White House medical adviser Dr. Scott Atlas rebuked the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention for his comment that “more than 90%” of the U.S. population remains vulnerable to novel coronavirus infection.
"It is not 90% of people that are susceptible to the infection,” Atlas said Wednesday, hours after CDC Director Robert Redfield told a Senate committee hearing that nine out of 10 Americans were vulnerable.
“I think that Dr. Redfield misstated something … the data on the susceptible, what he was talking about what his surveillance data that showed roughly 9% of the country has antibodies, but when you look at the CDC data state by state, much of that data is old,” Atlas said.
“The immunity to the infection is not solely determined by the percentage of people who have antibodies … the reality is that according to the papers from Sweden, Singapore and elsewhere there is cross-immunity highly likely from other infections and there is also T-cell immunity, and the combination of those makes the antibodies a small fraction of the people that have immunity.”
Atlas, appointed earlier this month to the White House coronavirus task force, has been criticized by media outlets for “pushing” “controversial” concepts such as herd immunity, adopted by Sweden to combat the spread of the novel coronavirus, and for having a “rosier” outlook regarding response to COVID-19 and mitigation measures.
Atlas has criticized reporting on the coronavirus, saying media outlets have done a “poor job” of explaining and portraying data.
When questioned by a reporter about the conflicting statements and who the public should believe, Atlas was adamant.
"You’re supposed to believe the science and I’m telling you the science," Atlas said.
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