The director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Dr Robert Redfield was overheard talking about new White House COVID-19 task force adviser Dr Scott Atlas in a phone call, saying ‘everything he says is false’.
Redfield, who has previously been rebuked by President Trump for his bleak assessments of the COVID-19 recovery, was overheard talking to a colleague on the phone on a flight from Atlanta to Washington D.C. on Friday.
During the call, Redfield could be heard expressing concern that Atlas – who is a late addition to the coronavirus task force – is sharing inaccurate information with Trump.
‘Everything he says is false,’ Redfield is reported to have said in the call.
The misleading data, according to Redfield, includes questioning the efficiency of masks, if young people are susceptible to COVID-19 and herd immunity.
A CDC spokesperson acknowledged the phone call between Redfield and a colleague and said the private discussion was regarding a number of points he has previously made public about COVID-19.
Atlas, who was brought onto the White House task force by Trump last month, is a neuroradiologist with no background in infectious diseases.
His views on handling the coronavirus pandemic have been denounced by his peers at Stanford University’s medical school.
Atlas has repeatedly pushed for schools to reopen and has privately advocated for potential herd immunity, according to a task force member.
He publicly denied last week that he had embraced a herd immunity strategy.
In response to Redfield’s comments, Atlas said: ‘Everything I have said is directly from the data and the science. It echoes what is said by many of the top medical scientists in the world, including those at Stanford, Harvard, and Oxford.’
In an interview with NBC after the phone call, Redfield gave a grim assessment of the coronavirus pandemic that contradicts what Trump has publicly said.
‘We’re nowhere near the end,’ Redfield said.
Trump has previously asserted as he seeks re-election that the country was ’rounding the corner’.
Redfield last week rejected Trump’s suggestions that COVID-19 doesn’t really affect young people.
‘It’s not true,’ Redfield said. ‘We know that the infection is very common. We know the highest-risk group right now is 18 to 25.’
He did, however, say that Trump was correct to say the death rates were low among that age group.
Trump has also publicly dismissed congressional testimony by Redfield earlier this month on when a vaccine could be broadly rolled out, calling him ‘confused’.