Dan Erickson and Artin Massihi co-own a chain of urgent-care clinics. They don’t appear to have any significant epidemiological experience. And their claims about coronavirus have been widely debunked by experts, including a national physician and emergency-care group that issued a joint statement “emphatically” condemning their “reckless and untested musings.”
Nevertheless, the two California doctors have managed to become rising stars on Fox News for downplaying COVID-19’s severity. And they recently garnered another round of news coverage after inviting local media outlets to their office last week with an announcement that they had research that proved it was time to end the state’s shelter-in-place order.
“Do we need to shelter in place?” Erickson said. “Our answer is emphatically no. Do we need businesses to be shut down? Emphatically no.”
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The celebrity that Erickson and Massihi have managed to garner in the midst of a global pandemic underscores how the news media’s desire for the outlandish and controversial can often be at odds with the public’s need for accurate health information—especially as Trump-supportive outlets on TV and online search for so-called experts that can validate the president’s desire to re-open the economy quickly.
At their press conference, the two doctors laid out a theory of a vastly reduced coronavirus mortality rate that would soon be trumpeted across right-wing media. Citing a 6.5 percent coronavirus positive rate for tests conducted at their clinic in Bakersfield, California, the pair claimed that meant roughly 6.5 percent of the people in surrounding Kern County (with a population of nearly one million) must also have already had the disease. In Erickson’s telling, that meant the virus had only a 0.03 percent mortality rate in California, and was much less dangerous than the flu.
“Is the flu less dangerous than COVID?” Erickson said. “Let’s look at the death rates. No it’s not.”
Erickson also indulged in some vague conspiracy theories, musing that the pandemic response was used by an unnamed “they” to control people.
“Something else is going on here,” Erickson said. “This is not about science and it’s not even about COVID. When they use the word ‘safe’—if you listen to the word ‘safe,’ that’s about controlling you."
Footage of the press conference went viral among coronavirus skeptics, with one video racking up more than five million views on YouTube. Tech billionaire Elon Musk, who tweeted in early March that the “coronavirus panic is dumb,” tweeted that Erickson and Massihi “make good points.” Libertarian pundit John Stossel called the video “enlightening.”
“Boy do they have some beans to spill!” tweeted conservative commentator Dinesh D’Souza.
The pair were cited by Fox host Shannon Bream, and went on Laura Ingraham’s Fox show on Monday night.
“You struck a nerve with those videos,” Ingraham said, praising the duo for speaking “inconvenient truths.”
On Tuesday, Fox News host Tucker Carlson devoted the entire opening of his show to the doctors, conceding that they had “some” critics. Carlson went on to praise Erickson and Massihi as “sober-minded medical researchers” who raised “valid questions” about the coronavirus response.
But the claims made by Erickson and Massihi have been quickly debunked by medical experts, who say the urgent-care doctors can’t extrapolate data from their clinic to an entire county.
Asked during their press conference whether they were just pushing for a reopening to get their clinics on stronger financial footing, Erickson claimed reporters should check with emergency doctors who would back up their findings. Instead of supporting Erickson and Massihi, though, the American College of Emergency Physicians and the American Academy of Emergency Medicine denounced the pair in a rare joint statement..
The two groups accused Erickson and Massihi of favoring “their personal financial interests” over public health.
“These reckless and untested musings do not speak for medical societies and are inconsistent with current science and epidemiology regarding COVID-19,” the statement reads. “As owners of local urgent care clinics, it appears these two individuals are releasing biased, non-peer reviewed data to advance their personal financial interests without regard for the public’s health.
Erickson, Massihi, and Fox News didn’t respond to requests for comment.
Erickson and Massihi’s claims contain one gigantic flaw: Their coronavirus data isn’t randomized. Because Erickson and Massihi based their numbers on people who were seeking coronavirus tests at their clinic, they were bound to pull in people who are more likely than the county’s general population to have the coronavirus. In a March interview with a local TV station, Erickson said that his clinic was only testing people who had coronavirus symptoms, confirmed contact with a carrier, or recently traveled to coronavirus hot spots—further pushing up the percentage of coronavirus positives.
“By having such a small and narrow sample, you’re going to have a selection bias that can’t be applied to the entire population,” Ryan Stanton, a Kentucky emergency physician on the board of the American College of Emergency Physicians, told The Daily Beast.
Data from the clinic can’t be extrapolated out for the entire county population, according to David Gorski, a Michigan surgical oncologist who writes about medical disinformation.
“They’re so clueless that they don’t even know what they don’t know,” Gorski said. “I think it’s actually flattering them to call it a ‘rookie mistake.’”
Stanton said the two doctors associations denounced the Bakersfield findings out of fear that it would be used by policymakers to prematurely ease measures aimed at stopping coronavirus’ spread.
“Folks could say, ‘Let’s just reopen everything,” Stanton said. “And then we could see a second wave.”
Stanton says Massihi and Erickson presented their conclusions like an “infomercial” for their clinics.
“If they had done it in a reasonable fashion, I don’t think it would have picked up traction and gone viral,” Stanton said. “It would’ve just been another YouTube video with a few views.”
Since their press conference, other claims made by Erickson and Massihi have been quickly debunked, even as their stars rise on the right. In one case, Erickson claimed that Kern County’s director of public health had agreed with his conclusions in private conversations. But the health official quickly denied agreeing with Erickson’s findings.
Little of the criticism about the obvious flaws in the doctors’ claims has made it to Fox News. In Ingraham’s interview with Erickson and Massihi, she briefly raised comments made in a Twitter thread debunking their claims—but then allowed Erickson to immediately pivot to discussing a randomized test in Santa Clara, California.
That test was conducted by a Stanford University team, not Erickson and Massihi. Ingraham never pressed the doctors again during the interview on their methodology.
YouTube deleted one video of Erickson and Massihi’s press conference on Monday night, driving even more attention to their claims from right-wing personalities like former Trump adviser Sebastian Gorka and Fox contributor Sara Carter.
In a statement, YouTube spokeswoman Ivy Choi said the video was removed for violating the site’s rules about social-distancing content.
“We quickly remove flagged content that violate our Community Guidelines, including content that explicitly disputes the efficacy of local healthy authority recommended guidance on social distancing that may lead others to act against that guidance,” the statement reads.
