Good article. No doubt will trigger GWB into apoplexy, which I'm sure will be followed with shrieking and spittle flying all over the monitor. Good thing he's wearing a mask, all alone in his apartment with his 30-something cats. Scott Atlas: The Last Word Editor's Note: Scott W. Atlas, MD, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, served from August through November 2020 as Special Adviser to the President and was a member of the White House Coronavirus Task Force. Atlas delivered the following remarks in a virtual lecture hosted by the College Republicans. They have been lightly adapted to appear in print. It is always a great pleasure, and an important part of my job, to speak to students. It is essential for students to hear ideas from many sources, especially ideas they may not agree with. That is a key part of learning how to think critically – and critical thinking is the most important lesson to learn in college, in my opinion. The coronavirus pandemic has been a great tragedy, there can be no doubt about that. But it has also exposed profound issues in America that now threaten the very principles of freedom and order that we Americans often take for granted. First, I have been shocked at the enormous power of the government, to unilaterally decree, to simply close businesses and schools by edict, restrict personal movement, mandate behavior, and eliminate our most basic freedoms, without any end and little accountability. Second, I remain surprised at the acceptance by the American people of draconian rules, restrictions, and unprecedented mandates, even those that are arbitrary, destructive, and wholly unscientific. This crisis has also exposed what we all have known existed, but we have tolerated for years: the overt bias of the media, the lack of diverse viewpoints on campuses, the absence of neutrality in big tech controlling social media, and now more visibly than ever, the intrusion of politics into science. Ultimately, the freedom to seek and state the truth is at risk here in the United States. First, we all acknowledge that the consequences of the SARS2 coronavirus pandemic and its management have been enormous. Over half million American deaths have been attributed to the virus; more will certainly follow. Even after almost a year, the pandemic still paralyzes much of our country. And despite all efforts, there was an undeniable failure to stop cases from rapidly escalating and prevent hospitalizations and death. Here's the unacknowledged reality: almost all states and major cities, with a handful of exceptions, have implemented severe restrictions for many months, including closures of businesses and in-person school, mobility restrictions and curfews, quarantines, limits on group gatherings, and mask mandates dating back to at least the summer. And let’s clear up the myths about the behavior of Americans – social mobility tracking of Americans and data from Gallup, YouGov, the COVID-19 Consortium, and the CDC have shown significant reductions of movement as well as a consistently high percentage of mask wearing since the late summer, similar to Western European countries and approaching those in Asia. All legitimate policy scholars should, today, be openly reexamining policies that severely harmed America’s families and children, while failing to save the elderly. Studies, including one in January from Stanford University’s infectious disease scientists and epidemiologists Bendavid, Oh, Bhattacharya, and Ioannidis, have shown the mitigating impact of the extraordinary measures was small at best and according to the study’s senior author Ioannidis, “usually harmful” – in his words, “pro-contagion.” President Biden openly admitted their lack of efficacy in his speech to the nation on January 22, when he said, “there is nothing we can do to change the trajectory of the pandemic in the next several months.” Bizarrely, though, many want to blame those who opposed lockdowns and mandates for the failure of the very lockdowns and mandates that were widely implemented. Separate from their limited value in containing the virus -- efficacy that has often been “grossly exaggerated” in scientific journals, as documented by epidemiologists and biostatisticians Chin, Ioannidis, Tanner, and Cripps – lockdown policies have been extraordinarily harmful. The harms to children of closing in-person schooling are dramatic, including poor learning, increased school dropouts, and social isolation, most of which are far worse for lower income groups. A recent study confirms that up to 78% of cancers were never detected due to missed screening over three months. If one extrapolates to the entire country, up to a million new cases or more over nine months will have gone undetected. That health disaster adds to missed critical surgeries, chemotherapy, organ transplants, presentations of pediatric illnesses, heart attack and stroke patients too afraid to call emergency services, and others, all well documented. Beyond hospital care, CDC reported four-fold increases in depression, three-fold increases in anxiety symptoms, and a doubling of suicidal ideation, particularly among young adults AMA reports of drug overdoses and suicides. An explosion of insurance claims for these psychological harms in children just verified this, doubling nationally since last year; and in the strictly locked down Northeast, there was a more than 300% increase of teenagers visiting doctors for self-harm. Domestic abuse and child abuse have been skyrocketing due to the isolation and specifically to the loss of jobs, particularly in the strictest lockdowns. Given that many in-person schools have been closed, hundreds of thousands of abuse cases are never reported, since schools are the number one agency where abuse is noticed. Finally, the unemployment “shock” from lockdowns, according to a recent NBER study, translates into what they called a “staggering” 890,000 additional U.S. deaths over the next 15 years from the lockdowns, disproportionately affecting minorities and women. We know we have not yet seen the full extent of the damage from lockdowns, because it will last for years, even decades. Perhaps that is why lockdowns were not recommended in previous pandemic analyses, even for infections with far higher lethality. To manage such a crisis, shouldn’t policymakers objectively consider both the virus harms and the totality of impact of policies? That’s the importance of health policy experts – my field – with a broader scope of expertise than that of epidemiologists and basic scientists. And that’s exactly why I was called to the White House – there were zero health policy scholars on the Task Force; no one with a medical background who also considered the impacts of the policies was advising the White House. To determine the best path forward necessarily means admitting that social lockdowns and significant restrictions on individuals are deadly and extraordinarily harmful, especially on the working class, minorities, and the poor. In his book “Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds,” Charles Mackay wrote: "of all the offspring of Time, Error is the most ancient, and is so old and familiar an acquaintance, that Truth, when discovered, comes upon most of us like an intruder, and meets the intruder's welcome." Optimistically, we should be seeing the light at the end of the long tunnel with the rollout of vaccines. I believe that we are. But, using logic that would put the Mad Hatter to shame, we now hear some claim that all children must be tested and vaccinated, even though they have extremely low risk from this infection and are proven to not be significant spreaders to adults? Or that all teachers must be vaccinated before they teach in-person, even though schools are one of the lowest risk environments and the vast majority of teachers are not high risk? Worse, we hear the same faces on TV once again stressing uncertainty, and issuing new warnings – that social distancing, masks, and other restrictions will still be necessary after vaccination and until 2022. Is there no intention of those who control the narrative – the often proclaimed “consensus” – to allow Americans to live normally, to live freely, without fear, again? Just as in Galileo’s time, one real problem is the experts and “vested academic interests.” Faculty members of many universities, America’s centers for critical thinking, have overtly intimidated views contrary to their own, likely out of political reasons, leaving many afraid to speak up. That intimidation has been effective – I know, I have received hundreds of emails from scientists and policy scholars all over the country, all over the world, telling me to never give up, but they are afraid to come forward. And yes, even a number of infectious disease experts right here at Stanford are afraid to step forward publicly and say the truth. It is commendable that Stanford’s President and Provost, former Provost Etchemendy, and a few other distinguished members of the academic community here spoke in defense of academic freedom at a recent Faculty Senate meeting. But it is not only the matter of academic freedom that needs comment. Instead of rethinking failed policies and admitting their errors, some have chosen to employ smears in opinion pieces and through organized rebukes against those of us who disagreed with what was implemented and who dared to help the country under a President they despised – apparently, the ultimate transgression. Straw-man arguments and out-of-context distortions to defame people are not acceptable in civilized society, let alone in our great universities. There has been an attempt to silence and delegitimize me using falsifications and misrepresentations. This dishonors Stanford’s code of conduct, damages the Stanford name, and most importantly, it abuses the trust parents and society place in them to influence America’s children, our next generation of leaders. It is understandable that most Stanford professors are not experts in health policy – that is my field, my lane – and understandable that most Stanford professors are ignorant of the data about the pandemic. But it is not acceptable to claim that I made recommendations that were “falsehoods and misrepresentations of science.” That is a lie. No matter how often a lie is repeated, and regardless of how often those lies are echoed in biased media, lies do not transform into truths. We should all remember the phrase attributed to Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels – “A lie told once remains a lie, but a lie told a thousand times becomes the truth” – and pray to God that it never becomes true in these United States of America. All policy considerations I recommended to the President were designed to reduce both the spread of the virus to the most vulnerable and the structural harms of the policies to those impacted the most – the poor and working class of America. I was one of the first to push for increasing protections to those most at risk, particularly the elderly, because they were dying by the tens of thousands because the chosen policies implemented by states, recommended by other Task Force members, were failing to protect them. Almost a year ago, I recognized that we must also consider theenormous harms to physical health, mental health, and lives lost coming directly from the draconian policies that attempted to contain the infection. That is the most appropriate goal of public health policy: to minimize all harms, not simply to stop Covid-19 at all costs. The claim in a recent JAMA opinion piece by three Stanford professors that “nearly all public health experts were concerned that [Atlas’s] recommendations could lead to tens of thousands (or more) of unnecessary deaths in the US alone” is patently false, absurd on its face. As pointed out on February 10 by Zinberg, the proposal called the Great Barrington Declaration, is “far closer to the one condemned in the JAMA article than anything [Atlas] said”. Yet, that policy declaration was co-authored by medical scientists and epidemiologists from Stanford, Harvard, and Oxford, and it has already been signed by over 50,000 medical and public-health practitioners. When critics display such ignorance about the scope of views held by experts, it exposes their bias and wholly disqualifies their authority on these issues. Indeed, it is beyond parody that these same critics wrote “professionalism demands honesty about what they know and do not know.” I have indeed explainedthe fact that younger people have little risk from this infection, and I explained the biological concept of herd immunity – protection arising when a large percentage of people acquire immunity – just like Harvard epidemiologists Katherine Yih and Martin Kulldorff, and some of the top scientists at Stanford, have explained. That is very different from proposing that people be deliberately exposed and infected by "allowing the virus to spread naturally" without mitigation efforts. I have not advised that. And how timely it is that Professor Makary of Johns Hopkins School of Public Health just did the same, acknowledging in the Wall Street Journal on February 18, 2021 that "herd immunity is the inevitable result of viral spread and vaccination." Makary went on to celebrate what he called “the good news” – that "the consistent and rapid decline in daily cases since Jan. 8 can be explained only by natural immunity. Behavior didn’t suddenly improve over the holidays; Americans traveled more over Christmas than they had since March. Vaccines also don’t explain the steep decline in January. Vaccination rates were low and they take weeks to kick in.” Those are Makary’s words. Will Dr. Makary now be linked with doctors who promoted eugenics and those who conducted the racist Tuskegee syphilis experiments, as in the piece in JAMA? Will professors also call for his medical license to be stripped, or that he be formally censured for explaining the benefit of naturally-acquired immunity? In fact, directly contrary to advocating that the infection spread, I have repeatedly called for mitigation measures, including extra sanitization, social distancing, masks, group limits, testing, and other increased protections to limit the spread and damage from the coronavirus. I also explicitly called for augmenting protection of those at risk in dozens of on-the-record presentations, interviews, and written pieces, including: Written pieces inThe Hill- May 3, The Hill-September 3, New York Post- September 15, New York Post- April 26; presentations to: Senate Committee on Homeland Security, Parliamentary Intelligence Security Forum, Liberty Forum of Silicon Valley, YPO retreat in Sea Island, Georgia; and interviews with: Ben Shapiro podcast, John Bachelor radio, Steve Deace Blaze TV, Tucker Carlson Fox News TV, Florida televised press conference, WAML Radio, and numerous others. One must ask the question: why would accusers also ignore my explicit, emphatic public denials about supporting the spread of the infection unchecked to achieve herd immunity – denials quoted widely in the media. Are not my own statements the object of their criticism in the first place? Or is it due to a desire to “cancel” anyone who accepted the call, who had the audacity to help this country under President Trump? I have been accused of claiming that “young people are not harmed by the virus and cannot spread the disease.” To the contrary, I have frequently cited detailed data explicitly stating that children do get the infection, that children can have serious consequences from the infection, and that some children die from the disease. When I said in a 5/20/2020 interview with Congressman Andy Biggs that there was “an extremely low risk for children that Covid-19 poses” and that the risk of dying if you’re under 18 from this disease is “nearly zero,” that matches the data, including CDC, and is almost verbatim what John Ioannidis, renowned Stanford epidemiologist, summed up about the entire world’s data. The risk of dying from Covid-19 is “almost zero” for young people. For many months, I was maligned after calling for opening in-person schools. The compelling case to open schools is now admitted to be longstanding truth, even in lay publications like the Atlantic. They acknowledged that “Research from around the world has, since the beginning of the pandemic, indicated that people under 18, and especially younger kids, are less susceptible to infection, less likely to experience severe symptoms, and far less likely to be hospitalized or die.” Further, that “We’ve known for months that young children are less susceptible to serious infection and less likely to transmit the coronavirus. Let’s act like it.” The accusers who wrote the opinion piece in JAMA stated: “Atlas disputed the need for masks”. That is misrepresenting my words. To the contrary, my advice on mask usage has been consistent and explicit – “wear a mask when you cannot socially distance” – and it matched the published recommendations of the World Health Organization in June: “When outside, wear a mask if you cannot maintain physical distance from others.” In December, the WHO modified that to “(In areas of known or suspected community or cluster SARS-CoV-2 transmission), WHO advises that the general public should wear a non-medical mask in … settings where physical distancing of at least 1 metre cannot be maintained”, i.e. not at all times, not by everyone. That also matches the NIH document dated February 2021 “Prevention and prophylaxis of SARS-COV-2 infection”: “When consistent distancing is not possible, face coverings may further reduce the spread of infectious droplets from individuals with SARS-CoV-2 infection to others.” Regarding universal masks: 38 states have implemented general-population mask mandates, most since at least the summer, with almost all the rest having mandates in their major cities. Widespread, general-population mask usage has shown little empirical utility for stopping cases, even though that evidence has been censored by Twitter and Amazon. Widespread mask usage showed only minimal impact in Denmark’s randomized controlled study. Those are facts. And facts matter. Here’s the reality: those who insist that universal mask usage is absolutely proven to be effective at controlling the spread of this virus and is universally recommended by “the science” are ignoring the published evidence to the contrary. One could say they are propagating false and misleading information; some might even call that, using a phrase from the JAMA opinion, “subverting science.” I posted a list where mask mandates empirically failed to stop cases, along with direct quotes, without any edit, from WHO, CDC, and Oxford University. That was censored by Twitter. And I stated numerous times that it would be irrational to wear a mask “when alone riding a bicycle outside, when driving your own car alone, or when walking in the desert alone.” I stand by those words. Those who charge that it is unethical, even dangerous, to question broad population mask mandates must not realize that several of the world’s top infectious disease scientists and major public health organizations explicitly question the efficacy of general population masks. The public needs to know the truth. For instance, Jefferson and Heneghan of University of Oxford’s Centre for Evidence-Based Medicine wrote: “It would appear that despite two decades of pandemic preparedness, there is considerable uncertainty as to the value of wearing masks.” Oxford’s renowned epidemiologist Sunetra Gupta said there is no need for masks unless one is elderly or high risk. Stanford’s Jay Bhattacharya stated “mask mandates are not supported by the scientific data … there is no scientific evidence that mask mandates work to slow the spread of the disease.” Throughout this pandemic until December, the WHO’s “Advice on the use of masks in the context of COVID-19” stated: “At present, there is no direct evidence (from studies on COVID19 and in healthy people in the community) on the effectiveness of universal masking of healthy people in the community to prevent infection with respiratory viruses, including COVID-19.” In December, the WHO changed their wording to today’s “At present there is only limited and inconsistent scientific evidence to support the effectiveness of masking of healthy people in the community to prevent infection with respiratory viruses, including SARS-CoV-2.” The CDC, in a review of influenza pandemics, “did not find evidence that surgical-type face masks are effective in reducing laboratory-confirmed influenza transmission, either when worn by infected persons (source control) or by persons in the general community to reduce their susceptibility.” And until the WHO removed it on October 21, 2020 (almost immediately after Twitter censored my tweet highlighting the WHO quote), the WHO had written “At the present time, the widespread use of masks by healthy people in the community setting is not yet supported by high quality or direct scientific evidence and there are potential benefits and harms to consider.” My advice on masks has always been based on scientific data, and it matches the advice of many of the top scientists and public health organizations throughout the world. One final false accusation must be addressed: that I "made unsupported claims about the immunity conferred by surviving infection". To the contrary, I was correct in accurately citing the scientific literature, when I explained that biological protection from this infection is not fully shown by antibody tests, since antibody prevalence changes in people over time (September 2020, Japan), and protection is also derived from other parts of the immune system (January 2021, Germany), including T-cells (January 2021, Minnesota), even in asymptomatic and mildly symptomatic patients, according to the Karolinska Institute. Professor Makary of the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine and Bloomberg School of Public Health acknowledged this on February 18, 2021, explaining that “Antibody studies almost certainly underestimate natural immunity. Antibody testing doesn’t capture antigen-specific T-cells." I was also correctly citing data that demonstrated some individuals could have cross-protection from previous coronavirus infections, shown by Singapore researchers and explicitly supported by the NIH itself on December 15, 2020. "The evidence that a subset of people has a cross-reactive T cell repertoire through exposure to related coronaviruses is strong.” At this point, one could make a reasonable case that those who continue to push significant societal restrictions without acknowledging their failures and serious harms are themselves putting forth dangerous misinformation. As Stanford’s Ioannidis stated on February 20, 2021, “most of the estimates show the draconian lockdowns increased the problems, it was pro-contagion.” Those restrictions have plainly “damaged the public health,” as my Stanford accusers might say. But I will not call for their official rebuke or punishment. I will not try to cancel them. I will not try to extinguish their opinions. And I will not lie to distort their words and defame them. To do so would repeat a behavior of intimidating the discourse that is critical to educating the public and arriving at the scientific truths we desperately need. As a health policy scholar for over 15 years and as a professor at top universities for 30 years, I now fear for our students and our nation’s future. Some faculty members of our acclaimed universities - many of whom are automatic recipients of society’s respect because of those university titles - are now dangerously intolerant of opinions contrary to their personally favored narrative. Without permitting, indeed encouraging, open exchange of views and admission of errors, we might never solve any future crisis. At a minimum, university mottos, if such things matter – like Harvard’s “truth,” Stanford’s “the winds of freedom blow,” and Yale’s “light and truth” – need to be explained to all faculty members at these universities. Some go further, distorting and misrepresenting words to delegitimize and prompt punishment of those of us willing to serve the country – their country – alongside a President they happen to loathe. As Tobin wrote on March 1, “Delegitimizing [Atlas] and his analysis of the coronavirus disaster was a matter of treating all those who have any connection with the Trump administration as criminals, something that could only be accomplished by blatant misrepresentations of his views and statements.” Worse than a violation of ethical behavior among colleagues, that does not meet my standard of simple human decency. If academic leaders – and the entire academic community – fail to denounce such attempts to vilify those whom one disagrees with, many more experts with a reputation to lose will be unwilling to serve this country in contentious times. As educators, as parents, as fellow citizens, that would be the worst possible legacy to leave to our children. We should also fear that the concept of “the science” has been seriously damaged. Even the best journals in the world – NEJM, Lancet, Science and Nature – have become contaminated by politics and published bad science. That adds to the public’s confusion, and it diminishes trust in experts. By now, many in the public have simply become fatigued by the arguments. That reaction is even worse, because widespread fatigue will allow fallacy to triumph over truth. Americans are now faced with a new status quo: biased social media have joined a dominant voice on campuses to be the arbiter of allowable discussion. The United States is on the precipice of losing its cherished freedoms, with censorship and cancellation of all those who bring views forward that differ from the “accepted mainstream." It is not clear if our democracy, with its defining freedoms, will recover, even after we survive the pandemic itself. But it is clear that people must step up – meaning speak up, as we are allowed, as we are expected to do in free societies – or it has no chance. Finally: Mackay, again, presciently spoke about the herd: "Men, it has been well said, think in herds; it will be seen that they go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses slowly, and one by one." So, how do we proceed at this very moment, in this country, with its heavily damaged psyche? Those of us who want the truth must keep seeking it, and those of us who see the truth must keep speaking it. Even if the recovery from madness is slow, and even if it is only one by one. Because truth matters.
It is amazing that this clown is still shoveling nonsense. And trying to re-write the history around many of his previous false statements.
Since anti data lockdown morons like you were just called out... You would think you would present data illustrating where he was mistaken. But I am sure you will wait for the hit pieces to come in vox.
He can't. He's never been able to attack any of the points or data, just attacks the people. That's how you know you're dealing with a fraud.
What's the real reason that you are ecstatic about the virus wreaking havoc on The US whether real or imagined?
An article outlines what a complete idiot Scott Atlas is and how he undermined the pandemic response. How hiring the wrong medical “expert” derailed US pandemic response An advocate for herd immunity inside the White House pushed to increase infections. https://arstechnica.com/science/202...s-made-herd-immunity-an-unofficial-us-policy/ While one congressional committee seems to be grabbing all the headlines recently, other investigations of the Trump administration have continued in the background. One of them is trying to determine how the US's response to the coronavirus pandemic went so wrong that the country ended up with over a million deaths and one of the worst per-capita death rates in the world. In its own words, the committee's goal is "to ensure the American people receive a full accounting of what went wrong and to determine what corrective steps are necessary to ensure our nation is better prepared for any future public health crisis." In its latest report, released on Tuesday, the committee details the White House career of Scott Atlas, a neuroradiologist with no infectious disease experience. Atlas' hiring by the White House was expected to be so controversial that he was initially instructed to hide his staff ID from the actual government public health experts. Yet he quickly became a driving force for the adoption of policies that would achieve herd immunity by allowing most of the US population to be infected—even as other officials denied that this was the policy. How’d this guy get here? Atlas' lack of relevant expertise raises questions as to why he was hired in the first place. The new report details that he wasn't shy about voicing his opinions about the pandemic response, making multiple TV appearances to complain about the policies advocated by actual public health experts. He also directly reached out to a senior government official, calling the US's response “a massive overreaction” to a virus he estimated “would cause about 10,000 deaths.” This eventually got him meetings with a number of White House officials, including Trump and his son-in-law, Jared Kushner. After that meeting, Kushner hired Atlas as pandemic adviser but knew that the hiring would not go over well with the government's public health experts. As a result, Atlas was told to continue working remotely from California, not to introduce himself on conference calls, and to hide his White House ID card when he met with Coronavirus Response Coordinator Deborah Birx. Atlas exited stealth mode when he switched to working in the White House. Once there, Atlas began participating in the activities of the White House Coronavirus Task Force, meant to formally coordinate the government's pandemic activities. But Atlas also sat in on less formal meetings with mostly political figures within the Trump administration, such as Kellyanne Conway and Hope Hicks. These meetings were referred to as “China Virus Huddles,” and provided Atlas with a route to influence policy that avoided disagreements with public health specialists. Birx suspected that this allowed Atlas to craft what she called "parallel data streams" for the president that didn't reflect official government pandemic figures. According to testimony and documents received by the committee, Atlas used this to promote the idea of reaching herd immunity prior to the availability of vaccines—a route that would see most of the US population infected at a time when there was little in the way of effective treatments. This approach received some backing from political figures in the Trump administration but was vigorously opposed by public health experts. The net result was a set of contradictory public statements and some rapid reversals of official government policy. Don’t follow the herd The idea behind herd immunity as promoted by Atlas is to allow most individuals to go about their normal lives, while steps are taken to avoid infections of vulnerable populations such as the elderly and immunocompromised. Almost all public health experts dismissed this idea, recognizing both the risks COVID-19 posed to the otherwise healthy, and the near impossibility of keeping the at-risk populations from being exposed. To get his ideas adopted over these objections, Atlas took a two-track approach: bring in other herd immunity advocates to influence political figures and sideline public health experts on policy decisions. Advocates for herd immunity made their arguments in favor of it public through a document called the Great Barrington Declaration, named after the town that hosts the libertarian think tank where it was drafted. Atlas invited many of the documents' signatories to brief White House figures, including Joseph Ladapo, who went on to play a key role in limiting public health efforts in Florida. Birx, supposedly in charge of the coronavirus response, dismissed these figures as “a fringe group without grounding in epidemics, public health, or on-the-ground common sense experience." But the committee found that Atlas began sending 'opposite opinions' that contradicted Birx's daily coronavirus reports to members of the White House staff. He also issued a public statement indicating that the herd immunity approach was formal policy, saying, “targeted protection of the vulnerable and opening schools and society policy matches the policy of the President and what I have advised.” And two White House officials gave an anonymous background briefing to the press that indicated the Trump administration had adopted herd immunity as a policy. Faced with this, at one point, Birx sent an email to then-Centers for Disease Control and Prevention director Robert Redfield and Anthony Fauci that simply said "I just can't." Despite team herd's apparent success, when questioned directly, Atlas denied he ever suggested the idea. Alex Azar, who served as secretary of Health and Human Services, also appeared to promote herd immunity publicly but denied it when questioned. (The committee suggests this contradiction "raises serious questions about the veracity of Secretary Azar’s representations to Congress.") Targeting testing Although there was obvious confusion about whether Atlas had gotten herd immunity adopted as official policy, the committee uncovered evidence that he managed to get policies enacted that were consistent with it—at least temporarily. This included undercutting efforts to limit infections through public health measures like testing and mask use. The committee heard evidence that Atlas blocked a public message that would have encouraged using masks to limit the spread of infections. Atlas also produced a document in which he falsely claimed that data indicated that masks weren't helpful and suggested they could actually promote infection—language that was echoed by Trump. But his most significant role was in turning CDC testing guidance into a mess. The CDC testing guidelines initially suggested that people who have been exposed get tested and isolate until they receive a negative test result—actions that, if followed, could significantly reduce the spread of the virus. That, obviously, goes against the idea of establishing herd immunity through infection, and Birx testified that "changing CDC’s testing guidance to reduce the amount of testing being conducted 'was an intent of Scott Atlas when he came to the White House.'" And he ultimately succeeded. Redfield allowed language suggesting that people exposed to the virus "do not necessarily need a test" after ensuring that the guidance also included the advice that people should get tested if their doctor suggested they do so—his reasoning being that any sane doctor would obviously suggest a test. (Atlas, it would seem, was evidence to the contrary.) But, after the language had been approved by the CDC, the recommendation that anyone exposed should isolate for two weeks was deleted, although the committee has not determined how that happened. Documents received by the committee indicate that Atlas also suggested that the PCR testing protocol be revised so it was less likely to return a positive result if the virus were present in low levels. This would ensure that, even if testing were done, fewer tests would return positive results. The new guidance set off a firestorm of criticism, including by public health figures within the government. Less than a month later, the original guidance was largely restored, thanks to the efforts of Birx and Redfield, among others. According to Redfield's testimony, the restoration left Atlas incensed. Assessing the damage It's important to remember that all of this was taking place before we had any targeted or especially effective therapies for COVID-19 and prior to the availability of vaccines. At that point, the only means we had of limiting deaths and the evolution of new variants was limiting infections. As the new report details, Atlas worked in this period both to sideline real public health experts and to work with political appointees to increase infection numbers. But if the committee's goal is to ensure we do better next time, it's not clear that this report provides much guidance. Given the large number of degrees our universities hand out, it's always going to be possible to find someone like Atlas: a person with seemingly relevant credentials who believes things that contradict the views of actual experts, yet maintains an unshakeable certainty in their own beliefs. The only way to ensure that such people don't become threats is to ensure that nobody on the political side of policymaking takes them seriously. Unfortunately, the pandemic has made it clear that we can't trust policymakers to exercise that judgment.
geeberdubberbeeber, What's the real reason that you are ecstatic about the virus wreaking havoc on The US whether real or imagined?