Dr. Robert Redfield, the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) was overheard by an NBC News reporter on a commercial airline flight trash-talking Trump's new coronavirus task force adviser Scott Atlas.
NBC News reports: “Redfield, who leads the CDC, suggested in a conversation with a colleague Friday that Dr. Scott Atlas is arming Trump with misleading data about a range of issues, including questioning the efficacy of masks, whether young people are susceptible to the virus and the potential benefits of herd immunity. ‘Everything he says is false,' Redfield said during a phone call made in public on a commercial airline and overheard by NBC News. Redfield acknowledged after the flight from Atlanta to Washington, D.C., that he was speaking about Atlas.”
Atlas, a neuroradiologist from Stanford's conservative Hoover Institution who joined Donald Trump's pandemic response team in August, has pushed the president to “embrace a controversial “herd immunity” strategy to combat the pandemic, which would entail allowing the coronavirus to spread through most of the population to quickly build resistance to the virus,” according to the Washington Post.
