CNN’s Jake Tapper and Chief Medical Correspondent Dr. Sanjay Gupta publicly approved of Twitter’s censorship of Dr. Scott Atlas, a member of the White House Coronavirus Task Force.
“I can’t think of anything more emblematic of this year that Twitter had to remove a tweet from Dr. Atlas because it was false,” Tapper said. “It was against masks.”
“It was false. He wrote ‘Masks? No.’ Unbelievable. The guy who has the presidency around coronavirus [sic], one of the most basic public health measures we can and should take, data shows that it could save tens of thousands of lives, and he’s saying ‘Masks, no,'” Gupta complained.
CNN's @jaketapper & @drsanjaygupta sound supportive of Twitter censoring @SWAtlasHoover: "He's harmful at this point."
"The AMA should get involved; he is violating his Hippocratic oath — first do no harm, he is doing harm." pic.twitter.com/WsASMYwIaU
— Tom Elliott (@tomselliott) October 19, 2020
Atlas was first censored on Sunday over a tweet expressing criticism of mask efficacy, instead urging people to use them as intended, when “close to others especially hi risk.”
In an email to The Federalist, Atlas outlined the scientific basis for his claims.
“In the deleted tweet, I cited the following evidence against general population masks:
1) Cases exploded even with mandates: Los Angeles County, Miami-Dade County, Hawaii, Alabama, the Philippines, Japan, the United Kingdom, Spain, France, Israel.
2) Dr. Carl Heneghan, University of Oxford, director of the Centre for Evidence-Based Medicine and editor in chief of British Medical Journal Evidence-Based Medicine: ‘It would appear that despite two decades of pandemic preparedness, there is considerable uncertainty as to the value of wearing masks.’
(https://www.cebm.net/covid-19/masking-lack-of-evidence-with-politics/)
3) The WHO: ‘The widespread use of masks by healthy people in the community setting is not yet supported by high quality or direct scientific evidence and there are potential benefits and harms to consider’ (http://bitly.ws/afUm)
4) The CDC: ‘Our systematic review found no significant effect of face masks on transmission of laboratory-confirmed influenza.’ (https://wwwnc.cdc.gov/eid/article/26/5/19-0994_article).
I also cited an article giving detailed explanation of the reasons why masks might not prevent spread: https://t.co/1hRFHsxe59.”
Despite Atlas’s scientific and medical credentials and citation of the World Health Organization’s evaluation of masks, both Tapper and Gupta claimed the censorship was necessary to curb the doctor’s tweet of WHO’s information.
“Atlas is a neuroradiologist. He is not an expert on infectious diseases, but President Trump saw him on Fox spewing his nonsense that the President likes and so he’s now on the coronavirus task force alienating all the other actual doctors on the force. Doctors who are experts on infectious disease,” Tapper added.
“He’s not helpful, he’s harmful at this point,” responded Gupta, the associate professor of neurosurgery, not infectious diseases, at Emory University Hospital. “I think we can definitively say Dr. Atlas may be a smart guy, but we should not be listening to him. At this point it is harmful. It is dangerous.”
Tapper even went so far as to suggest that Atlas’s medical credentials should be revoked for offering differing solutions to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic.
“Well, it’s worse than that, right? I mean the AMA should get involved,” Tapper said. “He is violating his Hippocratic Oath first: ‘do no harm.’ He is doing harm.”
Neither mentioned Gupta’s history of bungling medical science concerning COVID-19 on live television. In April, Gupta misread the infected Chris Cuomo’s chest X-ray during a live broadcast and received backlash from many for his attempts to look like an expert in radiology.
https://twitter.com/CuomoPrimeTime/status/1247339877345230848?s=20
https://twitter.com/tomfolanmd/status/1247541772281995264?s=20
Board-certified diagnostic radiologist x10 yrs. @drsanjaygupta shows us why 6 years of radiology training after med school was needed. He misinterpreted a chest X-ray on national TV (it was completely normal) and then misspoke the implications of that misinterpretation.
— Philip Teitelbaum (@PTeitelbaum) April 8, 2020
You could have said that you can’t read chest x-rays @drsanjaygupta honestly
— Jonathan Breslau, MD 🇺🇦 (@jonathanbreslau) April 7, 2020
Gupta’s history of mistakes extends back to the 2000s, when Gupta falsely accused filmmaker Michael Moore of inaccuracies “when the truth was that on every one of the allegedly fudged facts, Moore was actually right and CNN was wrong.” He also fell into some hot water after reportedly mixing up the reporting on some of his surgery patients in Nepal.
