PETER NAVARRO IS NOT A DOCTOR

‘Doctors disagree all the time’: Navarro drags Fauci feud into the open

The clash between the administration officials focused on the efficacy of a controversial potential treatment for the coronavirus.
By QUINT FORGEY

04/06/2020

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

In a fiery interview on CNN’s “New Day,” Navarro appeared to confirm media accounts of his altercation with Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, during a meeting of the White House coronavirus task force Saturday. 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 ability to combat the coronavirus.


The president and his allies, however, have continued to champion the decades-old malaria drug as a possible medical remedy for Covid-19, the disease caused by the novel coronavirus, while senior health officials have warned repeatedly that the medicine requires further trials.

“The data are really just, at best, suggestive,” Fauci told CBS’ “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 Monday, Navarro said he would let Fauci “speak for himself,” but added, “I would have two words for you: second opinion.”

Although Navarro has no medical experience, he 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 deliberation over the drug.

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

DR. NAVARRO IS NOT A REAL DOCTOR AND HE IS A FRINGE BOURGEOIS POLITICAL ECONOMIST