Scott Atlas blasts critics of Trump’s comeback rally
‘I don’t even know what the controversy is about’
Dr Scott Atlas, a member of the White House coronavirus task force, is slamming critics who deemed President Trump’s comeback rally in Florida unsafe, alleging that they have an ‘agenda’ separate from health concerns.
Atlas, who is also a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, told The Spectator in an interview Tuesday that the President met the standard of care necessary to be cleared for public events. According to the Center for Disease Control, individuals who have COVID-19 may be around others if it has been 10 days since their symptoms first appeared and if they have gone 24 hours with no fever without the use of fever-reducing medication. However, various media outlets criticized the fact that the mask-less president had not yet tested negative for the virus when he scheduled the rally.
‘He meets that [CDC] definition,’ Atlas told The Spectator. ‘I don’t even know what the controversy is about him being outside, doing his job. I mean, he’s like all other Americans. He knows he has to go to work. And he’s not infectious. He’s not contagious.’
‘It’s obvious, I think, the people that don’t think he should be working, they have some other agenda in mind because that’s just not what the what the science says,’ he added.
Even after Dr Scott Conley announced that Trump tested negative for COVID-19 on back-to-back days ahead of the rally, BuzzFeed News criticized the type of test used by the President’s physician. The CDC ‘does not recommend using antigen tests to make decisions about discontinuing isolation’, BuzzFeed noted, adding that the rapid tests are not as accurate in detecting traces of the virus.
‘There is no requirement to even be tested again,’ Atlas reiterated. ‘I think these people either are denying the data or they have simply lost rational thought to think that now we’re supposed to talk about what type of test we had. There is no requirement to be tested again. Period.’
