{"id":32819,"date":"2020-10-22T08:30:51","date_gmt":"2020-10-22T12:30:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/stateofthenation.co\/?p=32819"},"modified":"2020-10-22T08:33:33","modified_gmt":"2020-10-22T12:33:33","slug":"trumps-senior-covid-advisor-speaks-radioactive-truth","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stateofthenation.co\/?p=32819","title":{"rendered":"Trump&#8217;s Senior Covid Advisor Speaks Radioactive Truth (Video)"},"content":{"rendered":"<h1>Scott Atlas: I\u2019m disgusted and dismayed<\/h1>\n<p><!--more--><\/p>\n<div>\n<div><iframe src=\"https:\/\/cdn.iframe.ly\/api\/iframe?url=https%3A%2F%2Fyoutu.be%2Fvpn3JxXqnp4&amp;key=357d953055da7177194e1a84a2d8a5a3&amp;playerjs=1\" scrolling=\"no\" allowfullscreen=\"allowfullscreen\" data-mce-fragment=\"1\"><\/iframe><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<p>by UnHerd<\/p>\n<p>Freddie Sayers caught up with Scott Atlas, a healthcare policy academic from the Hoover Institute at Stanford, who has become the latest lightning rod for the controversy around Covid-19 policy and his support for a more targeted response.<\/p>\n<p>Speaking from inside the White House, where he is now Senior advisor to the President and a member of the Coronavirus task force, he does not hold back. He tells us that he is disgusted and dismayed at the media and public policy establishment, sad that it has come to this, cynical about their intentions, and angry that lockdown policies have been allowed to go on so long.<\/p>\n<p>He won\u2019t be rushing back to Stanford, where his colleagues have rounded on him, if the President loses in November.<\/p>\n<p>KEY QUOTES<\/p>\n<p><strong>Why him?<\/strong><br \/>\n\u201cI\u2019m a healthcare policy person \u2014 I have a background in medical science, but my role really is to translate medial science into public policy. That\u2019s very different from being an epidemiologist or a virologist with a single, limited view on things.\u201d<\/p>\n<p><strong>Dr Fauci<br \/>\n<\/strong>\u201cHe\u2019s just one person on the task force \u2014 there are several people on the task force. His background is virology, immunology and infectious disease. It\u2019s a very different background, it\u2019s a more limited approach, and I don\u2019t speak for him.\u201d<\/p>\n<p><strong>Herd immunity policy?<br \/>\n<\/strong>\u201cNo. It\u2019s a repeated distortion, lie, or whatever you want to call it\u2026 What they mean by \u2018herd immunity strategy\u2019 is survival of the fittest, let the infection spread through the community and develop a population immunity. That\u2019s never been the policy that I have advised. It\u2019s never even been discussed inside the White House, not even for a single minute. And that\u2019s never been the policy of the President of the United States or anybody else here. I\u2019ve said that many many times\u2026 and yet it persists like so many other things, hence the term that the President is fond of using called fake news.\u201d<\/p>\n<p><strong>On herd immunity<br \/>\n<\/strong>\u201cPopulation immunity is a biological phenomenon that occurs. It\u2019s sort of like if you\u2019re building something in your basement: it\u2019s down on the ground because gravity puts it there. It\u2019s not a \u2018strategy\u2019 to say that herd immunity exists \u2014 it is obtained when a certain percentage of the population becomes resistant or immune to an infection, whether that is by getting infected or getting a vaccine or by a combination of both. In fact, if you don\u2019t that believe herd immunity exists as a way to block the pathways to the vulnerable in an infection, then you would never advocate or believe in giving widespread vaccination \u2014 that\u2019s the whole point of it\u2026 I\u2019ve explained it to people who seemingly didn\u2019t understand it; I\u2019ve mentioned this radioactive word called herd immunity. But that\u2019s not a strategy that anyone is pursuing.\u201d<\/p>\n<p><strong>What is his policy?<br \/>\n<\/strong>\u201cMy advice is exactly this. It\u2019s a three-pronged strategy. Number one: aggressive protection of high risk individuals and the vulnerable (typically the elderly and those with co-morbidities). Number two: allocate resources so that we prevent hospital overcrowding, so that people can be treated for this virus and get the other serious medical care that is needed. Number three: open schools, society and businesses because keeping them closed is enormously harmful \u2014 in fact it kills people.\u201d<\/p>\n<p><strong>Has the policy changed?<br \/>\n<\/strong>\u201cIt is the White House policy on Coronavirus, but it always was. The President started this with an observation that was overlooked by most people in the world: he said in the third week of March that the cure cannot be worse than the disease\u2026 In April the White House released a formal \u2018opening up America\u2019 document, which included extreme protection of the vulnerable and opening up society\u2026 It\u2019s not been a shift.\u201d<\/p>\n<p><strong>Effect of lockdowns<br \/>\n<\/strong>\u201cWe must open up because we\u2019re killing people. In the US, 46% of the six most common cancers were not diagnosed during the shutdown\u2026 These are people who will present to the hospital or their doctor with later stage disease \u2014 many of these people will die. 650,000 Americans are on chemotherapy \u00ad\u2014 half of them didn\u2019t come in for their chemo because they were afraid. Two-thirds of screenings for cancer were not done; half of childhood immunisations did not get done; 85% of living organ transplants did not get done. And then we see the other harms: 200,000 cases plus of child abuse in the US during the two months of spring school closures were not reported because schools are the number one agency where abuse is noticed; we have one out of four American young adults, college age, who thought of killing themselves in the month of June\u2026<\/p>\n<p>All of these harms are massive for the working class and the lower socioeconomic groups. The people who are upper class, who can work from home, the people who can sip their latte and complain that their children are underfoot or that they have to come up with extra money to hire a tutor privately \u2014\u00a0these are people who are not impacted by the lockdowns.<\/p>\n<p>This is the topic, this is why you open up. A secondary gain might be population immunity, but this is the reason to open up.\u201d<\/p>\n<p><strong>On short-term immunity<br \/>\n<\/strong>\u201cWe don\u2019t know how long someone\u2019s immunity lasts to this, but this is a coronavirus, this is not a completely novel disease\u2026 Coronavirus exposure typically has a year, or even a few years, of immunity \u2014 we can make a first guess that probably there\u2019s a good chance that will happen\u2026 Yes, we know that antibodies disappear\u2026 but that\u2019s true for every infection, that\u2019s a typical scenario and not a cause for panic. Why? Because we know there is resistance to infection that seems to be coming out in the literature that is not purely due to antibodies, there are other components of the immune system. Suffice to say this: do we know that people have immunity? You don\u2019t need to be a scientist to understand that when you hundreds of millions of cases\u2026 do you know how many cases of reinfection there are? At the most, five in the world\u2026 It is not true that there is no immunity to this, that would be a bizarre conclusion.\u201d<\/p>\n<p><strong>Climate of fear<br \/>\n<\/strong>\u201cThis is one of the biggest failures of the voices of public health in the United States and in the world \u2014 they specifically instilled fear with their proclamations and statements\u2026 And the models that were put forward that were worst case scenarios and were just hideously wrong, and the media that has hyped up these rare exceptions like multi-system inflammation in children even though we know the overwhelming evidence is that this disease is absolutely not high risk for children. All the hyperbole, the sensationalising and the failure of public health officials to articulate what we know instead of what we don\u2019t know\u2026 The fear is due to what was said by the so-called experts, by the media and by a failure to understand or care that they were instilling hear\u2026 I just heard a famous epidemiologist from Harvard the other day say that to have the idea of herd immunity even being discussed is \u2018mass murder\u2019 \u2014 these kinds of statements are hideously outrageous.<\/p>\n<p>It\u2019s never appropriate to have fear. There is no such thing as a government leader who is competent who instils fear.\u201d<\/p>\n<p><strong>How to protect old people<br \/>\n<\/strong>\u201cWe have not been perfect at it, there\u2019s no question \u2014 it\u2019s very challenging. The first is to educate people: put forward the guidelines. I think our society has learned \u2014 no-one knew what social distancing meant\u2026 that was a foreign concept and we now understand that \u2014 but there are more specific measures. We have shipped every single nursing home point of care rapid testing \u2014 we have mandated weekly testing of every staff that enters a nursing home, but when there is community increase we recommend going up to\u2026 four times a week.<\/p>\n<p>We cannot guarantee that we can protect everybody \u2014 there is not such thing as zero risk in life\u2026\u201d<\/p>\n<p><strong>But<br \/>\n<\/strong>\u201cI have a 93 year old mother in law, and she said to me 2 months ago, \u201cI\u2019m not interested in being confined in my home. I am not interested in living if that\u2019s the life\u2026 I\u2019m old enough to take a risk, I understand social distancing. I\u2019m going to function, otherwise there\u2019s no reason to live.\u201d This sort of bizarre, maybe well-intentioned but misguided idea that we are going to eliminate all risk from life, we are going to stop people from taking any risk that they are well aware of, we\u2019re going to close down businesses, we\u2019re going to stop schools \u2014 these are inappropriate and destructive policies.<\/p>\n<p>There are between 30,000 and 90,000 people a year that die \u2014 that are high risk elderly \u2014 in the United States every flu season. We don\u2019t shut down schools in response to that\u2026\u201d<\/p>\n<p><strong>Is it politics?<br \/>\n<\/strong>\u201cI see that there is a different philosophy in life. In my own family we have different views on things. But we need to start by looking at the data.<\/p>\n<p>One thing that\u2019s been really shocking to me is that in the US and I think all over the world, we have a really contaminated media. Their politics has really distorted truth\u2026 I think that has now contaminated public policy and science. There\u2019s been a massive distortion \u2014\u00a0a complete almost disregard for objectivity, including in some of what were the world\u2019s best journals like <em>Lancet<\/em>, <em>New England Journal<\/em>, <em>Nature<\/em>, <em>Science<\/em>: these people feel compelled to be politically visible, and that\u2019s contaminated the discussion.\u201d<\/p>\n<p><strong>On test and trace<br \/>\n<\/strong>\u201cNow, there are 7 million registered cases in the US but even the CDC says that it\u2019s probably tenfold that, that\u2019s 70 million people at least; if we look at the world\u2019s cases, maybe 40 million cases but we know that it\u2019s probably 10 to 20 times that. So it\u2019s not possible to do things like contact tracing and isolating asymptomatic people.<\/p>\n<p>A lot of these people who have very fancy CVs have engaged in very sloppy thinking. And now, partly because it\u2019s a political year in the US with a massively polarised electorate, the politics have entered the scene and there\u2019s a massive amount of digging in to the original beliefs even though they are completely wrong\u2026\u201d<\/p>\n<p><strong>On his own reputation<\/strong><br \/>\n\u201cMy position here is not political \u2014 zero politics. My motivation was that the President of the United States asked me, a public health policy person who understands medical science, to help in the biggest healthcare crisis of the century. There would be something wrong with you if you would say no to that, no matter what your politics\u2026<\/p>\n<p>When I did that though, I knew I would be vilified, because in the US there are a lot of people who think that this President is radioactive, so there is a massive destruction that ensues immediately when you associate with this President. It\u2019s a very sad statement on America, on American culture, on the world \u2014 these people are blinded, even scientists, to the data because they despise the political side of this. And they have a massive ego, and can\u2019t admit they\u2019re wrong. Ok I\u2019m a contrarian, I\u2019m used to being a contrarian, I\u2019m proud to be an outlier when the inliers are wrong.<\/p>\n<p>I\u2019ve gone through various levels of being angry. I\u2019m not angry but I\u2019m sort of disgusted and dismayed at the state of things\u2026 It\u2019s just sad to me. I\u2019m cynical about the state we\u2019re in right now and the future\u2026 I\u2019m disturbed. I have children of my own who are in their twenties, and I wonder what the future is if we have lost truth in the media, to a great extent, and we are now starting to lose truth in science\u2026<\/p>\n<p>I am angry at the people who were wrong and who insist on prolonging these policies that are killing people, particularly people who are not in their socioeconomic class. It\u2019s no problem for a person who has a high level job in government, or an academic job, to sit there and pontificate when the average guy is being destroyed. That I am angry about and I think history will record these people very harshly \u2014 it is an epic failure of massive proportion that they have abandoned regular people here with their own hubris and political agenda. In that sense \u2013 yeah I\u2019m angry.\u201d<\/p>\n<p><strong>On masks<br \/>\n<\/strong>\u201cThings like universal mask wearing \u2014 honestly that is contrary to the science as well as common sense, to think that you need to wear a mask when you\u2019re in the middle of the desert, when you\u2019re in the car on your own, when you\u2019re bicycling through St James\u2019s Park. This kind of stuff is nonsense. There is no science to support universal masking.<\/p>\n<p>You can look at LA County, Miami-Dade county, many states in the US, the Philippines, Spain, France, the UK, all over the world mandating masks does not stop for the population does not stop cases. That is just super na\u00efve, wrong, and that\u2019s just garbage science really. The WHO does not recommend widespread mandatory masks, the NIH does not recommend that, the CDC data itself shows that that doesn\u2019t work. That\u2019s bordering on wearing a copper bracelet as far as I am concerned.<\/p>\n<p>I do think masks have a role\u2026 in medicine we wear masks for surgical procedures. The reason you wear a mask is when you\u2019re very close to somebody, or a sterile environment like an open incision, you want to stop a cough or droplets from getting in there and infecting something. That\u2019s very different from breathing\u2026 If you\u2019re socially distanced, there\u2019s no reason to wear a mask.\u201d<\/p>\n<p><strong>On the Stanford letter<br \/>\n<\/strong>\u201cThey expose themselves for who they were when they wrote that letter\u2026 It\u2019s preposterous what was said. But I have a lot of support inside Hoover Institution, a lot of support in faculty\u2026 I certainly have lost some friends, there\u2019s no question about that \u2014 would I do it again? Absolutely. It\u2019s the most important thing I\u2019ve ever done.<\/p>\n<p>I\u2019m disgusted by politics \u2013 completely disgusted \u2014 and it\u2019s a sad statement. People were exposed when someone came into power who they didn\u2019t agree with it they were exposed for who they were. That\u2019s a gross embarrassment, and its sad.. There\u2019s a tremendous amount of emotion rather than rational thought.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>___<br \/>\n<a href=\"https:\/\/unherd.com\/thepost\/scott-atlas-im-disgusted-and-dismayed\/\">https:\/\/unherd.com\/thepost\/scott-atlas-im-disgusted-and-dismayed\/<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Scott Atlas: I\u2019m disgusted and dismayed<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-32819","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stateofthenation.co\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32819","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stateofthenation.co\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stateofthenation.co\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stateofthenation.co\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stateofthenation.co\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=32819"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/stateofthenation.co\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32819\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stateofthenation.co\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=32819"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stateofthenation.co\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=32819"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stateofthenation.co\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=32819"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}