Why Respectable Doctors Choose to Mix with Cranks and Quacks on Fox News
Taking one for the team. Kudos, Dr. Lipkin 
April 15, 2020 7:30AM ET
Why Respectable Doctors Choose to Mix with Cranks and Quacks on Fox News
“The guy who lives on Pennsylvania Avenue doesn’t watch Maddow,” one doctor says. “If I need to reach him, I go on Fox & Friends at 4 o’clock in the morning”
By Andy Kroll
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In mid-December, Lipkin says he heard from a contact in China about an outbreak of a pneumonia-like illness in the city of Wuhan. He wrote to George Fu Gao, the head of the China CDC, whom Lipkin had known for years through his work to help China strengthen its national public-health system. He didn’t hear back for several weeks, but when he did, he immediately knew how bad the outbreak could become.
He flew to China in January and spent seven or eight days on the ground meeting with Chinese government officials, public-health experts, scientists, academics, and journalists. “It was clear there was a tragedy in Wuhan,” Lipkin says. When he returned to the U.S., Lipkin knew he had to do whatever he could to sound the alarm. That meant, among other things, trying to get the attention of the president and his administration via Trump’s preferred TV channel.
In more normal times, during a more normal presidency, the government would seek out experts far and wide, within and outside of government, using an organized process to help inform its decision-making and shape its policies. John Brennan, who was President Obama’s homeland security adviser during the 2009 H1N1 outbreak, says that Obama relied on the latest data and advice of subject-matter experts to shape the administration’s response. Brennan remembers Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, and then-CDC Director Dr. Tom Frieden being fixtures in the White House during H1N1 planning conversations. Pandemic experts from the Bush White Houe were asked to stay on to deal with H1N1. Influenza experts in academia were enlisted. “For a medical challenge that was outside his area of competence and experience, [Obama] wanted the science and professionals to drive the policy discussions,” Brennan says.
Scientists now face an altogether different challenge: counseling a president who has little regard for facts or science, who prefers to get his information from fawning TV anchors, debunked contrarians, and a loose network of old friends, business partners, and sycophants. For those who worked in public-health and medicine, whether to study new viruses or devise strategies for how best to communicate during a public-health crisis, there is an urgency now more than ever to go on TV and fight bad information with good. “It is particularly frustrating for us who’ve been in these fields for decades to see inappropriate responses,” says Matthew Seeger, a Wayne State University professor who specializes in crisis communications and helped design the CDC’s 450-page communications manual for pandemics. “When we see people making mistakes, we want to help.”
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https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/trump-fox-news-doctors-lipkin-coronavirus-lou-dobbs-hannity-983859/
