amid tensions between Trump and Fauci and Birx. Fauci has contradicted Trump’s rosier outlook of the pandemic. While Trump has urged states to reopen businesses since the spring, Fauci has warned several times that the coronavirus will not “disappear” because it is such a “highly transmissible virus.”
Last month, Fauci said he has not seen the president at the White House since June 2 and that he has not briefed Trump in at least two months, although he is “sure” his messages are passed along. In that same week, Trump said on Fox News that Fauci “is a nice man, but he’s made a lot of mistakes.”
Atlas has repeatedly rejected Fauci’s warnings that the coronavirus pandemic will continue unless the public takes social distancing protocols more seriously. After Fauci said that COVID-19 is the “perfect storm” of characteristics that makes the virus particularly worrisome, Atlas told Fox News’s Laura Ingraham that he is “cautiously optimistic because we actually know a lot [about the virus] now.”
“We have to tell the American people that this is not out of control here,” Atlas said. “You don’t eradicate a virus by locking down. That’s just a complete misconception. We know with socializing we’re going to get more cases.”
Atlas has decried statewide restrictions for months, writing in April that stay-at-home orders and isolation have cost the lives of people too afraid to seek critical medical care not related to COVID-19. He has also pushed for complete school reopenings in the fall.
Atlas reasserted Tuesday that “we are not in the same position that we were in March or April” and there is no need to panic.
When Trump announced Atlas’s new role in the White House on Aug. 10, about 5 million COVID-19 cases had been confirmed in the United States, and roughly 163,000 people had died. Just eight days later, the number of cases hit 5.45 million, and about 170,600 people have died.
