The President's Crackpot New Coronavirus Czar

The doctor is in and ready to rumble with the COVID

As always, the president hires only the best people. Those people are ones loyal to the president above the constitution, the rule of law, the truth and the American people. Their actual expertise and competence are both basically irrelevant. The New York Times writes about the new crackpot leader the president has picked to drive the federal COVID-19 disaster even farther off the rails than it already is.

“Dr. Scott W. Atlas has argued that the science of mask wearing is uncertain, that children cannot pass on the coronavirus and that the role of the government is not to stamp out the virus but to protect its most vulnerable citizens as Covid-19 takes its course.

Ideas like these, both ideologically freighted and scientifically disputed, have propelled the radiologist and senior fellow at Stanford University’s conservative Hoover Institution into President Trump’s White House, where he is pushing to reshape the administration’s response to the pandemic.

‘I think Trump clearly does not like the advice he was receiving from the people who are the experts — Fauci, Birx, etc. — so he has slowly shifted from their advice to somebody who tells him what he wants to hear,’ said Dr. Carlos del Rio, an infectious disease expert at Emory University who is close to Dr. Birx, the White House coronavirus response coordinator.”

The NYT article points out that Dr. Atlas is not an epidemiologist or an infectious disease expert. Those are the usual kinds of expertise for dealing with jobs usually associated with a pandemic response. To compensate for his lack of expertise, Atlas has made appearances on the Fox News Channel. Apparently, his ideological rigidity and blithering infectious disease nonsense is what the president found appealing in this creep. Apparently, the president feels that this is the kind of pandemic leadership that can get him re-elected.

The president is enthused for obvious reasons he had made clear to the public: “He has many great ideas. And he thinks what we’ve done is really good, and now we’ll take it to a new level. .... Once you get to a certain number — we use the word herd — once you get to a certain number, it’s going to go away.”

We use the word herd?

Anyway, it is going to go away. And, Atlas has many great ideas, e.g., get herd immunity the old fashioned plague way and to hell with the death and morbidity toll. He is going to take gross incompetence to a new level, super-gross incompetence.

Dr. Atlas denies ever advocating getting to herd immunity the old fashioned plague way. But there’s that disconnect with these statements that Atlas made in public: “When you isolate everyone, including all the healthy people, you’re prolonging the problem because you’re preventing population immunity. Low-risk groups getting the infection is not a problem. In fact, it’s a positive. .... The reality is that when a population has enough people who have had the infection, and since these people don’t have a problem with the infection, that’s not a problem. That’s not a bad thing.”

I'm no expert, just a simple boy from the Midwest, but that sure does sound like Atlas favors building herd immunity the old fashioned way.

Against the advice of real experts and contrary to real world data, Atlas argued for the new CDC guidance that people without Covid-19 symptoms do not need to be tested even if they were exposed to an infected person. Atlas apparently ignores the fact that people without symptoms could be major disease spreaders.

Dr. Atlas has some influential experts on his side. For example, last April Rush Limbaugh praised Atlas for “countering Fauci. .... Scott Atlas is a brilliant guy, and he thinks by early October that we could well be burned out of Covid.” So there you have it, another expert, Rush the Blowhard, says it's going to be all over by early October.

It is good that the president has found one of the best people to valiantly protect Americans from the pandemic.

In other jaw-dropping news

Various sources are reporting that the president has recommended that people vote twice for him in the 2020 election, once by mail and once in person. Knowingly voting twice is illegal, but as we all know by now, the president does not care about the rule of law whenever it gets in his way. Massive voter fraud for the president’s re-election is good, but horrible and awful if it is for his opponent. The president's rationale is simple, but flawed: “If it has [mail in ballot been counted] you will not be able to Vote & the Mail In System worked properly. If it has not been Counted, VOTE (which is a citizen’s right to do).”

Trump ignores the fact that many or most mail-in ballots will not be counted until after election day. He is asking people to risk breaking voter laws, some of which are felonies.

Of course, the White House strongly denies that the president was suggesting that anyone should break the law, but that denial is clearly contradicted by what the president actually said.

One has to admire hypocrisy and disregards for people’s welfare like that. It is just so blatant that one’s jaw literally falls off one’s face, or close to it.