Covid Lies: How the White House handled the pandemic could be a predictor of future "negligence"
As we get further away from the onset of the “Covid pandemic,” we hopefully have learned for ourselves that much of what the “Experts” told us was wrong. If we only follow the Leftstream media, Wikipedia and Chat GPT, which are still parroting the official narrative, we won’t have learned that. Fortunately there are many voices that truly “follow the science” if we search for them. One such voice, both during the pandemic and after, is Dr. Scott W. Atlas.
A Plague Upon Our House
Dr. Scott W. Atlas, MD, is a Senior Fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institute,1 where he investigates the role of government and the private sector in health care quality and access, global trends in health care innovation, and the key economic and civil liberty issues related to health policy. Dr. Atlas served on President Trump’s Coronavirus Task Force from July to December 2020. In 2021 he co-founded the Academy for Science and Freedom at Hillsdale College with Jay Bhattacharya, MD and Martin Kulldorff, PhD, both signers of The Great Barrington Declaration.
While serving on the White House Coronavirus Task Force, Dr. Atlas relates how he was often in opposition to the “troika of ‘medical experts’” (his description) composed of Dr. Robert Redfield (CDC Director), Anthony Fauci (Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases) and Dr. Deborah Birx (White House Coronavirus Response Coordinator) over coronavirus policy.
He wrote in his book, A Plague Upon Our House: My Fight at the Trump White House to Stop COVID from Destroying America2 that he was the only participant on the Task Force to bring data and statistics to the meetings. (Chapter 4: The Mad Hatter’s Tea Party). Dr. Atlas continually challenged the unscientific policy positions promoted by the troika, and especially Fauci and Birx, during the Task Force, which continually made recommendations contrary to long established epidemiological science and practice.
Based on Lies
On March 6, 2023, Atlas had an Opinion article published in Newsweek entitled America's COVID Response Was Based on Lies. He states in his article
We must acknowledge the abject failure of the Birx-Fauci policies. They were enacted, but they failed to stop the dying, failed to stop the infection from spreading, and inflicted massive damage and destruction particularly on lower-income families and on America's children.
The tragic failure of reckless, unprecedented lockdowns that were contrary to established pandemic science, and the added massive harms of those policies on children, the elderly, and lower-income families, are indisputable and well-documented in numerous studies. This was the biggest, the most tragic, and the most unethical breakdown of public health leadership in modern history.
Dr. Atlas also lists in the Article the 10 biggest falsehoods promoted by officials during the pandemic.
SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus has a far higher fatality rate than the flu by several orders of magnitude.
Everyone is at significant risk to die from this virus.
No one has any immunological protection, because this virus is completely new.
Asymptomatic people are major drivers of the spread.
Locking down—closing schools and businesses, confining people to their homes, stopping non-COVID medical care, and eliminating travel—will stop or eliminate the virus.
Masks will protect everyone and stop the spread.
The virus is known to be naturally occurring, and claiming it originated in a lab is a conspiracy theory.
Teachers are at especially high risk.
COVID vaccines stop the spread of the infection.
Immune protection only comes from a vaccine.
Why Now?
So why are we talking about the Covid pandemic that began almost four years ago and whose restrictions mostly ended over a year ago? Why did Dr. Scott Atlas write the Newsweek Opinion Article just last year? Three reasons actually.
First, we are hearing rumblings of another pandemic. Maybe a Covid variant, maybe something else. The World Economic Forum is talking about a future “Disease X.” (Monkey Pox already came, got little traction and went away.) And while most restrictions ended, there are still vaccine mandates in some universities and businesses. And mask mandates are coming back. The University of Pittsburg Medial Center (UPMC), an integrated nonprofit health enterprise that owns or operates most hospitals and clinics in western PA, brought back the mask mandate a month ago. In many areas of western PA, the only labs, urgent care and other medical clinics around are run by UPMC. When UPMC requires “masks,” in opposition to “the actual science” that shows they don’t work, many in western PA must comply with the lie to get medical care. And I’m sure that other part of the country are having similar experiences.
Second, those in civil government seeking power or control love emergencies as tools of control. If its not a pandemic, maybe its a climate emergency or a power grid failure or rampant racism next time. Anything to gain control over the populace. If we are wise to the fact that they don’t actually “trust the science” but rather promote a pseudo-science with mandatory restrictions, we are better equipped to question what they say and are more willing to listen to those with alternate views. The 10 biggest falsehoods represent a broad span of control and we can be sure that control will be more important that truth in the next emergency, whatever kind of emergency it is, just as it was in the Covid pandemic.
Finally, government “experts” are often just entrenched bureaucrats. Fauci was the highest paid Federal bureaucrat. He was a government employee for over 50 years, entering government employment immediately upon completing medical school and his two-year internship and residency, never having been in practice as a Doctor. These “experts” may have medical or engineering degrees (or whatever area of “expertise” they represent), but often no real world experience. Often your local Doctor (or plumber3) has more real world experience and common sense than the government or NGO “expert” wanting to control your life.
We can’t know for sure if there will be a new emergency of some kind but we do know that those in power love to use emergencies to increase control. And we know that fear is a potent means of control. (See our post on Fear).
What we have learned from the pandemic is that we should not trust uncritically what we hear from civil government officials or experts of any kind, but seek out other reliable sources of information to pursue truth. In fact during Covid we had (and still have) voices at the State and Local level that didn’t follow the “official” narrative and have been shown to be correct.
So be wise and Pursue Truth.
For more information on the Hoover Institute and Scott W. Atlas: https://www.hoover.org/profiles/scott-w-atlas
A Liberatio Protocol Book, An Imprint of Post Hill Press (2011)
You may remember “Joe the Plumber,” during the 2008 Presidential campaign. He questioned Barrack Obama’s tax policies at a campaign stop and became a symbol of the “working man.”