Tag: Trump unqualified COVID-19 team leader

Trump COVID-19 advisor accused of ‘inciting violence’ after calling for Michigan to ‘rise up’ against Whitmer

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President Donald Trump’s top coronavirus advisor, Dr. Scott Atlas, is being accused of sedition and inciting violence by calling for Michigan to “rise up” after Democratic Governor Gretchen Whitmer issued new orders to fight the coronavirus pandemic.

“The only way this stops is if people rise up. You get what you accept,” Atlas, who is a radiologist – not an epidemiologist – tweeted Sunday night. He added the hashtags “#FreedomMatters” and “#StepUp” to his tweet.

Last month 14 people were charged in an alleged domestic terror plot to kidnap Governor Whitmer. Some reportedly also had a plan to “overthrow” the government, and some allegedly had “made plans to kidnap Whitmer and commit violence with the hopes of sparking a ‘civil war,'” MLive.com reports, quoting Attorney General Dana Nessel. Continue reading.

Trump health official meets with doctors pushing herd immunity

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A top Trump health official met Monday with a group of doctors who are proponents of the controversial “herd immunity” approach to COVID-19, even as other experts warn of its deadly and dangerous consequences.

Martin Kulldorff, a professor at Harvard; Sunetra Gupta, a professor at Oxford; and Jay Bhattacharya, a professor at Stanford, all of whom are epidemiologists studying infectious diseases, were invited to the meeting by Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar and Scott Atlas, an adviser to Trump on whom other experts have cast doubt for his statements about COVID-19, including his endorsement of herd immunity. 

In the meeting, the three doctors told Azar that allowing the virus to spread uncontrolled among young, healthy people while protecting older adults and those at higher risk for serious illness would build up enough population immunity to stop it from spreading widely while avoiding lockdowns and other mitigation measures that have had a damaging impact on the economy.  Continue reading.