Atlas Shrugged
I used to receive many ‘throw-away” journals. These magazines were intended for health professionals, sent free of charge, and contained non-peer-reviewed articles. Their sole purpose was to spread drug company advertising. Now, instead of throw-away paper, I get junk email from sources like MedPageToday with clickbait headlines that drive readers to online ads.
This story about a congressional investigation into the Covid response (When will Congress investigate covid’s origin?) caught my attention because it mentioned Dr. Scott Atlas whose book I read.
“The report noted that the Trump administration recruited Scott Atlas, MD, a radiologist with no background in infectious diseases to serve as an advisor on the response to COVID-19, adding that Atlas received unfettered access to the Trump White House, and became an influential voice pushing for herd immunity policies.
At Atlas’s urging, Trump administration officials promoted the herd immunity strategy with “deadly consequences,” according to the report. Specifically, the report stated that Atlas pushed the Trump administration to change CDC guidance to limit the amount of testing conducted in the U.S.”
The author of this article claims to be an investigative journalist, but she didn’t investigate anything. She just repeated the lies and accusations of a one-sided political report.
I imagine that Dr. Atlas would have shrugged if he read the accusations in the congressional report. He has heard them all before and discussed them in his book A Plague Upon Our House. He’s not just a radiologist. He never advocated for a ‘let it rip’ herd immunity approach. He did oppose the over-emphasis on testing because excess testing was a political goal, not a medical one. But perhaps the biggest lie is that Dr. Atlas controlled the nation’s response to Covid at all. Dr. Fauci and Dr. Birx ran the federal program while Dr. Atlas only operated at the margins.
Dr. Atlas has an impressive background that made him well suited to join the Coronavirus Taskforce. Yet, they make him sound like some random guy who spent his days looking at chest x-rays. In reality, he was Professor of Radiology and Chief of Neuroradiology at Stanford University Medical Center from 1998 until 2012. He is also the editor of the leading textbook in the field, the best‐selling Magnetic Resonance Imaging of the Brain and Spine. In addition, he has been editor or associate editor of numerous scientific journals.
After leaving radiology, he became Senior Fellow in health care policy at Stanford’s Hoover Institution where he investigated the impact of government and the private sector on access, quality, pricing, and innovation in health care.
In other words, he was a leader at a top Medical School who knows how to evaluate scientific papers and devise policy—the perfect counterpoint to the lifetime government functionaries who controlled the Coronavirus response.
Fauci and Birx were veterans of the AIDS war. In addition, previous pandemic planning focused on influenza variants. They were rigid in their ways, fighting old battles. Dr. Atlas brought in the logical idea of considering the novel aspects of the novel coronavirus to guide our response.
Dr. Atlas’ radical ideas included protecting the vulnerable while keeping schools open. It was known as early as March 2020 that mortality rates in the young are orders of magnitude less than in the elderly. He was criticized for saying that total lockdowns would only prolong the problem. Yet, the same people who criticized him advocated ‘flattening the curve.’ What did they think ‘flattening the curve’ means? You don’t need to know calculus to see that the flattened curve extends the pandemic, though it decreases numbers at the peak.
Atlas was portrayed as anti-testing for saying in testimony to the Senate in May 2020, “those with mild symptoms of the illness should strictly self‐isolate for two weeks. It’s not urgent to test them – simply assume they have the infection. That includes confinement at home, having the highest concern for sanitization, and wearing protective masks when others in their homes enter the same room.” The concept of when to test is very confusing. Good physicians intuitively understand Bayes’ theorem. When there is a high likelihood of disease, a negative test doesn’t change anything. Did long lines of infected people spreading disease while waiting at urgent cares help anyone?
The problem with our covid response is that everything became political. And one political contention was that we weren’t doing enough testing. Therefore, a major focus of the Task Force was to do as many tests as possible just to score political points. The number of tests done became a more important metric than lives saved.
Dr. Atlas didn’t even join the coronavirus task force until August 2020, and his advice was never implemented. Dr. Birx and Dr. Fauci were firmly in charge. Members of the Trump re-election team—Jared Kushner, for example—thought it would be political suicide to go against Fauci.
Read A Plague Upon Our House and learn about the inner workings of the Covid Task Force from Dr Atlas’ viewpoint. You’ll be shocked and amazed to read about how decisions were made.
If there are more investigations to be done, there should be a truth and reconciliation commission. Those responsible for instituting Chinese-style lockdowns, retarding the education of our youth by closing schools and making children wear muzzles, closing their playgrounds, and simultaneously putting infected people in nursing homes are the ones who need to be brought to justice.
BRAVO, BRAVO, BRAVO!! I just finished Atlas’ book, and – as though I couldn’t get angrier – was beyond infuriated. With numbers, sources, and reasoned arguments, Atlas confirmed what a lot of us thought early on, that the vulnerable should have been sequestrated, and the rest of us should have gotten on with our lives. He repeatedly, thoroughly made the point in his book and to the soulless apparatchiks from Mike Pence on down that the harms from these idiotic lockdowns would far outpace any potential good (which never materialized). The biggest lie about Atlas, the so-called “let ‘er rip” herd immunity strategy, was a stinking lie that he completely debunks.
U.S. medicine, because of government metastasis, was long ago made captive by these bureaucracies, just waiting for something like this to use us to exploit everyone. We all participated in making the COVID damage far, far worse than it need have been, and I appreciate your review.