Scott Atlas, the neuroradiologist whose Fox News spots led President Trump to bestow on him a senior White House pandemic-response role, allegedly shot down attempts to expand U.S. testing, openly feuded with and sidelined top experts on the coronavirus task force, advanced fringe theories (such as that social distancing and mask-wearing were pointless), and advocated allowing infections to spread naturally among most of the American population to attain herd immunity. A report in The Washington Post says that Atlas’ ascendancy was made visually apparent after Trump left a recent Oval Office meeting and Atlas “startled other aides by walking behind the Resolute Desk and occupying the president’s personal space to keep the meeting going.” Atlas has denied all the claims leveled against him, dismissing the Post’s story as politically motivated.

Meanwhile, a separate jaw-dropping claim in the Post report alleges that on a call in August with Francis Collins, director of the National Institutes of Health and leader of the Human Genome Project, Trump berated the agency for moving too slowly to approve a vaccine or other treatments; in fact, the NIH is a biomedical research agency and has no role in approving treatments or vaccines.