Reprinted with permission from Alternet

President Donald Trump's highly controversial COVID-19 advisor, Dr. Scott Atlas, is urging Americans to visit their elderly family members for Thanksgiving because it may be their final one. Atlas warns against isolation despite the coronavirus pandemic's near-exponential explosion.

"This kind of isolation is one of the unspoken tragedies of the elderly who are now being told don't see your family at Thanksgiving," Atlas, a radiologist, not an epidemiologist, told Fox News Monday evening, as Media Matters reported.

"For many people this is their final Thanksgiving, believe it or not. What are we doing here? I think we have to have a policy, which I have been advocating, which is a whole person, whole health policy. It's not about just stopping cases of COVID. We have to talk about the damage of the policy itself."

Atlas, who has embraced dangerous "herd immunity," also talked about a rise in thoughts of suicide among young adults frustrated with pandemic restrictions.

But Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nation's top infectious disease expert, is warning Americans to stay away from family members and others who are elderly or at increased risk over the holidays.

"If you have someone in the family, an elderly person or person with an underlying condition who, whatever that underlying condition may be—diabetes, obesity, hypertension, someone on chemotherapy for one reason or other, cancer, auto-immune disease—you really need to make a decision," Fauci said last week on MSNBC.

Dr. Atlas is currently under fire for telling Michigan residents to "rise up" against Governor Gretchen Whitmer's new coronavirus restrictions. Whitmer has been the target of domestic terror plots including plans to kidnap and try her for "treason."

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