On Friday, U.S. Surgeon General Dr. Jerome Adams blasted the media for hyping “worst-case scenarios” when discussing the coronavirus crisis. Adams appeared on CBS “This Morning,” where co-host Gayle King ripped President for a similar perspective to Adams’ arguing that the president had “no medical training.”
As Kyle Drennen of Newsbusters reports, King began the exchange by asserting:
Dr. Adams, let’s talk about ventilators for just a second. You know, doctors and nurses around the country are saying, “Hello, government, we need ventilators, we need ventilators now.” But President Trump seems to have a different take on that. I want you to hear what he said last night and get your response to that.
King then played a clip of the president saying, “But I have a feeling that a lot of the numbers that are being said in some areas are just bigger than they’re going to be. I don’t believe you need 40,000 or 30,000 ventilators. You know, you go in major hospitals, sometimes they’ll have two ventilators. So now all of a sudden they’re saying, ‘Can we order 30,000 ventilators?”
King continued, “Dr. Adams, the President, to our knowledge, has no medical training, yet he continues to question the advice from the medical experts and professionals. Is that frustrating to you?”
Adams, who is an anesthesiologist and vice admiral in the U.S. Public Health Service Commissioned Corps, answered, “Well, you mentioned ventilators, and Dr. Birx said this, when you look at some of the projections out there, they’re based on worst-case scenarios and doing something. I heard a reporter yelling at Peter Navarro yesterday, ‘Where is a million ventilators?’ A million ventilators for the United States would mean one in 300 people in this country were on a ventilator at once. There is nowhere in the world where we’ve seen that type of spread of coronavirus, not even close. And so, some of these projections are way off. But we are leaning into supply. I was on a meeting with the American Society of Anesthesiologists last week and they’ve identified 70,000 ventilators that are in communities right now that can be converted.”
Drennen noted that the interview Adams referenced came from CNN on Thursday, when CNN anchor Brianna Keilar cut off White House advisor Peter Navarro from correcting her on her assumptions of how many ventilators were needed nationwide.
Then King started hyping New York governor Andrew Cuomo, gushing, “But we heard New York Governor Andrew Cuomo ask for ventilators. He gave very specific numbers. Do you think he doesn’t know what he’s talking about when it comes to this issue? When he’s in constant contact with New York – the top New York hospitals, by the way, that are in trouble.”
Adams, who received a Master of Public Health degree from the University of California, Berkeley, with a focus on chronic disease prevention, countered:
Well, I think that if you – I think that’s a fair question, and I think that if you talk to experts, Dr. Fauci, Dr. Birx and others, the models in many cases are way off. New York City, we actually have people on the ground who have told us that there are 1,000 ventilators sitting in a warehouse right now that haven’t been used.
You heard Governor Cuomo yesterday say, “Look, we actually have resources, they’re just mismatched.” And so, we sent a team, a FEMA team to help New York City make sure the resources are getting to where they need. I talked to people in western New York who said they’re furloughing nurses in hospitals in western New York State while people in New York City are suffering. We need to make sure we get the right resources to the right people. And that’s what we’re committed to doing.
Transcript courtesy of Newsbusters.