On Sept. 1, Dr. Scott Atlas — a Hoover Institution creep and recent addition to the White House coronavirus task force — was forced to issue a blanket denial, to the allegations in the Washington Post contending that he was on the verge of winning President Donald Trump over to a “herd immunity” approach to the COVID crisis. His statement read: “There is no policy of the President or this administration of achieving herd immunity. There never has been any such policy recommended to the President or to anyone else from me.”
It may be troubling that Atlas has joined the White House team, as he had been a mouthpiece on Fox News for such as the following: “These people getting the infection is not really a problem, and in fact..., when you isolate everyone, including all the healthy people, you’re prolonging the problem because you’re preventing population immunity. Low-risk groups getting the infection is not a problem.” If he’s won any fights in the task force, it is his promotion of such policies as opening the schools without delay. However, the Post's reporting was a deliberate fallacy of composition. It was constructed by using previous (pre-White House) Atlas comments and then claiming that some Trump quotes can be understood as in the same ballpark as Atlas’s.
