Scary enough dude at the best of times. But as Fat Boy Slim once said …”right here right now?”
“I’m trained in all of these things,” he told The New Yorker, ambiguously. “I’ve worked on evolutionary theory for 40 years in its relationship to law.”
Who he is: Law professor at New York University and one of the country’s leading libertarian legal academics.
Academic credentials: Law degree
Contribution to humanity’s understanding of the coronavirus: Published an article for the Hoover Institution’s website on March 16 arguing that the reaction to the disease was going too far. According to Epstein, as deadlier strains of the virus claim more victims, the cases that spread will be weaker, less deadly strains. (Here it’s worth mentioning that there is absolutely no evidence that there are stronger and weaker strains of the coronavirus. “The fallacy in his argument is the overall lack of scientific rigor in his analysis,” Daniel Kuritzkes, the chief of the infectious diseases division at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, told The New Yorker.)
In his March 16 article, which reportedly influenced the White House’s short-lived pivot toward reopening the economy by Easter, Epstein predicted 500 US deaths, a number that was surpassed one week later. He later admitted that was a mistake and updated his estimate to 5,000. (As of this writing there have been about 11,000 reported coronavirus-related deaths in the US.) Eventually, he updated his update to 50,000.
Coronavirus expertise: “I’m trained in all of these things,” he told The New Yorker, ambiguously. “I’ve worked on evolutionary theory for 40 years in its relationship to law.”
Source Wired: https://www.wired.com/story/trumps-coronavirus-experts-a-field-guide/
