Newly released emails from last August show Drs. Anthony Fauci and Deborah Birx felt that Scott Atlas, the conservative radiologist from the Hoover Institution who ended up advising Donald Trump on the pandemic, was harming efforts to prevent the spread of the coronavirus.

From emails obtained by Buzzfeed News through a Freedom of Information Act request, Fauci and Birx sent a series of emails following the appointment of Atlas, who had publicly made statements doubting the spread and the severity of the coronavirus before joining the Trump team.

“I am more convinced than ever the dangers of Dr. Atlas’ views on the pandemic,” Birx, the White House’s coronavirus response coordinator at the time, wrote to Fauci and other top health officials in an August 21st email, eleven days after his appointment. She accused Atlas of “providing information not based on data or knowledge of pandemics — nor pandemic responses on the ground but by personal opinion formed by cherry picking data from nonpeer reviewed COVID publications.

“This is dangerous and a true threat to a comprehensive and critical response to this pandemic,” she continued. “Dr Atlas [sic] views appeal to a subsection of American citizens and if allowed to gain traction will reverse months of incredibly hard won gains.”

Fauci responded that he was in agreement with Birx’s characterization of Atlas and his views.  “I agree and share your concerns,” Fauci wrote.  “He is a very clever guy and knows the literature (in his own way). It is in the interpretation of the literature that we differ.”

Atlas become infamous for appearing on Trump-friendly media, specifically Fox News, in which he routinely undermines FDA and CDC officials’ recommendations for masking and social distancing.  He repeatedly downplayed the infection data and promoted debunked “cures” like hydroxychloroquine.  He also promoted allowing the virus to spread naturally, while protecting only elderly people, a misguided policy to obtain herd immunity which experts say would have cost millions of American lives.

In the exchange, Birx notes that Atlas believed the US had reached herd immunity in August, when the nation had surpassed 170,000 fatalities due to the virus.  “He is convince[d] that we have reach[ed] herd immunity in the NE. Midwest and now the Sunbelt,” she wrote.

Atlas was quickly countered by hundreds of mainstream medical and public health professionals who made media appearances and drafted editorials decrying Atlas’s approach to dealing with the pandemic.