Public health experts losing ‘credibility’ with continued COVID warnings: Dr. Marty Makary

Fox News medical contributor Dr. Marty Makary joined “Your World” Monday to discuss whether the medical establishment was in danger of losing the trust of Americans after the CDC urged caution as more states lift coronavirus restrictions.

MAKARY: When you have a [coronavirus] case today, it’s very different from a case in the fall or the spring of last year. So I don’t think it’s honest for public health officials to use fear to tell people that we could flare into another surge. There’s fewer susceptible people left out there. We need to be vigilant with the new strains, but we’re doing better with the vaccines.

If you could look back on what Biden COVID task force member Michael Osterholm said, the darkest days were still ahead. That was not true. Remember the “twindemic,” how influenza was going to combine with COVID and cause a catastrophic epidemic from those two in combination? Didn’t happen. We didn’t have flu that year. Remember the surge on top of a surge that was supposed to happen over the summer? People are getting a sense that the risk is declining and they’re correct. A lot of this stuff is causing people to lose credibility with the public health community.

Look at the data. Airplanes are not a super spreading source. If you look at people on planes, where there’s good ventilation and wearing masks, we’ve seen good safe air travel. People need to know when they get their vaccine, there’s a reward for that. The reward is once you wait four weeks from the first dose, you can be liberated. You can live a normal life. That should be our messaging. Certainly we’re going to watch the variants closely. For now it’s clear that even in parts of the country where there’s high dominance of B.1.1.7 mutation, you’re seeing cases plummet there: Texas, Florida, Southern California. So we have to put things in perspective. Remember that isolation kills people too.

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