Watch: TV Doctors Want US to Get 'Mojo' Back; with COVID Deaths the Price
Dr. Anthony Fauci is the face for COVID-19 information for most of the nation, but you can imagine in President Donald Trump's perfect world it would be the team of Dr. Mehmet Oz and Dr. Phil McGraw.
The pair, like Trump, are television personalities. The duo has come under fire for their expertise in ways that are often deemed suspect. But they also appear to be working in sync with the president's evolving point-of-view regarding the lessening of social distancing guidelines regarding the virus.
Dr. Oz, who has been a fixture on Fox News during the pandemic, made that point with Sean Hannity on his show on Tuesday night.
"First, we need our mojo back. Let's start with things that are really critical to the nation where we think we might be able to open without getting into a lot of trouble. Schools are a very appetizing opportunity," he told Hannity, Deadline reports.
"I just saw a nice piece in The Lancet arguing that the opening of schools may only cost us 2 to 3 percent in terms of total mortality. You know, that's — any life is a life lost, but to get every child back into a school where they're safely being educated, being fed, and making the most out of their lives, with the theoretical risk on the backside, it might be a trade-off some folks would consider."
"The article he cited appeared to be an April 6 review in The Lancet, a medical journal, that said studies had shown school closures alone would prevent only 2 to 4 percent of deaths from the coronavirus," reports The New York Times.
The social media response was quick and critical, as this Twitter feed shows.
By Friday, #FireDrOz was one of the leading trending hashtags on Twitter.
This led to an apology by Dr. Oz in a video released on Twitter on Thursday: "I've realized my comments on risks around schools have confused and upset people, which was never my intention, I misspoke."
Complicating matters was earlier on Thursday morning when he appeared on "Fox and Friends" to criticize Boston University for canceling its fall 2020 semester.
"I learned that Boston University canceled its fall semester. That really bothered me. How do you know right now in April -- before you even tried to reopen-- if you need to close down your school through the rest of this calendar year?"
"Oz said that though BU is signaling that they are 'trying to do the right thing,' closing the school down 'is not the right thing' for everyone," Fox News reports.
"You're hurting people that you're responsible for. I am a doctor. I want you to be safer -- I want you to err on the side of being overly cautious, but not at the expense of making decisions that don't really serve us," Dr. Oz said.
In the past, Dr. Oz has been accused of promoting health remedies and theories that have been criticized for having little value. Another study by The Lancet brought this to life when it examined the veracity of health advice dispensed by Dr. Oz and other television doctors.
"Approximately half of the recommendations have either no evidence or are contradicted by the best available evidence. Potential conflicts of interest are rarely addressed. The public should be skeptical about recommendations made on medical talk shows."
"Oz has morphed not just willingly but exuberantly into a carnival barker," wrote New York Times columnist Frank Bruni in 2015. "He's a one-man morality play about the temptations of mammon and the seduction of applause, a Faustian parable with a stethoscope."
That year ten of his colleagues at Columbia University called for him to end his affiliation with the University "guilty of either outrageous conflicts of interest or flawed judgments about what constitutes appropriate medical treatments, or both."
His colleague Dr. Phil also came under fire comments he made this week. On an appearance on Fox News on Thursday reported by the New York Post, he told Laura Ingraham:
"The economy is crashing around us and they're doing that because people are dying because of coronavirus. I get that, but look, the fact of the matter is we have people dying - 45,000 people a year die from automobile accidents, 480,000 from cigarettes, 360,000 from swimming pools - but we don't shut the country for that."
Dr. Phil appears to have conflated the number of drownings internationally per year (somewhere around 320,000 as reported by the World Health Organization) with the number of drownings per year in the United States, which the CDC said averaged a little more than 3,500 per year from 2005 - 2014.
Both men were scoured on MSNBC's "Morning Joe" on Friday.
"The party of life is suddenly fine with very high mortality rate/ I guess it's getting in the way of, you know — taking care of people's health is getting in the way of the bottom line," said co-host Joe Scarborough reports the website MediaLite.
"The problem is, they have huge followings. Dr. Oz and Dr. Phil both have shows with millions of viewers," added co-host Willie Geist. "Fox News, those programs, obviously, are very highly rated. Millions of viewers. So when those prominent doctors go on TV and say these things, a lot of people listen. That's reflected, by the way, in polling, that shows who is taking this seriously and who is not."
There was even criticism found from the most unlikely of sources:
You can watch Dr. Oz's comments in this video from The Damage Report:
And Dr. Phil's: