Bullshit treatment...

'Doctors disagree all the time': Navarro drags Fauci feud into the public

The clash focused on the efficacy a controversial potential treatment for the coronavirus.

By QUINT FORGEY

White House trade adviser Peter Navarro on Monday questioned the experience and medical judgment Dr. Anthony Fauci — dragging his reported dispute with the nation's top infectious disease expert out of the situation room and onto cable news.

In a fiery interview on CNN, Navarro appeared to confirm media accounts of his altercation with Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, during a meeting Saturday of the White House coronavirus task force. The clash focused on the efficacy of hydroxychloroquine, a controversial potential treatment for the coronavirus that President Donald Trump has promoted despite limited clinical evidence.

"There was that discussion on Saturday, and if we didn't have disagreement and debate in the Trump administration, this administration would not be as strong as it is," Navarro said of the incident, which reportedly saw him spar with Fauci, who has voiced caution about hydroxychloroquine's potential to combat coronavirus.

Trump and his allies have promoted the decades-old malaria drug as a possible medical remedy for Covid-19, the disease caused by the novel coronavirus, despite repeated warnings from Fauci and other health officials that the drug requires further clinical trials.

"The data are really just, at best, suggestive," Fauci told CBS's "Face the Nation" on Sunday. "There have been cases that show there may be an effect, and there are others to show there's no effect. So I think in terms of science, I don't think we could definitively say it works."

Responding to that assessment on Monday, Navarro said he would let Fauci "speak for himself," but added, "I would have two words for you: Second opinion."

Navarro, who has no medical experience, went on to assert that "doctors disagree about things all the time," and forcefully defended his credentials as sufficient for him to weigh in on the scientific debate over the drug.

"My qualifications, in terms of looking at the science, is that I'm a social scientist. I have a PhD," he said. "And I understand how to read statistical studies, whether it's in medicine, the law, economics or whatever."

Navarro acknowledged that while he was "not the arbiter of this," he argued there were "a lot of doctors out there who are on one side and there's a of doctors on the other side" of the issue.

"It's like, if CNN wants to set up Dr. Fauci as the only authority on medicine and only rely on him, that's one set of facts," he said. "What I'm saying is doctors disagree all the time."

The new front in the feud between the hawkish economist and the widely respected physician marks the most intense, public escalation yet of the ongoing debate between administration officials over hydroxychloroquine, which Trump has eagerly championed in an effort to gin up optimism amid the global pandemic and restart the American economy in a matter of weeks.

"I hope they use it because I'll tell you what: What do you have to lose?" Trump said Saturday at the White House task force's daily news conference, referring to Covid-19 patients. "In some cases, they’re in bad shape. What do you have to lose?"

But when Fauci was asked his opinion of hydroxychloroquine at Sunday's briefing, the president interjected before the career immunologist could respond to reporters.

"Do you know how many times he's answered that question? Maybe 15 — 15 times," Trump said. "You don't have to ask the question."