Dr. Phil McGraw isn’t an epidemiologist or a coronavirus expert. He just happens to play one on Fox News.
On Thursday night, McGraw appeared on Fox News to share his distaste with the shutdowns intended to stop the spread of coronavirus and erroneously compared the deaths attributed to COVID-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus, to other causes of death.
“Forty-five thousand people a year die from automobile accidents, 480,000 from cigarettes, 360,000 a year from swimming pools,” McGraw told host Laura Ingraham, “but we don’t shut the country down for that. But yet we’re doing it for this?”
McGraw, who has a Ph.D. in clinical psychology and is not a medical doctor, has not studied infectious disease and does not have any specific expertise associated with epidemiology. (McGraw had a vertical on HuffPost for a period of time. His contract with the site ended in 2016.)
Dr. Christopher Gill, an infectious disease specialist and associate professor of global health at Boston University, called McGraw’s argument both “silly” and “shortsighted and unhelpful.”
“In the US, [COVID-19] case numbers are doubling every week or so — in some parts of the country, they are doubling every few days,” he told HuffPost via email. “Dr. Phil seems to be arguing that we should do nothing until things get so catastrophic that there are more [COVID-19] deaths than smoking deaths.”
“This argument makes no sense to me,” Gill continued. “The number of smoking deaths (or swimming pool deaths) is slowly falling in the U.S. due to aggressive public health campaigns around smoking cessation and swimming safety. By contrast, the [COVID-19] numbers are rising every week.”
“If we were to take Dr. Phil’s advice and do nothing because the [COVID-19] deaths SO FAR are much smaller than the smoking deaths, then the math is pretty clear that before too long the [COVID-19] deaths could actually be much higher than smoking deaths, which would be catastrophic,” Gill said.
Dr. Arnold Monto, an epidemiology professor at the University of Michigan, also disagreed with McGraw’s “analysis” of the current situation.
“This is an infectious disease and when it occurs, there are multiple cases in a limited geographic area. Handling them stretches the system,” Monto explained in an email to HuffPost. “If this were like a local disaster, such as a major explosion, it would be limited to a single place. Here, this is occurring widely and draining resources. What is worse is that cases stay in the hospital for long periods, further impacting the system. This does not happen in swimming deaths and his other illustrations.”
Monto went on to say that, while social distancing is “a blunt instrument,” it’s crucial “to flatten the demand for medical management” and “it is all we have.”
It should also be noted that the statistics Dr. Phil mentioned on Fox News Thursday night were wrong. Outside of his quote for the cigarette-related deaths, none of those figures are accurate. Additionally, unlike the coronavirus, swimming deaths and traffic fatalities aren’t contagious.
He later addressed this issue during a Facebook Live stream on Friday, telling viewers that those were “probably bad examples.”
“Now, last night, I said we as a society have chosen to live with certain controllable deadly risks every day. Smoking, auto crashes, swimming. And yes, I know that those are not contagious. So, probably bad examples,” he said. “And I refer to them as numbers of deaths that we apparently find acceptable because we do little or nothing about them. I get that they are not contagious, so they are probably not good examples. I probably could have used better examples.”
Dr. Phil, who also talked about the psychological toll of coronavirus on people in lockdown while on Ingraham’s show, went on to stress the importance of helping people deal with depression right now. He also emphasized: “I am not an infectious disease doctor. I am not a molecular microbiologist. I look at this from a human behavior psychological standpoint.”
McGraw is not the only TV personality Fox News has called on to speak about the pandemic. Dr. Mehmet Oz, a cardiothoracic surgeon and host of “The Dr. Oz Show,” has also offered commentary.
Oz has been lambasted over the years for giving “non-scientific” advice, supporting blatant scams, and “doing more harm than good.”
On Thursday, Oz told Fox News host Sean Hannity that he thinks “schools are a very appetizing opportunity” in the efforts to allow the United States to get our “mojo back.”
“I just saw a nice piece in The Lancet arguing the opening of schools may only cost us two-to-three percent, in terms of total mortality,” Oz explained, referencing a percentage that suggests thousands could potentially die.
“Any, you know, any life is a life lost, but to get every child back into a school where they’re safely being educated, being fed, and making the most out of their lives, with the theoretical risk on the back side,” he said. “That might be a tradeoff some folks would consider.”
As HuffPost reported then, Oz’s interpretation of the study in The Lancet “appears to suggest that the benefit of reducing overall projected coronavirus deaths by a small margin may not be comparable to the benefits of sending students back to school.” In looking at modeling by the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington in Seattle, that addition to the projected deaths means that thousands of lives would be lost.
Not only is that rhetoric endangering lives, but it wasn’t even clear. Many interpreted Oz’s comments to be specifically about risking the lives of thousands of school-aged children. Later Thursday, he issued an apology.
The “news” that comes from TV personalities like McGraw and Oz is a dangerous mix of misinformation and wild rhetoric directed straight to the largest network audience in the country.
With more than 2.1 million confirmed cases of COVID-19 worldwide and more than 146,000 people dead as the disease continues to spread, giving pundits like Dr. Phil air time to speak their thoughts to a national audience is a recipe for more confusion during an already confusing time.
The blowback to Dr. Phil and Dr. Oz’s rhetoric this week has been strong as social media exploded with people imploring Oprah Winfrey, who helped launch the two figures into the limelight, to speak out against them.
When reached by HuffPost, Fox News had no comment about the backlash or the remarks made by either of their so-called experts.
It’s not clear how else these TV doctors are going to meddle in the coronavirus conversation going forward, but perhaps networks should defer to the CDC or National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Director Dr. Anthony Fauci to avoid misinformation and obfuscation.
Dr. Phil has his own TV show to appear on.