The director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) overheard a phone conversation on a commercial flight that a key member of Donald Trump’s coronavirus taskforce was spreading misinformation about the epidemic.

Dr. Robert Redfield heard an NBC News employee on a flight from Atlanta to Washington. According to NBC, Redfield criticized Scott Atlas, a radiologist and head of Fox News talk, who joined the taskforce last month.

The NDC reports, “Redfield said of Atlas,” everything he says is a lie. Redfield later confirmed that he was talking about Atlas.

The number of confirmed deaths from Covid-19 in the United States has exceeded two million and the number of cases has exceeded one million.

Trump seems to have the most current access to any medical consultant, even if he has no background in infectious diseases, which has been criticized by unscientific and public health professionals by the medical community as bad advice about the coronavirus.

Atlas has misleadingly questioned the effectiveness and social distance of masks, substantiated Trump’s call for the school to reopen, and perhaps most controversially supported the purposeful contraction of the virus aimed at creating so-called “animal immunity” among young people.

Public health experts warned that the effectiveness of “animal immunity” against coronavirus without any vaccine is unknown, given the uncertainty about the duration of resistance and inadequacy in individual cases. They added that achieving “animal immunity” would involve millions of infections and thousands of unknown cases of serious illness and death.

Atlas is a former Stanford Medicine Professor and Senior Fellow at the Conservative Hoover Institution at Stanford University.

His controversial remarks attracted attention Free letter From former 78 former colleagues at Stanford Medical School who warned that his advice was dangerous

“Many of his views and statements are opposed to established science and in doing so undermine public health authorities and credible science that govern effective public health policy,” the letter said.

Asked to respond to Redfield’s comments, Atlas told NBC News: “Everything I say is done directly by information and science.”

This is not true in the judgment of Redfield and other experts. The CDC said NBC News only heard “one side” of Redfield’s conversation, but did not dispute the report.

The CDC said, “NBC News is reporting on one side of a private phone conversation … heard on the plane from Atlanta Hartsfield Airport.” “Dr. Redfield was privately discussing a number of points made public about the Covid-19.”