White House pandemic adviser appears on Russian state media, dismisses predictions about Covid-19 deaths in US

From CNN’s Marshall Cohen and Maggie Fox

White House pandemic adviser Dr. Scott Atlas gave an extensive interview to RT, the Kremlin-controlled state media network in which he asserted coronavirus lockdowns “are killing people,” attacked public health experts and dismissed models predicting hundreds of thousands more pandemic deaths in the US.

Atlas gave the interview via satellite from the White House grounds, according to the footage. He said the pandemic is improving in the US, even as daily case counts and death counts hit new records for the pandemic as a whole.

“We see a lot of cases. We do not see an explosion of deaths,” Atlas asserted.

Atlas, who is a radiologist and who has no expertise in infectious diseases or epidemiology, also dismissed forecasts from the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington School of Medicine that forecasts 399,000 coronavirus deaths in the US by Feb. 1 under current conditions.

“The IHME model is really sort – it’s absurd to start looking at this model at this point,” Atlas said. “At this point in time anybody who’s even focusing on models has not learned from the past.”