Dr. Scott Atlas, the neuroradiologist who is now the Trump Administration’s public face of the coronavirus task force, was challenged to support statistics he stated during a BBC interview Friday morning, Yahoo News reports.
Atlas claimed that Europe has a coronavirus fatality rate 38 percent higher than the US, which apparently is a fictional statistic created by the Trump Administration.
The BBC interviewer, James Menendez, noted that the US has one of the highest fatality rates in the world, according to Johns Hopkins. Atlas claimed the Johns Hopkins data was “wrong” and “incorrect” but offered no data to contradict the university’s data.
While Atlas, like Trump, has continued to claim the US is doing far better at its response to the coronavirus than any other nation, it’s unclear where the “38 percent” figure comes from. FactCheck.org has researched the information and found that under any metric, the US falls short of most developed countries.
Atlas also claimed that he is not an advocate of the “herd immunity” myth, saying in the BBC interview that his inexperience in epidemiology and virology is meaningless: “You know, I have to laugh at that.”
Alas, however, he’s on video advocating the “herd immunity” myth.