After Donald Trump has been bashing doctors and baselessly accusing them of diagnosing people with coronavirus because they get more money, Trump campaign advisor Corey Lewandowski insisted, “We have enormous respect for doctors who are serving the front line patients and they do an amazing job, by and large.” That was right after he smeared doctors, too.
On Fox News Sunday today, host Chris Wallace asked Lewandowski, “Hasn’t the president failed at the biggest job this year, containing the virus?”
Lewandowski said no because Trump “was the very first” leader to ban flights coming in from China.
FACT CHECK: Bill Gates, who probably knows more about public health than Lewandowski, made a plausible argument as to why Trump’s January 31 travel restrictions (it was not really a ban) actually worsened the pandemic but putting that aside, that was nine months ago and the cases are skyrocketing.
Worse, Lewandowski went on to suggest that Trump knows better than doctors and public health officials.
LEWANDOWSKI: What we saw, very candidly, was most of the time the experts were wrong. They told us that our hospitals would be overrun and that you wouldn’t have access to the care and where we are today is, through Operation Warp Speed, people are going to have the opportunity to have a solution to this pandemic and, more importantly than that, Chris, the survival rate right now – and I’m not belittling this - is 99.99 if you’re under the age of 50 years old if you get COVID-19. So, we have to be careful -
WALLACE: That, that’s certainly, Corey, that’s accentuating the positive. The fact is, more than 230,000 Americans have died so far from this disease. On Wednesday, a thousand people died. On Thursday, a thousand people died.
Wallace played a clip of Trump saying that doctors get more money if they say a death was caused by COVID.
WALLACE: What is the president’s evidence that doctors, many of whom are risking their lives treating these patients, are in fact lining their pockets by saying they are inflating the number of COVID deaths?
LEWANDOWSKI: You know, Chris, I haven’t seen that evidence but we have seen on multiple occasions, uh, instances where people have claimed that they have died from COVID-19 and that wasn’t the case. We saw that Fox News actually did a whole exposé on an individual who died in a motorcycle accident. Maybe he had COVID but died in a head-on collision. They said it was a COVID-related death. Fox News exposed that entire hypocrisy.
So, look I think, we’re categorizing sometimes individuals who may have COVID but aren’t dying from that and claiming it as a COVID death which is not accurate.
WALLACE: But there are also, according to a number of studies, that the number of people who actually are dying from COVID is greatly undercounted.
But we’re talking specifically about the president saying that doctors are inflating the number of COVID deaths.
Wallace read a quote from the president of the American Medical Association, calling Trump’s allegation “a malicious, outrageous and completely misguided charge.”
WALLACE: Does the president stand by his accusation that doctors are profiteering off this virus?
LEWANDOWSKI: You know, Chris, I haven’t spoken to the president about this directly so I couldn’t answer that. But I can tell you that –
WALLACE: You understand it’s a pretty serious thing to say about the nation’s doctors who are on the front lines?
LEWANDOWSKI: Look, we have enormous respect for doctors who are serving the front line patients and they do an amazing job, by and large.
You know that Fox News thinks Trump’s attacks on doctor are problematic because they called this segment, “Trump has ‘enormous respect’ for doctors who are serving patients amid pandemic: Lewandowski.”
You can watch it below, from the November 1, 2020 Fox News Sunday.
And Corey, the guy to manhandled a female reporter, says this amounts to an expression of admiration and respect for the medical profession. ????
Words fail me.