Celebrity physician Dr. Drew Pinsky stated that the media is stoking the flames of coronavirus “panic” in the U.S., and the industry should “be held accountable.”
“What I have a problem with is the panic and the fact that businesses are getting destroyed, that people’s lives are being upended, not by the virus, but by the panic,” Dr. Pinsky said in an interview with CBS last week. “The panic must stop. And the press, they really somehow need to be held accountable because they are hurting people.”
“A bad flu season is 80,000 dead, we’ve got about 18,000 dead from influenza this year, we have a hundred from corona,” Dr. Pinsky said.
“Which should you be worried about, influenza or corona? A hundred versus 18,000? It’s not a trick question. And look, everything that’s going on with the New York cleaning the subways and everyone using Clorox wipes and get your flu shot, which should be the other message, that’s good. That’s a good thing, so I have no problem with the behaviors,” he added.
California, Washington state, New York, and Oregon are among the states to declare states of emergencies as the corona virus spreads. So far, at least 603 cases have been confirmed in the U.S. Across the globe, more than 110,000 cases have been reported.
Since President Trump named Vice President Mike Pence to lead the administration’s response to coronavirus, reporters and Democratic critics have resurfaced reports of what some have called an inadequate response to a public health crisis in Indiana during Pence’s time as governor of the state, as the Washington Examiner reported.
Dr. Pinsky came to Mike Pence’s defense, saying, “I don’t know what they’re talking about. We used to point at the way Indiana responded to the opiate of the HIV epidemic as the model for the country. I don’t know what they’re talking about.”
“They handled them better than most states did, almost any other states,” Dr. Pinsky said. “So, I don’t know what the hell people are talking about. That is fake news.”
