Adding a Fox News doctor

Donny’s found a new doctor buddy.

President Donald Trump has found a new doctor for his coronavirus task force — and this time there’s no daylight between them.

It’s gonna disappear, like things that disappear. It’s because of testing that we have so many cases. They were all old anyway. You can fix it by injecting a little bleach. We’re doing GREAT. Let’s watch some football.

Trump last week announced that Dr. Scott Atlas, a frequent guest on Fox News Channel, has joined the White House as a pandemic adviser. Atlas, the former chief of neuroradiology at Stanford University Medical Center and a fellow at Stanford’s conservative Hoover Institution, has no expertise in public health or infectious diseases.

So what, he’s a DOCTOR.

But he has long been a critic of coronavirus lockdowns and has campaigned for kids to return to the classroom and for the return of college sports, just like Trump.

College sports! What could possibly be more important!?

“Scott is a very famous man who’s also very highly respected,” Trump told reporters as he introduced the addition. “He has many great ideas and he thinks what we’ve done is really good.”

This was the president talking? Not a five-year-old who wandered in from somewhere?

Atlas, the sole doctor to share the stage at Trump’s pandemic briefings this past week, has long questioned polices that have been embraced by public health experts both in the U.S. and abroad. He has called it a “good thing” for younger, healthy people to be exposed to the virus, while falsely claiming children are at near “zero risk.”

A good thing, hey? Even now that we know there’s little if any immunity? How is it a good thing then?

In an April op-ed in The Hill newspaper, Atlas bemoaned that lockdowns may have prevented the development of “natural herd immunity.”

That was April. Growing evidence is that there is no herd immunity. People have been getting the virus a second time.

Paul E. Peterson, director of the program on education policy and governance at Harvard University and a senior fellow at Hoover with Atlas, praised Atlas as “a really brilliant guy” with “a tremendous knowledge base” about the virus. Peterson said Atlas is someone who conducts ”the most rigorous and careful research before he comes to a conclusion.”

Some colleagues have found Atlas abrasive. But Peterson, who has written several op-eds with Atlas advocating the reopening of schools and who appeared with Atlas at a White House event this past week, praised Atlas as “delightful to work with” and stressed the value of Trump having input from people with a variety of backgrounds.

“If you get a variety of people from one perspective or one kind of training out there, that’s not desirable,” he said. “It’s extremely important to have diversity on the advisory board.”

Right. Some who say the pandemic is very serious and some who say it’s nothing and all we need is for more people to get infected.

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