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scott atlas
Dr. Birx Criticized for Failing to Speak Out on Trump's 'Parallel Data': Her 'Legacy is One of Sycophancy and Failure'
'Dr. Birx went out of her way to praise Trump and just straight up lied'
Jan 23, 2021
Dr. Deborah Birx, who was the Trump administration's coordinator of the Coronavirus Task Force, said in a CBS News' Face The Nation interview that aired Sunday that ex-President Donald Trump had been reviewing "parallel" data sets on the coronavirus pandemic from someone inside the administration.
"I saw the president presenting graphs that I never made," Birx said. "So, I know that someone out there or someone inside was creating a parallel set of data and graphics that were shown to the president."
Birx said she doesn't know who gave the Trump competing information but "I know now by watching some of the tapes that certainly Scott Atlas brought in parallel data streams." She added: "I don't know who else was part of it, but I think when the record goes back and people see what I was writing on a daily basis that was sent up to White House leadership, that they will see that I was highly specific on what I was seeing and what needed to be done."
Birx was blasted after her comments Sunday for failing to speak out at the time to set the record straight about what she saw in the White House:
Birx also said that there were COVID-19 deniers at the White House.
"There were people who definitely believed that this was a hoax," she said. "I think the information was confusing at the beginning. I think because we didn't talk about the spectrum of the disease, everyone interpreted what they knew."
When asked what her biggest mistake was during her time in the Trump administration, Birx said she should have been "more outspoken," especially on the issue of COVID testing. "I didn't know all the consequences of all these issues," she said. Birx has been criticized for never publicly challenging Trump's suggestion to inject bleach, and after she warned of a dangerous "new phase" of the pandemic last August, Trump tweeted that her comments were "pathetic."
So Crazy Nancy Pelosi said horrible things about Dr. Deborah Birx, going after her because she was too positive on the very good job we are doing on combatting the China Virus, including Vaccines & Therapeutics. In order to counter Nancy, Deborah took the bait & hit us. Pathetic!
-- Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 3, 2020
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268,000 People Died and Scott Atlas Shrugged: Trump's "Most Dangerous" Covid Adviser Quits
Atlas brought no expertise in infectious diseases but plenty of misinformation to the position.
Nov 30, 2020
Scott Atlas, President Donald Trump's "favorite--and most dangerous--Covid-19 adviser," announced his resignation from his White House position late Monday just days before his 130-day role on the coronavirus task force was set to expire, a move that was welcomed by critics who say the Stanford University radiologist's views on the deadly pandemic are inconsistent with epidemiological recommendations and harmful to the nation's public health.
"I worked hard with a singular focus--to save lives and help Americans through this pandemic," Atlas wrote in his resignation letter.
The coronavirus pandemic has killed more than 268,000 Americans, and NPR reported Monday night that "since Atlas began his job in August, nearly one hundred thousand people have died of Covid-19 in the U.S."
Slate summarized Atlas' tenure on Tuesday morning:
Atlas had no prior experience in public health but grabbed Trump's attention during his flame-throwing appearances on Fox News and joined the Trump administration as an adviser in August. Atlas proceeded to push a libertarian approach to managing the pandemic: he questioned the effectiveness of social distancing, considered widespread testing to control the virus unnecessary, all the while he derided widespread closures and questioned the utility of mask-wearing as part of an overall belief in the highly questionable herd immunity approach to solving the virus... Atlas' coronavirus views, as you may have suspected, conveniently jived with Trump's anti-science takes on all aspects of the virus.
Progressives characterized Atlas' embrace of herd immunity as not just "highly questionable," but rather as a potential "massacre" that would require over 200 million people to be infected, resulting in millions of deaths, as Common Dreams reported in September.
In his resignation letter, Atlas insisted he "always relied on the latest science and evidence, without any political consideration or influence."
"As time went on, like all scientists and health policy scholars, I learned new information and synthesized the latest data from around the world, all in an effort to provide you with the best information to serve the greater public good," he said.
Atlas claimed to have focused in particular on looking out for "the working class and the poor." The U.S. has more than 13.5 million Covid-19 cases as of Tuesday, and as Les Leopold showed in an October Common Dreams essay, low-income Americans will bear the greatest burden as infections and deaths surge.
"He's an MRI guy... He has no expertise in any of this stuff," Dr. Ashish Jha, the dean of the Brown University School of Public Health, told NPR.
Despite having no background in infectious diseases, Atlas has "been bringing out arguments that have been refuted week after week, month after month, since the beginning of this outbreak," Jha added.
Matthew Gertz, a senior fellow at Media Matters for America, illustrated one example of the clash between Atlas' anti-lockdown opinions and real-world evidence.
On October 30, Atlas told Fox News: "All lockdowns do are destroy families, really kill people... And it's amazing to me that places, unfortunately, like the U.K. and France have not learned their lesson." Meanwhile, data comparing the three countries' trajectories completely undermine Atlas' talking points.
"He's a destructive force," a federal health official told The Daily Beast last month. "I mean, at this point, I don't know how else to explain what he's doing. It's really disruptive."
Trump's outgoing adviser took a leave of absence from his position as a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, a conservative think tank at Stanford, to temporarily join the White House.
The university has in recent weeks distanced itself from Atlas, especially after he called for an uprising against Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer following the Democratic leader's implementation of new public health measures last month.
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'It's Even Worse on Video': Trump Adviser Welcomes Killing Loved Ones With Covid-19 as This May Be 'Their Final Thanksgiving' Anyway
"Eat, drink, and be merry, because tomorrow my policies may kill you."
Nov 16, 2020
In his latest anti-science appeal to Americans, White House coronavirus adviser Dr. Scott Atlas on Monday night called on families to ignore the guidance of public health experts who say the holiday season should not include indoor gatherings--suggesting to Fox News that families should take the risk even for elderly or sick relatives this Thanksgiving because they will no longer be alive next year.
"This kind of isolation is one of the unspoken tragedies of the elderly who are now being told, 'Don't see your family at Thanksgiving,'" Atlas, who has no public health expertise, told Fox host Martha MacCallum. "For many people this is their final Thanksgiving, believe it or not. What are we doing here?"
Stanford University, where Atlas was a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution before joining President Donald Trump's coronavirus team, promptly distanced itself from the doctor's comments, while political observers expressed shock on social media.
Talking Points Memo founder Josh Marshall wrote that for many Americans it will be their last Thanksgiving "because they're attending Thanksgiving."
Protecting the elderly from Covid-19 is one of the main reasons infectious disease expert Dr. Anthony Fauci and other officials have called on Americans to skip indoor family gatherings and traveling this year. Last week he advised Americans to wear face coverings at any gatherings they do have if they don't know the Covid-19 status of all attendees.
Meanwhile, Atlas has falsely stated that face masks don't reduce transmission of Covid-19 and is a proponent of the U.S. government taking a "herd immunity" approach to the pandemic--encouraging people who are relatively young and healthy to go about their daily lives with no regard for mask-wearing, social distancing, or the existence of a virus that's killed more than 246,000 people in the U.S. this year, while using unspecified methods to separate them from people who are elderly or at high risk for severe Covid-19 infections.
The "herd immunity" approach, euphemistically rebranded as "focused protection" by some proponents, has been denounced as "fringe" by seasoned public health officials.
On Sunday, Atlas also called on Michigan residents to "rise up" against public health guidance after Gov. Gretchen Whitmer announced that in-person learning, indoor dining, organized sports, and other activities would be shut down for three weeks to mitigate the spread of Covid-19.
"This guy is a public health menace and it needs to stop now," tweeted one emergency room physician on Monday evening following Atlas's comments about Thanksgiving.
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'Our Worst Fears Have Come True': With No Sign of Federal Relief, Nursing Home Industry Study Shows Surge in Covid-19
"Trying to protect nursing home residents without controlling community spread is a losing battle."
Nov 16, 2020
Calling on federal lawmakers to take responsibility for the wellbeing of Americans living in nursing homes amid the current surge in coronavirus cases, the nation's top organization of long-term care providers demanded urgent action as they released a report Tuesday showing that the recent spike across the country has corresponded with rising cases in nursing homes.
"Our worst fears have come true as Covid runs rampant among the general population, and long-term care facilities are powerless to fully prevent it from entering due to its asymptomatic and pre-symptomatic spread," stated Mark Parkinson, president and CEO of the American Health Care Association and National Center for Assisted Living (AHCA/NCAL), the industry groups that produced the new findings.
"Our health are heroes are doing everything they can to prevent it from spreading further," Parkinson added, "but this level of Covid nationwide puts serious strain on our workforce, supplies, and testing capacity."
The new AHCA/NCAL study (pdf) shows that weekly Covid-19 cases in nursing homes have reached record numbers this month and traces the spike to community spread outside the facilities.
According to Johns Hopkins University, weekly new cases of Covid-19 rose 140% in the first week of November, with more than 572,000 Americans infected. That same week, more than 10,000 people living in long-term care facilities tested positive, and nearly half of those cases were in Midwestern states with huge spikes in community transmission, including North Dakota and Minnesota.
"The public must realize that their actions not only endanger our nation's most vulnerable, but also trigger government lockdowns of facilities, keeping these residents from their loved ones. This is detrimental to their health, wellbeing, and happiness."
--Mark Parkinson, AHCA/NCAL
Since mid-September, northern states in the Midwest have seen a 200% weekly increase in nursing home cases.
While White House officials including Dr. Scott Atlas, a top coronavirus adviser to President Donald Trump, have pushed a "herd immunity" strategy in which relatively young and healthy people would be urged to go about their daily routines without wearing face masks or social distancing, while nursing home residents and other medically vulnerable people would be quarantined, the AHCA/NCAL study demonstrates the impossibility of such an approach--as medical experts have warned for months.
"Trying to protect nursing home residents without controlling community spread is a losing battle," Tamara Konetzka, an expert on long-term care at the University of Chicago, told the Associated Press earlier this month. "Someone has to care for vulnerable nursing home residents, and those caregivers move in and out of the nursing home daily, providing an easy pathway for the virus to enter."
Dr. David Grabowski, professor of healthcare policy at Harvard Medical School also recently stated, "The strongest predictor of whether or not we'll see cases in [a particular setting] is community spread."
The prevalence of community spread as a cause of outbreaks in nursing homes has caused care providers to underscore calls by immunologist Dr. Anthony Fauci for a drastically scaled back holiday season.
"We are especially concerned that this situation will only get worse with Thanksgiving just around the corner," Parkinson said in a statement. "We urge everyone to do their part to slow the spread immediately and exercise caution when celebrating Thanksgiving."
While he said that nursing homes are doing everything possible to protect those under their care, Parkinson added: "If everybody would wear a mask and social distance to reduce the level of Covid-19 in the community, we know we would dramatically reduce these rates in long term care facilities."
Parkinson's comments came shortly after Atlas insisted on Fox News that Americans should consider celebrating the holidays as they normally would, including traveling and spending time indoors with family members, to combat the isolation faced by many elderly Americans. Atlas also recently decried lockdown measures put in place by Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer.
Atlas's approach, Parkinson suggested, is precisely what puts elderly Americans in danger of both Covid-19 infection and prolonged isoltion.
"The public must realize that their actions not only endanger our nation's most vulnerable, but also trigger government lockdowns of facilities, keeping these residents from their loved ones," said Parkinson. "This is detrimental to their health, wellbeing, and happiness."
While Covid-19 cases in nursing homes only account for 8% of total cases in the U.S., the virus has proven especially deadly for populations in long-term care facilities, where many patients have multiple co-morbidities. Forty percent of Americans who have died of Covid-19 lived in nursing homes.
To reduce the mortality rate in nursing homes, Parkinson said, the federal government must replenish the $175 billion Provider Relief Fund which was included in the CARES Act in March. Most of the funds have been spent, leaving care providers scrambling to secure enough personal protective equipment to mitigate Covid-19 transmission, testing supplies, and staff to care for patients.
"Congress must fulfill its duty," said Parkinson. "Without adequate funding and resources, the U.S. is repeating the same mistakes made during the initial outbreak last spring and the major spike over the summer. We need Congress to prioritize our vulnerable seniors and their caregivers in long-term care facilities, by passing another Covid relief package during the lame duck session in Congress."
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) has shown no signs of budging on his plan to provide the public with just $500 billion in Covid-19 relief, while Democrats have pushed for a $2.2 trillion package including $400 billion for state and local governments and small business loans to potentially enable businesses to shut down temporarily, limiting coronavirus spread.
On Tuesday, a day after more than 166,000 people in the U.S. tested positive for Covid-19, McConnell directed the Senate to vote on a lifetime appointment for one of Trump's federal judicial nominees.
"McConnell is still prioritizing Trump's judges over Covid relief," tweeted Vanita Gupta, president and CEO of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights.
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"I'm Not Going to Be Bullied": Michigan Governor Rebukes Trump Aide's Call for Uprising Over Covid-19 Measures
"Actual public health professionals do not incite violence in response to guidelines or policy that they disagree with. The purpose of public health is to help people, not endanger them."
Nov 15, 2020
"It actually took my breath away, to tell you the truth."
So said Michigan's Democratic Gov. Gretchen Whitmer on Monday morning after Scott Atlas, a member of President Donald Trump's coronavirus task force, urged the state's residents to "rise up" against new Covid-19 public health measures the governor ordered on Sunday as a way to curb the pandemic's surging infection rate.
Whitmer pointed out that "we are in the midst of the worst weeks of this pandemic. We've been going through this for nine months, and right now, the numbers are as bad as they've been at any given time."
"We have to take aggressive measures," she continued. "With the vacuum of leadership in Washington, D.C., it's on the states' governors to do what we can to save lives and to follow epidemiologists and public health experts."
"They're telling us not to gather indoors, as our temperatures plummet and we're on the brink of flu season," she added. "The modelling... shows that we'll lose another 20,000 people just here in Michigan between now and the middle of February."
In response to Whitmer's announcement of an emergency order that enacts a three-week pause on indoor dining, recreation, and in-person learning, Atlas, a radiologist with no background in public health who has parroted Trump's baseless and anti-scientific views on infectious diseases since joining the White House in August, wrote on Twitter: "The only way this stops is if people rise up. You get what you accept." He included the hashtags #FreedomMatters and #StepUp.
Soon after Atlas attacked Whitmer for attempting to preserve lives, the governor told CNN: "I'm not going to be bullied into not following reputable scientists and medical professionals."
Whitmer's message was reinforced by Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel, who described Atlas' remarks as "disappointing, irresponsible, and the reason why the United States finds itself in such desperate circumstances regarding Covid-19."
"A patriot," Nessel added, "is one who protects America from its enemies, both foreign and domestic. Covid-19 is the enemy, not each other. Stop pitting Americans against each other and start supporting policies proven to effectively fight the virus."
Atlas' call for an uprising came just over a month after the FBI foiled a plot by right-wing domestic terrorists to kidnap Whitmer and overthrow Michigan's government, an attempt at violent insurrection that, as Common Dreams reported at the time, many observers said was connected to Trump's intimidating, all-caps tweet to "Liberate Michigan!" in April.
Shortly after federal agents thwarted the far-right threat against Whitmer, Trump at a mid-October rally in Muskegon, Michigan told the cheering crowd: "You've got to get your governor to open up your state," ranting against what he called the "draconian, unscientific" lockdowns that public health experts have recommended to stem severe coronavirus outbreaks and get the pandemic under control.
In response to chants of "Lock her up!" Trump amplified the crowd's authoritarian spirit, saying "Lock them all up," an apparent reference to other Democratic lawmakers who have taken stronger steps than their Republican counterparts to curb the spread of Covid-19 and protect the public's health.
This "is simply incitement to violence," Dr. Abdul El-Sayed, a physician, epidemiologist, and progressive activist and author, said at the time.
Whitmer noted last month that "this is exactly the rhetoric that has put me, my family, and other government officials' lives in danger while we try to save the lives of our fellow Americans."
On Sunday night, Dr. Angela Rasmussen, a virologist at Columbia University, denounced Atlas' statement, pointing out that "actual public health professionals do not incite violence in response to guidelines or policy that they disagree with."
"The purpose of public health," she added, "is to help people, not endanger them."
After several observers suggested that Atlas was, like Trump, encouraging violence against Whitmer, the president's adviser backtracked.
"Hey. I NEVER was talking at all about violence. People vote, people peacefully protest. NEVER would I endorse or incite violence. NEVER!!!" he tweeted three hours after his initial, incendiary message.
As New York Magazine's Matt Stieb wrote on Monday, however, "Atlas' online remarks may actually be less dangerous than the comments he's made within the White House."
"According to the Washington Post, in the early fall he 'advocated allowing infections to spread naturally among most of the population,' a course that the president is functionally encouraging," Stieb noted, "by doing nothing to stop the unmitigated surge of the pandemic in many states."
The disastrous effects of Trump's commitment to a so-called "herd immunity" approach has been on full display in the past week, as the coronavirus caseload in the U.S. increased from 10 to 11 million in only six days while the death toll moved closer to 250,000.
Amid a spike in hospitalizations that has pushed healthcare workers to the brink, elected officials have begun to impose new restrictions in an attempt to slow down disease transmission.
"Michigan is experiencing the fastest growing surge of Covid-19 cases since the early days of the pandemic," El-Sayed said Sunday night on social media. "If this goes unchecked, we could see a huge surge in deaths."
Whitmer's actions "to limit spread will save lives," he added. "It's that simple."
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Scott Atlas Is Trump's Doctor Death
He’s a reminder of an infamous Russian who "probably killed more human beings than any individual scientist in history."
Oct 21, 2020
After all this time, most of us realize that Donald Trump is a Russian asset. Not that he's a secret mole necessarily or even The Manchurian Candidate, but Vladimir Putin plays him like a balalaika strumming Song of the Volga Boatmen.
No one but the two of them knows with absolute certainty why this is--whether it's money-related (probably) or something else--but unwittingly or not, the cash-strapped president's certainly playing the "useful idiot" role so beloved in spy fiction and such TV shows as "Homeland." Doubtless to Putin's delight, a second term would see an even more concerted effort on Trump's part to tear apart the NATO alliance and other vital international coalitions, not to mention a further fracturing of these United States.
What's more, the intelligence community has made us aware, in no uncertain terms, that Russian cybermeddling in our election is still hammering away at American social media with trolls, bots and fake websites favoring Trump, and that he has been informed that Rudy Giuliani is a primary conduit for made-in-Russia leaks and misinformation about Joe Biden and his son Hunter. Trump waved the allegations aside.
One of Rudy's main sources is discredited Ukrainian Andriy Derkach, described by the US Treasury department as "an active Russian agent for over a decade, maintaining close connections with the Russian intelligence services." Nonetheless, Rupert Murdoch's New York Post has been publishing this rubbish (to the horror of many in its newsroom) and the primetime marionettes of Fox have pumped and bumped the story like a trumpet, even though the channel's own news department doubted its veracity.
But this week, what strikes me as particularly in the style of the old Soviet Union are the actions of Dr. Scott Atlas, the neuroradiologist with absolutely no experience in virology, immunology or public health who Trump has plucked from the toxic airwaves of Fox to take over the increasingly moribund coronavirus task force.
As per The Washington Post:
Atlas shot down attempts to expand testing. He openly feuded with other doctors on the coronavirus task force and succeeded in largely sidelining them. He advanced fringe theories, such as that social distancing and mask-wearing were meaningless and would not have changed the course of the virus in several hard-hit areas. And he advocated allowing infections to spread naturally among most of the population while protecting the most vulnerable and those in nursing homes until the United States reaches herd immunity, which experts say would cause excess deaths, according to three current and former senior administration officials.
Atlas also cultivated Trump's affection with his public assertions that the pandemic is nearly over, despite death and infection counts showing otherwise, and his willingness to tell the public that a vaccine could be developed before the Nov. 3 election, despite clear indications of a slower timetable.
Atlas's ascendancy was apparent during a recent Oval Office meeting. After Trump left the room, Atlas startled other aides by walking behind the Resolute Desk and occupying the president's personal space to keep the meeting going, according to one senior administration official. Atlas called this account 'false and laughable.'
Colleagues described Atlas as "ill-informed, manipulative and at times dishonest." So as I read and listened to these reports, the someone who Atlas' actions and personality reminded me of the most was a controversial figure from the Soviet Union's Stalinist era: Trofim Lysenko - a man who, as Sam Kean wrote for The Atlantic a few years ago, "probably killed more human beings than any individual scientist in history."
Lysenko, a biologist--sort of--rejected the science of genetics in favor of screwy theories that said the environment in which crops are grown was far more important than a plant species' genetic code. Food could be made to grow in the dead of winter, for example, if you soaked the seeds in cold water.
His nutty ideas were embraced by Soviet officials as properly Marxist. Russia was wracked by famine and death. Collective farms were a failure so Stalin put Lysenko in charge. The pseudoscientist helped make it even worse. Kean notes, "Wheat, rye, potatoes, beets--most everything grown according to Lysenko's methods died or rotted... Stalin still deserves the bulk of the blame for the famines, which killed at least 7 million people, but Lysenko's practices prolonged and exacerbated the food shortages. (Deaths from the famines peaked around 1932 to 1933, but four years later, after a 163-fold increase in farmland cultivated using Lysenko's methods, food production was actually lower than before.)"
Communist China adopted his methods, too--30 million died from starvation.
Russian scientists who dissented from the Lysenko school of humbug wound up denounced and jobless. Many were sent to prison and several were executed. His influence finally waned after the death of Stalin in 1953 although he remained at his job until 1965. Lysenko set back Russian agriculture by at least half a century.
Oddly enough, in Putin's Russia today, there has been a bit of a revival of interest in Lysenko's crackpot theories, in part because of an overall distrust in science and expertise. In other words, if Trump and Dr. Scott Atlas are any indication, Lysenko would fit right in at this White House.
Despite having contracted coronavirus himself, Trump still eschews masks and social distancing, attacks the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the FDA, then insults Dr. Anthony Fauci, the pandemic's trusted voice of reason, as "an idiot" and "a disaster." He mocks Joe Biden for listening to "the scientists," says he's "tired of covid," of talking about and hearing about the pandemic, poor thing. He'd rather throw mudballs, hurl scurrilous QAnon conspiracy theories, egg on armed extremists and yell at his rallies that he wants to throw Biden in jail on bogus criminal charges - anything to distract and keep from talking about an estimated 225,000 dead Americans by Election Day, 400,000 by year's end. In fact, according to the CDC, if we count undiagnosed cases and COVID-related sickness and death, the terrible human toll already is closer to 300,000.
COVID-19 is on the rise in forty states. On Sunday's Meet the Press, Dr. Michael Osterholm, director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota, warned Chuck Todd, "The next six-to-12 weeks are going to be the darkest of the entire pandemic. Vaccines will not become available in any meaningful way until early to third quarter of next year. And even then, half of the U.S. population, at this point, is skeptical of even taking the vaccine... [P]eople don't know what to believe. And that's one of our huge challenges going forward, is we've got to get the message to the public that reflects the science and reflects reality."
But the message from Trump and Dr. Atlas remains one of denial. Trump says the disease "is disappearing," that a vaccine is imminent. And just this past weekend, Atlas tried tweeting that masks are useless, only to have his message rejected by Twitter for misinformation. Although Atlas denies he supports the idea of herd immunity - letting the disease rage through the population until it burns out - he recently endorsed the so-called "Great Barrington Declaration," a pro-herd immunity document conjured by researchers affiliated with the libertarian American Institute for Economic Research and, as reported by The New York Times opposed by eighty "alarmed and angry" experts believing that "the declaration's approach would endanger Americans who have underlying conditions that put them at high risk from severe Covid-19--at least one-third of U.S. citizens, by most estimates--and result in perhaps a half-million deaths."
The bottom line is that Trump suffers from a different virulent disease, a callous indolence complicated by indifference and a lack of compassion, not to be unexpected from a lazy and ignorant man who has never worked an honest day in his life. When the nation fell deathly ill, he failed to do what needed to be done and now embraces Atlas as an expert who reverse engineers the president's lassitude and apathy and tries to make it look like smart policy. Marc Lipsitch, director of Harvard's Center for Communicable Disease Dynamics said it well, telling The Washington Post, "If your goal is to do nothing, then you create a situation in which it looks okay to do nothing [and] you find some experts to make it complicated."
If you would seek an elected official who seems to know what he's doing--at least on the pandemic front--look again to New York State Governor Andrew Cuomo, who, for all his many faults and infuriating anti-reform efforts, has managed to preside over a largely successful statewide campaign against COVID. (Although as The New Yorker's Nick Paumgarten recently pointed out, "Many of the moves Cuomo made in the earliest days of the pandemic were indicative of a governing style often hampered by political calculation and personal pique.")
Watch his media briefing this past Sunday, when he made a thoughtful presentation on vaccines and what needs to be addressed before successful inoculations can be administered to vast numbers of people. Some have suggested that he would make an excellent pandemic czar in a Biden administration; theoretically, a job he could hold while continuing as governor--much as Fiorello LaGuardia ran the nation's civil defense during World War II yet remained mayor of New York City.
In Scott Atlas, Donald Trump has found his Dr. Death, a Lysenko-like sidekick to the Superman that the president fantasizes himself to be. Yet in reality, this horrific pandemic turns out to be the Kryptonite that may take away his real and imagined political powers and send him, weakened and alone, back to the dark Bizarro world from whence he came.
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Public Health Experts Raise Alarm as Trump White House Embraces 'Fringe' Declaration Pushing Herd Immunity
"It's being presented as if it's a major alternative view that's held by large numbers of experts in the scientific community. That is not true."
Oct 14, 2020
Public health experts on Tuesday evening into Wednesday raised alarm over reports that the White House has embraced a declaration calling for a "herd immunity" approach to managing the coronavirus pandemic, put forward by scientists whose views have been denounced as "fringe" by National Institutes of Health Director Francis Collins.
"This is a fringe component of epidemiology. This is not mainstream science. It's dangerous. It fits into the political views of certain parts of our confused political establishment."
--Dr. Francis Collins, National Institutes of Health
Reporters spoke on Monday with an anonymous senior administration official about the "Great Barrington Declaration," a document unveiled on Oct. 4 in Great Barrington, Massachusetts at the American Institute for Economic Research, a libertarian think tank.
The declaration promotes a strategy called "Focused Protection"--what one professor at the University of New South Wales called a rebranding of "herd immunity," in which Covid-19 would be permitted to spread through the young and relatively healthy population while the elderly and people with pre-existing health conditions would follow public health guidance to prevent them from contracting the disease. The document calls for a return to schools, workplaces, and normal pre-pandemic routines as a means of allowing the virus to spread at "natural" rates.
Three epidemiologists in particular--Martin Kulldorff of Harvard University, Sunetra Gupta of University of Oxford, and Jay Bhattacharya of Stanford Medical School--were signatories of the document and have been mentioned by name in recent press briefings by Dr. Scott Atlas, a neuroradiologist and senior fellow at the right-wing Hoover Institution who has become one of President Donald Trump's top coronavirus advisers in recent months despite his lack of public health expertise.
The scientists met with Atlas and Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar last week, according to the Washington Post.
The senior administration official told the Post that the Great Barrington Declaration--which proponents claim has been signed by thousands of doctors and scientists but whose signatories include "transparently fake" names including "Dr. Johnny Bananas" and "Dr. Person Fakename," according to Sky News--simply promotes the approach pushed by Trump for months.
The president began harshly criticizing lockdown measures almost as soon as they began in March and has pushed for a full reopening of schools and businesses while he and other Republicans have scoffed at the notion of providing robust, long-term economic aid to people and small businesses as other wealthy countries did months ago.
By forcing much of the population to return to their normal routines amid the pandemic, adherence to the Great Barrington Declaration would keep the Trump administration and the Republican-controlled U.S. Senate from having to consider how to provide aid to businesses that are forced to close and people who have to stay at home to avoid spreading the coronavirus.
Rather than ignoring public health guidance, tweeted Yale epidemiologist and public health activist Gregg Gonsalves, the federal government must focus on making it economically viable for families and small businesses to keep their communities safe.
The declaration does not include any mention of members of the public wearing face coverings or adhering to social distancing guidelines, nor does it outline how specifically society would segregate elderly and medically vulnerable people from young and relatively healthy people who are urged to go about their regular routines.
Collins told the Post that the document will likely be embraced as "an idea that someone can wrap themselves in as a justification for skipping wearing masks or social distancing and just doing whatever they damn well please."
"What I worry about with this is it's being presented as if it's a major alternative view that's held by large numbers of experts in the scientific community. That is not true," Collins told the Post. "This is a fringe component of epidemiology. This is not mainstream science. It's dangerous. It fits into the political views of certain parts of our confused political establishment."
Other public health experts on social media, both in the United Kingdom and the U.S., expressed alarm over the White House's decision to embrace the proposal.
Gonsalves called into question the primary idea being put forth by the Great Barrington Declaration--that public health experts are calling for a "full-scale" lockdown in which people would be unable to leave their homes for long periods of time.
"We need a vaccine to get to herd immunity without putting millions of lives in jeopardy," Gonsalves tweeted. "Full stop. Stop the bullshit."
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'COVchella' at the White House: Tiny Crowd Shows Up for Trump's COVID-19 Rally
Dr. Scott Atlas, Trump’s advisor on COVID-19, was not wearing a mask at Saturday’s rally.
Oct 10, 2020
President Trump greeted a couple hundred people gathered on the South Lawn of the White House from a balcony on Saturday in an event many on Twitter have dubbed "COVchella."
Sounding hoarse, Trump said "I'm feeling great," calling Covid-19 by the racist name "China Virus."
Trump gave his brief 18-minute speech from the same White House balcony where Trump's bizarre salute earlier this week evoked Benito Mussolini and Eva Peron.
"No one is hurt more by the left-wing war on cops than African Americans," Trump said. "Last year, in just 4 Democrat-Run cities, over 1,000 African-Americans were murdered as a result of violent crime. And the riots, looting, and arson disproportionately hurt Black and Latino communities."
The smaller than expected gathering on the South Lawn of the White House was organized by controversial conservative activist Candace Owens' group Blexit, a campaign to urge Black Americans to leave the Democratic Party.
Trump's advisor on COVID-19 was not wearing a mask at Saturday's rally. Dr Scott Atlas was spotted standing off to the side of the South Lawn.
Although the Trump administration refuses to say whether he's still infected with the COVID-19 virus, Trump plans to hold rallies in Florida on Monday, Pennsylvania on Tuesday and Iowa on Wednesday.
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'Disgusting': Critics Denounce Reported Trump Team Effort to Pressure CDC on School Reopenings
One former aide said she saw "senior White House political staff actively undermine the doctors by attempting to manipulate scientific data on the virus and force changes to CDC guidances."
Sep 29, 2020
In yet another revelation regarding the Trump Administration's concerted effort to downplay the threat of Covid-19 to the American people, new reporting shows top White House officials pressured the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to encourage in-person schooling, despite scientific evidence that the virus is airborne and can be more easily spread indoors.
"The White House spent weeks trying to press public health professionals to fall in line with President [Donald] Trump's election-year agenda of pushing to reopen schools and the economy as quickly as possible," the New York Times reported Monday. "The president and his team have remained defiant in their demand for schools to get back to normal, even as coronavirus cases have once again ticked up, in some cases linked to school and college reopenings."
In the Times article, Mark Mazzetti, Noah Weiland, and Sharon LaFraniere wrote these actions were "a strikingly political intervention in one of the most sensitive public health debates of the pandemic, according to documents and interviews with current and former government officials."
The revelations come as the global death toll from Covid-19 surpassed one million people--nearly a fifth of them in the United States--this week, and as a new CDC report found more than 277,000 American children have contracted cornoavirus since May. Kaiser Health News reported earlier this month that opening colleges and universities in the U.S. fueled a spike in Covid-19 cases at the rate of about 3,000 a day.
Olivia Troye, a former top aide to Vice President Mike Pence on the White House Coronavirus Task Force--who was admittedly involved in some of the alleged interference--has since spoken out about the efforts, saying she regrets being "complicit" in the disinformation campaign.
"During my tenure on the task force, I saw senior White House political staff actively undermine the doctors by attempting to manipulate scientific data on the virus and force changes to CDC guidances," Troye tweeted Tuesday. "I know my former task force colleagues are still fighting for what's right today."
According to Times reporting, "As part of their behind-the-scenes effort, White House officials also tried to circumvent the CDC in a search for alternate data showing that the pandemic was weakening and posed little danger to children... The effort included Dr. Deborah L. Birx, the White House's coronavirus response coordinator, and officials working for Vice President Mike Pence, who led the task force. It left officials at the CDC, long considered the world's premier public health agency, alarmed at the degree of pressure from the White House."
The CDC itself has come under fire for its inconsistent guidance on how Covid-19 is spread and its public health recommendations to the American public regarding what safety precautions are necessary and when.
As Common Dreams reported Monday, the agency's director, Robert Redford, was reportedly overheard telling a colleague that Dr. Scott Atlas, a neuroradiologist with no expertise in infectious diseases or epidemiology appointed to the coronavirus task force in August, has been spreading incorrect information at the behest of the Trump administration.
"Everything he says is false," Redford a phone conversation on an airplane overheard by an NBC journalist on the same flight.
The Times details a months-long push to downplay the dangers of opening schools:
The White House seized on a bar chart the CDC distributed [in June] to other agencies, which showed that 60% of coronavirus deaths were people over the age of 75. Officials asked the CDC to provide a new chart to show people 18 and under as a separate group--rather than including them as normal in an under-25 category--in an effort to demonstrate that the risk for school-age children was relatively low.
In another instance, Dr. Birx took a direct role in an effort to push the CDC to incorporate work from a little-known agency inside the Department of Health and Human Services, the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration.
The document worked on by the mental health agency struck a different tone from the cautious approach being proposed by the CDC, warning that school closures would have a long-term effect on the mental health of children. It said that "very few reports of children being the primary source of Covid-19 transmission among family members have emerged" and asserted that children who were asymptomatic "are unlikely to spread the virus."
That document became the "gist" of the mental health agency's official position on school reopenings, the Times reported.
Throughout the summer, Trump made a public effort to push for school reopenings, arguing that it was safe and that the risks outweighed the damage to children's mental health that not reopening would cause.
In addition, the Times reported Monday, "the White House drafted materials that CDC officials originally believed were intended to be posted on the White House website, including an illustrated slide presentation emphasizing the 'high costs of keeping schools closed,' while asserting that school-age children face minimal risks from the coronavirus."
The slides, obtained by Times, were not made public due to objections from CDC officials.
In response to the reporting, lawmakers Tuesday chided the Trump Administration for putting lives at risk.
"[The] Trump White house pressured CDC to say schools could safely reopen, even though scientists disagreed with the data," Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.) tweeted. "Some of that data was included by the CDC. That's our kids' safety at risk. Disgusting."
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'Everything He Says Is False': CDC Director Overheard on Airplane Condemning Trump Covid Adviser's Misinformation
Dr. Scott Atlas, a Trump adviser with no expertise in infectious diseases, "has been spreading misinformation for a long time," said one epidemiologist.
Sep 28, 2020
During a phone conversation on a commercial airplane late last week overheard by an NBC News reporter, the head of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention slammed one of the White House's top Covid-19 advisers for providing President Donald Trump and the U.S. public with misleading information about the deadly pandemic.
"Everything he says is false," CDC Director Dr. Robert Redfield told a colleague while on a flight from Atlanta to Washington, D.C. on Friday, NBC News reported Monday morning. Redfield, a Trump appointee, later acknowledged to NBC that he was referring to Dr. Scott Atlas, a neuroradiologist with no expertise in infectious diseases or epidemiology.
Brought aboard the administration's Covid-19 task force in August after reportedly catching Trump's attention with his frequent appearances on Fox News, Atlas has been pushing the White House to adopt a so-called "herd immunity" approach to the coronavirus pandemic--a strategy public health experts warn would cause millions of additional deaths. Atlas has also publicly questioned the effectiveness of face coverings in preventing the spread of coronavirus.
"Since his addition to the task force, Atlas has become the medical expert who spends the most time with the president, and his profile has been elevated in recent weeks by his appearing in the White House briefing room when Trump speaks with reporters," NBC reported. "There is a concern among Redfield and others that Atlas continually briefs the president and misrepresents what other health experts have said in sworn testimony, according to a member of the task force."
As epidemiologist Eric Feigl-Ding noted on Twitter, Atlas "has been spreading misinformation for a long time," including by falsely stating that coronavirus poses "no risk" to children.
Despite Atlas' complete lack of experience in the field of infectious diseases, Trump has cited the radiologist in an effort to legitimize his false claims about the coronavirus.
"A lot of people do agree with me," Trump said during an ABC News town hall in defense of his insistence that the U.S. is "rounding the corner" on the pandemic. "You look at Scott Atlas, you look at some of the other doctors that are highly--from Stanford."
But in a letter about a week ahead of Trump's town hall, dozens of Atlas' former colleagues at Stanford University Medical School denounced the White House adviser for spreading "falsehoods and misrepresentations of the science" in a variety of areas, from mask use to his promotion of a herd immunity strategy.
"Many of his opinions and statements run counter to established science and, by doing so, undermine public-health authorities and the credible science that guides effective public health policy," the Stanford faculty members warned.
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