On Friday’s “Morning Joe,” Joe Scarborough called out Dr. Mehmet Oz and Dr. Phil McGraw for the “stupidity” of their comments on Fox News this week talking about the nation’s coronavirus response.
“Listen to Dr. Phil from last night and let’s try to figure out what the hell is going on,” Scarborough said. He rolled a clip of the McGraw, who is not a medical doctor but holds a PhD in psychology, downplaying the seriousness of the pandemic in an interview with Fox News’ primetime host Laura Ingraham and comparing the death toll (inaccurately) to swimming pool-related deaths. At the clip’s conclusion, Scarborough remarked, “The stupidity of that… I’ll let others explain just how stupid that is.”
From there, he rolled a clip of Oz saying some people might consider a “tradeoff” in the form of a 2-3% mortality rate in exchange for reopening American schools. Oz, who apologized for the remark on Thursday, made the comments Tuesday night, also while appearing as a guest on Fox News.
“My God, it is — again — as Dr. Fauci said, it is unprecedented,” Scarborough said, almost lost for words. He added, “Lives are going to be lost because of the propaganda that is being spewed out there and it really has started the last couple of days.”
“Morning Joe” co-host Willie Geist highlighted the Thursday night appearance of Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nation’s top infectious disease expert, on Ingraham’s show: “You have the tale of three doctors that you just showed, all on Fox News, speaking to the Fox News audience. Dr. Fauci brought information. I think it’s important for doctors to go all over the place and talk to all those audiences. He rebutted Laura Ingraham’s theory about HIV there, point-by-point, and just presented facts. The other two doctors — Doctors Oz and Phil — both very smart men, so then you ask yourself, ‘What’s going on there?’ Dr. Phil knows that the reason the economy was shut down is because this is contagious — I can’t believe I’m saying this out loud — in a way that car crashes and swimming pool drownings are not.”
Geist concluded “the problem with TV doctors is they think about TV ratings and they think about TV audiences,” but Doctors Oz and Phil “know better.”