Dr. Anthony Fauci is calling President Donald Trump’s new coronavirus advisor Dr. Scott Atlas an “outlier.”
“The bad guy is the virus. The bad guy is not the person on the other side of your opinion,” Fauci said during a CNN interview on Monday.
The top infectious disease expert said that the American public “really needs to know the facts” but “some of the media that I deal with really kind of — I wouldn’t say distort things, but certainly give opposing perspectives on what seems to be a pretty obvious fact.”
He pointed to Fox News saying, “If you listen to Fox News, with all due respect to the fact that they do have some good reporters, some of the things that they report there are outlandish, to be honest with you.”
Fauci expressed concern that “sometimes things are said that are really taken either out of context or are actually incorrect.”
He added by calling Scott Atlas an “outlier,” as he said, “Most are working together. I think, you know, what the outlier is. My difference is with Dr. Atlas, I’m always willing to sit down and talk with him and see if we could resolve those differences.”
See Fauci’s remarks below:
Dr. Fauci: “If you listen to Fox News, with all due respect to the fact that they do have some good reporters, some of the things that they report there are outlandish, to be honest with you.”
— Justin Baragona (@justinbaragona) September 28, 2020
Fauci also says he has "differences" with Scott Atlas, who he calls an "outlier." pic.twitter.com/JZvSAwK4MP
Fauci’s remarks come amid an NBC News report where Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) Director Robert Redfield was overheard on a flight during a phone call saying of Atlas, “Everything he says is false.” Atlas is a neuroradiologist but, as NBC News notes, he has no experience in infectious diseases or public health.
The network, citing a member of the coronavirus task force, reported that “there is a concern among Redfield and others that Atlas continually briefs the president and misrepresents what other health experts have said in sworn testimony.”
In response to Redfield’s comments, Atlas told NBC News, “Everything I have said is directly from the data and the science. It echoes what is said by many of the top medical scientists in the world, including those at Stanford, Harvard, and Oxford.”
