Who is Marc Siegel? Here’s what we know about the doctor evaluating Trump live on Fox
President Donald Trump will have his first on-camera interview since his COVID-19 diagnosis Friday night live on Tucker Carlson’s Fox News show.
Trump will also be medically evaluated by Dr. Marc Siegel, a Fox News Channel medical correspondent since 2008.
Many expect the evaluation to shine some light on the president’s health and diagnosis timeline amid rising concerns that Trump’s medical team has shied away from sharing complete truths.
Who is Dr. Siegel?
Siegel, 64, is an internal medicine doctor with a focus on influenza at the New York University Langone Health academic medical center. He is also a clinical professor at the NYU Grossman School of Medicine.
The doctor is a columnist for The Hill and contributes to the Wall Street Journal, National Review and New York Daily News.
During the coronavirus pandemic, Siegel has been a proponent of science, but he has also mirrored Trump’s ideology on fear and the media as factors that hurt America’s progress.
In his new book to be released Oct. 13, titled “COVID: The Politics of Fear and the Power of Science,” Siegel “identifies three major catalysts of the culture of fear — bureaucracy, the media, and our own psyche,” according to a news release.
“It is possible for a massive pandemic and the fear and hysteria over that pandemic to exist simultaneously,” Siegel writes in his book, according to the release. ”Unfortunately, effective public health measures are compromised by both hysteria and denial. ... The purpose of this book is to help us overcome our worries as well as vanquish the virus.”
Siegel believes political inconsistencies hurt pandemic response
At the same time, Siegel blames inconsistent responses from political leaders across the country for the pandemic’s strength today.
“It’s inconsistencies we’re seeing that is most disturbing here. That’s where it is all politics because people are making political statements and they don’t have anything to do with public health,” Siegel said during a July 13 Fox Business interview.
In the same interview, Siegel said there’s “no scientific evidence proving what extent masks work. We believe they have a role but people become religious about masks” — a sentiment Trump has long shared and promoted, and one epidemiologists have fought hard against.
White House Rose Garden ‘superspreader’ event
Siegel is often heard defending Trump’s actions and remarks on the coronavirus.
The Sept. 26 event at the White House Rose Garden where Trump announced his nomination of Amy Coney Barrett to the U.S. Supreme Court has since become known as a superspreader event that has led to dozens of infections.
FAUCI: "The data speak for themselves. We had a superspreader event in the White House.” (CBS News Radio interview)
— Ana Cabrera (@AnaCabrera) October 9, 2020
When asked if Trump was irresponsible for holding the event in the way he did (no face masks or social distancing), Siegel said, “No of course not. There’s no way he could’ve predicted that,” according to a recent Fox Business interview.
And while many doctors and coronavirus victims were appalled by the president’s Twitter comment to not “let [COVID] dominate your life,]” Siegel admitted that he liked it.
“I like it. In the face of disease, it’s saying, ‘Show strength, show courage.’ What’s disturbing is all of the people who don’t want to wish him well,” Siegel said in the same interview. “Courage in the face of illness, that’s what we look for. How can that be disturbing?”
I will be leaving the great Walter Reed Medical Center today at 6:30 P.M. Feeling really good! Don’t be afraid of Covid. Don’t let it dominate your life. We have developed, under the Trump Administration, some really great drugs & knowledge. I feel better than I did 20 years ago!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) October 5, 2020
“We want this message: ‘This virus is very troubling, it’s problematic, but you have to live with it. We have to deal with it.’ That’s a very uplifting message and extremely appropriate, and it’s what physicians want to see,” Siegel added.
Other works by Siegel
Siegel has published articles titled “Darwin and God,” “The Perils of Privatized Healthcare” and “The False Bird Flu Scare” in The Nation, an outlet that describes itself as “principled” and “progressive.”
The doctor wrote in a 2013 USA Today article that forcing health care workers to get vaccinated for the flu won’t protect patients from getting or dying from the it, citing a lack of “convincing evidence.”
“It makes more sense to mandate that workers with influenza-like symptoms not be allowed to come to work,” he wrote. “And why not a mandate that unvaccinated workers not be allowed to care directly for flu patients? This would be a much more convincing and effective strategy.”
Siegel also wrote an article titled “The Death of the Bedside Manner: ObamaCare is Speeding the Decline in the Quality of Medical Practice.”
“How can ObamaCare be labeled a success when it adds layers of bureaucracy to an already overburdened system?” Siegel wrote. “What ObamaCare gave us instead is a hybrid that should make both Democrats and Republicans, doctors and patients unhappy: big business combined with big government.”
The doctor has published studies on HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, as well.
