Downloaded from the Highwire website. Great stuff as always from the Del.
Del Bigtree: [00:00:00] So many of us watch this incredible experience happen before our eyes. We lost our jobs where our children were kept home many of them getting depressed. We saw our economy destroyed all by a White House and a set of decisions by a task force that seemed, especially if you're watching the high wire, to be going against the science of what we actually saw happening around the world.
At the center of it, there was a moment where there was a bright shining light, at least from our perspective, that stepped in there. His name was Dr. Scott Atlas. He has been called a hero. He has been called a villain, and when you watch him in the news, this is what that has looked like.
Dr. Scott Atlas: Dr. Scott Atlas, president Trump's special advisor on the pandemic.
Scott is a very famous man. He's also very highly respected chief resident at Northwestern. Fellowship at the University of Pennsylvania, expert in neuroradiology. We have a man with us who's a great [00:01:00] expert from Stanford. He's working with us. He's consulting with us, Dr. Scott Atlas. Okay, thank you Mr.
Preston. It's a great honor to be asked to help out in any way I can. I'm a healthcare policy person and I have a background in medical science. My role really is to translate medical science into public policy. Herd immunity or population immunity exists when enough people in a population get an infection, ha have their own established immunity, and break the chains of connectivity of contagiousness to people, particularly the vulnerable.
That's just a known fact. That's an immunological concept. We know that the risk of the disease is extremely low for children, even less than that of seasonal flu. We know that the harms of locking out the children from school are enormous. And we also know that educating America's children is right at the top of the list for our nation's priorities.
In the cities, in the [00:02:00] states, in the countries that had a mask mandates, the cases exploded. And when you compare, which I think is really striking what happened in this fall surge fall winter between Florida and California, because they're distinctly apo opposite in how the governors handled things Florida did better than California.
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. For many people, this is their final Thanksgiving, believe it or not. What are we doing here, Dr. Atlas. Okay. A guy with no pandemic experience. Dr. Scott Atlas, who's public stance on the pandemic echoes trump's unscientific claims.
If you don't believe that herd immunity exists as a pathway to block a as a way to block the pathways to the vulnerable in an infection, then you would never really advocate or believe in giving widespread vaccination. That's the whole point [00:03:00] of it. The man who has no background in infectious diseases, it's a
Del Bigtree: radiologist.
All righty. It's like getting a podiatrist too. Work
Dr. Scott Atlas: on your spine. Dr. Atlas repeatedly questioned the efficacy of face masks. He talked about the potential benefits of herd immunity. He also wondered whether all children essentially should go back to school without changing guidelines is incontrovertible that there is extremely low risk to children from this illness.
Not only low risk, but lower risk in seasonal influenza for both hospitalization and death. Americans hear one thing from the CDC director and another thing from you. Who are we to believe? You're supposed to believe the signs, and I'm telling you the signs. Stop telling us science. I'm telling you the science.
And that's the answer. And if you wanna look up all the data that you're free to, this is the most irrational public policy probably in, in modern history. You don't lock down the children because you are [00:04:00] personally afraid. It's totally outrageous. Dr. Scott Atlas, president Trump's special advisor on the pandemic has resigned.
His post, I don't just blindly accept c d c data. They've been erratic in what they've said. He was serving a 130 day detail, which was set to expire this week. That's why he submitted his resignation yesterday. In a letter to the president, he defended his views. I actually thought that, truth mattered, that facts mattered, and my role was to provide the best possible advice in a big crisis.
If you don't know this stuff, you shouldn't be in the cdc. If you don't know this stuff, you should not be advising the President of the United States. And if you don't know this stuff, you certainly should not be on tv. Talking to the American public.
Del Bigtree: It is absolutely my honor and pleasure to be joined by Dr.
Scott Atlas. Thank you so much. Thank you for having me. So your book plague upon our house. I, it's [00:05:00] obviously worn out. I've read it several times. I have a million things I would love to talk to you about. We will never get to all of it, but all I can say is this truly is a bucket list moment for me.
We have, I've been so curious about what happened, inside the White House. We were watching it from the outside but to begin with when the pandemic hit what first inspired you to start investigating it and starting to write articles about it?
Dr. Scott Atlas: Sure. So I was working as I have been doing for over a decade in healthcare policy, which basically combines my medical science background of 25 years with how we should have our healthcare system to increase access and quality.
And I was working on a book that because I thought frankly, that the 20 20 year were, would be a, an issue [00:06:00] of importance healthcare system reform. Yeah. So I was writing this book and the data, the numbers, the se, the studies about the princess diamond ship of Japan and the fear and the World Health Organization information on this infection, fatality rate that was stratospheric came out.
And I was saying what's going on here? Because it's obvious who's at risk. And the infection fatality rate was being calculated incorrectly because they weren't considering in the denominator of that fraction, everyone who would be infected, because most people, a large percentage anyway with the respiratory infection are asymptomatic, right?
So they, this number was calculated on the base of who was really sick enough to go see a doctor. So I'm home and I start explaining this to my own son, and my kids are, I have two sons and they're both smarter than I am. And that's good.
Del Bigtree: Okay? That'd be
Dr. Scott Atlas: amazing. Doesn't mean they know more, but they're smarter.
But I'm one of those. [00:07:00] So I'm explaining this to my sons and they don't understand what I'm talking about. And I'm saying to myself, wait a second, this is obvious stuff. This is not complicated. You don't lock down low risk people and not protect the high risk people. And watch the high risk people, the elderly in the nursing homes particularly.
Yeah, die. This was a failed strategy and yet people were frantic because of the media, because of the w h o, because of a lot of reasons. And so I said, okay, if you don't understand this, then I need to get working on researching it and explaining it. And so I dropped everything about my book and I started working on specifically researching the pandemic and going through all the data, going through the articles, speaking to epidemiologists every day, every other day and became visible in the news because it became very obvious in March of 2020 when I wrote a [00:08:00] piece saying, and the lockdowns, this is the wrong strategy.
And in increased the protection of the people who were high risk, meaning the elderly, and I called it targeted protection.
Del Bigtree: Here is the, here's the article in the hill. The data is in stop the panic and end, the total isolation. In fact, you had several articles out in the hill. The Covid 19 shutdown will cost American millions of years of life.
Science says, opened the schools. Fear first, education last. All of these things we were. Reporting on actually, and you popped up. In fact, one point we were doing a show and celebrating that there were several voices that were not being heard. Just to give you a sense of how we've been tracking you take a look at this.
The global
Dr. Scott Atlas: data showed at the very beginning and appeared to show to this day that 98 to 99% of all cases are mild. While lockdowns were justified initially, their perpetuation may risk many lives. Treating gut [00:09:00] covid 19 at all costs is severely restricting other medical care and instilling fear in the public, creating a massive health disaster in addition to the severe economic harm that would generate a world poverty crisis with incalculable consequences.
Del Bigtree: Does anyone else out there wish you could vote on? On who's gonna run this country? Since clearly presidents aren't and prime ministers aren't around the world now it's doctors and we should be allowed to vote, right? I wanna vote out Fauci and Burkes, maybe Voting Atlas Cats, ides, and Mr. Roy. All of these people, brilliant scientists that have established medical schools in this country.
I'd like them making the decision in this country, wouldn't you? That was May. We were talking about what you were writing, and I wanna give you this opportunity because it, I think it's one of the issues the media, and we'll talk about this, really defined who you are. But what is your background? Someone will say, oh, he's a d he's a radiologist.
What does he have to do in this [00:10:00] space? When you say, you're a health, specialist in, in sort of populations and health, what do you mean by that? Sure. So what is your background?
Dr. Scott Atlas: My background is I'm an md. I was Educated at University of Chicago School of Medicine. I did a I was all academic medicine for the first 25 years of my career, which means that I did my training at Northwestern and then at University of Pennsylvania.
Okay. I was an assistant professor at University of Pennsylvania. I ended up working for most of my career there. And then I came to Stanford. And for those 25 years I worked as a professor and a researcher and teaching other doctors and a clinician doing medical procedures, et cetera, in neurologic disorders of the brain and spine.
I wrote the main book most people would say in magnetic Resonance Imaging, MRI of the Brain and Spine. So when we're getting
Del Bigtree: MRIs, [00:11:00] our doctors that are doing that are well aware of the work that you've done, because that's a huge part of your
Dr. Scott Atlas: battleground. Yes. The book is. Con considered one of the books in mri, if not the main book.
Okay. And and then over the course of my academic career, I have over a hundred scientific publications and peer review journals. I've been funded over 30 different grants. I've been given visiting professor lectures over 600 times at every major medical school in the country. And when I came to Stanford in 1998, I started to work also on health policy.
Okay. And so I had two positions. I was the professor and chief of neuroradiology in the Stanford University Medical School. And I worked simultaneously on health policy, which was integrating information and knowledge about medical science. With [00:12:00] economics and access and quality of healthcare, medical care, delivery, because most people that are in health policy don't really understand medicine.
They understand economics of healthcare. But that's it. And then in 2012, which is maybe more information than the asked for, but I was offered an endowed chair at Hoover Institution, which is a public policy institute as part of Stanford University. Okay. And I resigned from the medical school in 2012 because I don't like to dabble in things.
I don't think it's, I think it's hard enough to do one thing very well, expert level. And so I quit the medical school and went over to work on health policy in 2012. So for over a decade, I'm working on health policy and what this crisis of covid, the pandemic required. Was health policy, right?
That's my lane. It's not a surprise that most of the Stanford University medical school professors don't know the data, didn't [00:13:00] understand what to do with this pandemic because the job of a health policy person is to integrate all the information, right? And figure out how to address all public health, not just focus on stopping a single infection.
So the breadth of knowledge of a health policy person is far broader than someone who's, say a virologist or an epidemiologist. Those are parts of the puzzle, but the puzzle is very complicated. I'll just give you a very crude example. You could line up everybody on a wall and shoot 'em, and you'll stop covid, right?
You're not gonna do that because you're gonna kill them. And this kind of unifocal, really irrational focus on stopping all cases of c o d at all costs was known from the beginning. To be completely harmful and wrong. In one of the articles you noted there Yeah. That I wrote in May of 2020 was with some economists, because it's one of the known [00:14:00] parts of the whole health area that if you have a severe economic downturn, you kill people.
Particularly by the way, the low income and poor families.
Del Bigtree: And so what's amazing too is though you were dragged through the media on these issues, you are even a unicorn inside of health policies. You said you're not just an economist and you're not just a bureaucrat, you've been a practicing doctor.
Diagnosis is the center of your specialty, your first 20 something years. And so you brought all that together. To me, you were like the most perfectly qualified person to be stepping into this space. So how did that happen? How did the White House how did you reach out to them? How did you make
Dr. Scott Atlas: contact?
Sure. I started to become visible because I wrote in this one from March that we should use targeted protection with Johnny and Ides also wrote it in David Katz. Formerly [00:15:00] at Yale we all almost at the same time, but independently wrote in March of 2020 that we need to end the lockdowns and use targeted protection.
Yeah. And then over the summer I started to do more of the work and was on TV somewhat. And it's a funny story. It turned out my mother-in-law was watching the press conferences of the White House over the spring and summer of 2020. And she's in her nineties and she called me up once and said Scott Kayleigh McAneney, the press secretary is quoting your data and your statements.
And I didn't know that. And she said, yeah, you're going to the White House. My mother-in-law said, and so I said I'm not going to the White House. I don't wanna go to the White House. No. And then I get a call actually a couple weeks later in July from the White House office of Personnel saying, would I come speak to President Trump?
And of course, okay, people are [00:16:00] dying. This is the president of the United States. The, it, it's obvious, the answer is yes. It has nothing to do with politics either way. There'd be something wrong with you, frankly, if you wouldn't go and speak to the president of your country. And so I did, and I say it that way because there are people who don't believe it or not.
And so I go in and spend a day at the White House having meetings, individual meetings with everybody from vice President Pence, Kaylee McAneney the president. Jared Kushner, et cetera, and went through a series of meetings and they were asking me about the pandemic and what I thought about this and what I thought about that.
Many of them were taking notes. And at the end of the day, Jared Kushner said to me we'd like you to help advise the president. And I said, okay, but this is what you're gonna get. Because frankly, [00:17:00] my I've always been very direct and outspoken, and so I wanted to make sure they understood what this was.
I'm not a political person, and so I said, this is what you're gonna get. I'm going to say the truth of what I see no matter who tells me not to. I'm not going to agree with someone just because somebody else tells me to, including the president in the United States. I'm not signing onto a group statement that I don't agree with.
And Jared Kushner said that's exactly why we want you. And I remember being struck and very happy to hear that. But the problem was the next sentence he said, I'm, he goes, I'm concerned though they're going to destroy you once it becomes public. And that shocked me because first of all, I didn't think Jared Kushner would care about that.
But it shocked me more because I'm not really interested in being destroyed. Yes. I'm not insane. And so I said why don't I go back to California and try it from there? [00:18:00] And so he said, okay, let's do that. Yeah. And so I went back to California for a few days. It became obvious this was not gonna work.
Because it was a very sort of chaotic situation. People were feeding the president of the United States the wrong, grossly wrong information. Yeah. And the public was extremely fearful. And so I went back to Washington.
Del Bigtree: I remember the moment you did. We actually celebrated on the show just to one, one last time, show you how much we were following you.
We actually changed the opening of our show. This is a flashback to the moment that you were invited into the White House. Take a look at this, everybody. It's fun.
Good morning, good afternoon, good evening. Wherever you are out there in the world, it's time to step out onto the high wire. [00:19:00] What does all this have to do with Atlas? When I watch the comments in the show, a lot of times I'll see it written in the comments, oh, from your lips to God's ears, del.
This week, perhaps the next specs thing. It went from our lips to President Trump's ears. As you know here on the high wire, we have been showing you that really the majority of scientists, virologists doctors around the world disagree with the draconian measures of lockdowns mass. They disagree that waiting for a vaccine is the way to go.
Many of them talking about herd immunity. Finally, it's now in the middle of August. We are seeing some moves in the White House and one of those guys that I was talking about. That's right, you got it. Dr. Scott Atlas was announced by Donald Trump as a part of the new task force. We were pretty excited, obviously about that [00:20:00] announcement.
And I had been, we had been following the work that you were doing. We were very much looking at the science at that point. By August it was clear, it was so crystal clear, even starting in China, then watching Italy, of course you had the cruise ship and Johnny Aides was doing these great breakdowns. I think at that point he was guessing that the overall death rate was somewhere in the 0.02, five to 0.035% for everybody.
Clearly a much higher risk rate amongst the elderly kids. Point zero, zero zero something. And so you were making a lot of sense. What is going on here? What is with the terror, this looks to be really, for most people, a flu, a very bad flu for a very small group of people. So going to the White House, what was it you imagined you could do?
Dr. Scott Atlas: This was a tricky situation, obviously, because [00:21:00] I'm not, I was naive about the political welcome that I would get. And I say that in quotes, but I was not naive that there would be complete resistance to what I was saying. And so I was asked to be a, an advisor to the president.
Okay. But then at the same time I was told, but it's important. I'm part of the task force too. And I frankly said, I don't wanna be part of the task force. There's no point These people are dug in. Burkes had been running the task force since end of February. Fauci and Burkes were the most. Important parts of the task force.
And they were there for five, six months already. There was no point in me saying, oh, I'm gonna try to change their minds. But it was of course, important that I hear what they were saying and do my best. I went into the task force meetings. The first one was in middle, second week of August.
Really, I had been advising the president frankly about [00:22:00] a couple things before that, which was during, when I got there, July 30th, 2020, which was number one. It's very important that he resumes his press conferences and talks to the people and says the data. Okay. Even that alone, the public, if you remember, was in a tremendous amount of fear.
Yeah. Fear is debilitating. Fear makes people think irrationally. If you're a leader, you're most important thing is to say the facts. And allay any unnecessary fear, right? And so that don't
Del Bigtree: scream fire in a crowded room. Absolutely. Let's try to put some fires out and get some peace,
Dr. Scott Atlas: insanity going on here.
And I thought that the most important way to eliminate fear is to eliminate the unknown as much as possible, which was to say the data. So I was trying to help give some data to the president in his prepared remarks. And then I was sitting in on the task force and the task force [00:23:00] it was as bad, really worse than I imagined.
And in a way worse. Because the amount of you know, there's two parts of the task force, basically the logistical side, which was very good actually, but the medical side of the task force was run by Dr. Deborah Burkes. Deborah Burkes was the task force coordinator. She wrote all of the White House official policy to every governor.
She visited every state with or without Vice President Pence. She was the head of the medical advice fauci. Dr. Fauci was not in charge of anything, but he was the most visible voice
Del Bigtree: of the Yeah, he was the one we were following thinking was driving policy. Cuz you heard a lot more from him. You always just saw her in the background with a new scarf, but didn't get this sense.
He was driving anything.
Dr. Scott Atlas: She was literally the person who was writing the policy and that the White House task [00:24:00] force was the federal policy. So Fauci was on TV in the media. Influencing the public. And then the third doctor of importance was Dr. Redfield. Yeah. The head of the cdc. And among the people of the, when I went to a task force meeting, there were about eight of us at this table with vice President Pence, who was the official head of the task force.
Yeah. But President Trump had nothing to do with the task force. President Trump did not visit the task force meetings. President Trump, in fact was saying something very different from the message of the task force. And this was part of the problematic leadership under that, yeah.
Administration because they had two separate messages going to the public. President Trump was saying before I got there that the schools should be open, that businesses should be open, that were killing people with the lockdowns. But the task force, and that is the official policy was telling the public, but also all the governors, all the local health officials lock down closed [00:25:00] schools, mask up.
Et cetera, et cetera. Let's talk
Del Bigtree: about some of the personalities inside of the White House. One of them that you've mentioned, Deborah Burkes, like that she's in charge. In the book you talk about that the, at first it sounds like they're trying to shuffle you around and not really get around her there as though everyone's I don't know how this is gonna work out.
Seemed to be a paranoia. And then the moment you meet her, I think we had therp from the book. Lemme just read this. After an initial and quick meeting with Dr. Burkes, I saw that Kushner's concerns were fully warranted. She seemed threatened right away by my presence. She was noticeably uneasy, even though I told her, I'm just here to help in any way I can.
She instantly asked, with slight hesitancy in her voice, how long will you be there? I said, it wasn't clear, which was certainly true. My White House badge, a sign of some permanence, was tucked inside my laptop case. She wasn't happy to see you.
READ THE FULL TRANSCRIPT on the Substack. Covidreason.Substack.com
Dr. Scott Atlas: My impression was she was nervous. And [00:26:00] that, that is a personality by the way.
It's very consistent with someone who doesn't know that much. People are intimidated. I was an outsider, okay? So I'm an academic medical science and health policy expert. I didn't care about my position in the White House. I didn't need that job. I was there because people were dying and it's my country right?
And I wasn't there to wield power or to make sure that I had a position intact. So when I was meeting and I was told I had to meet with Dr. Berks and that's fine. She was. Agitated a little bit and asking, and I literally did not know how long I'd be there. In fact, in the beginning it wasn't clear.
It wasn't wasn't necessarily known because we were gonna see how it goes. When I got into the task force meetings, it became very obvious that it was very threatening to Dr. [00:27:00] Burkes and others partly because they had wheeled, this is my own opinion, but they were busy with their entourages walking into a room full of non-medical people, the task force, and the other covid meetings that were being held. And so I, in my opinion, most people are intimidated and somewhat deferential to people that are doctors or PhDs or scientists. And so they don't feel comfortable speaking out. And so when she would speak, okay, there was a natural deference to her or Dr.
Fauci. I wasn't there to be deferential, I was there to say the truth. And I was frankly, a little bit, I was frantic by this point because the data was known for months, right? And the lockdowns were literally killing people and destroying our children on top of it. And so I wasn't really, I didn't care about making friends.
I wanted to do whatever I could to change the dialogue [00:28:00] and inform people. And so I would walk into a task force meeting, and in the first one vice President Pence says Scott, what do you think about the, one of the first couple about the risk to children? Yeah. And I said and I had about 15, 20 manuscripts of the current data in my briefcase.
I had all the, I already discussed everything with all the epidemiologists who I knew, and so I gave a 10 minute presentation. On the data. And basically the bottom line is it's extraordinarily low risk for healthy children. And schools should open. And the data was known all over Europe, all over western European peer nations.
They were opening their school from the Netherlands. Yeah. Italy, France, Sweden. Even in the face of Lockdowns, they knew that the risk of children was low and they were opening the schools and the harms of children were extremely high, if not opening schools. The pence then [00:29:00] turns to Dr. Burkes and Fauci and says what do you think?
There was silence. They had no data. In fact, there was never a single task force meeting, not one where any of the other doctors brought in a scientific paper. Zero. And Dr. Burke's only comment at that meeting and in the future was, you're an outlier. Okay. That's not a scientific. Rebuttal.
There's no data there. And then at that same meeting, I remember this vividly because it was really tragically depressing the level of incompetence and lack of knowledge in these doctors on the task force. He turned to Dr. Redfield and said, what do you think, Bob, about the risk to children in opening schools?
And Redfield leaned back, and this is after massive day, the known published all over the world. He leaned back and he said let's just say the jury's still out.[00:30:00] And so I, I was I didn't know what to say and then we just went on as if my presentation didn't exist. And this was a repeated pattern.
These people, I have never worked with such low level people in, and I always used to say none of these people could be an assistant professor in the departments that I worked at. Wow.
Del Bigtree: That's an incredible statement. And I'm watching it from the outside because our show has been very diligent in following all the science we were reporting on Israel, the study, as you're saying, Sweden, Denmark, all of these studies were coming out.
We were so clear what was going on. And that was my question. What are they looking at in there? What are they looking at? How are they, all of these just random. Let's flatten the curve. We're gonna flatten the curve and then that goes whipping by. And that just seemed to be a way to just start taking away all of our rights.
And I think it was supposed to be 14 days or something like that. It goes on forever. What was your opinion of flatten the curve? Was that the right [00:31:00] move at the moment?
Dr. Scott Atlas: Moment. Okay. So flatten the curve was the statement of Dr. Burkes back in the spring, early on, 15 days to slow the spread or flatten the curve.
And I think that if we wanna be completely fair, which we do, yeah, it's, it is rational to try. A very short term measure to flatten the curve. Now the key here is what does flatten the curve mean? Flatten the curve means slow. Bring down the peak of cases and prolong that. Why? So that we can function as hospitals, right?
So that we can treat people with other illnesses, not just with covid, rather than overwhelm hospitals. And this was a reaction to what was seen in Italy where they did have hospitals overrun. And a lot of that, frankly, is that their hospital system is a disaster. It's a disaster.
Del Bigtree: But much older population, much older in, in Lombardi and [00:32:00] these places where they're having serious issues.
That's
Dr. Scott Atlas: right. And there were reasons why they were overrun. But it's rational. It's reasonable to say, okay, let's try two weeks of flattening the curve. But you'll notice something here that's very important. There was never. A goal or even a possibility of reducing the number of deaths or cases with flattening the curve.
If you wanna be a math person, you would say the area under the curve doesn't change with flattening the curve, the total number of cases, the total number of deaths, that was not even the goal. Okay. It was just simply slowing things down. Of course that didn't really work. And what happened though is what the problem was.
What happened was it became, stop all cases of covid, right? And so you ask what data were they using? There were these sophomoric tabulations of cases per day, cases per week based upon. A non surveillance level [00:33:00] of testing. So it was erratic. The numbers were irrelevant because every state, every place was testing for different criteria.
Del Bigtree: I wanna drill into this, cuz you talk about in the book, and it's a funny part where you talk about how Berks keeps flying into the room with these arbitrary colored charts, of, infection cases that they're seeing in different states, comparing one state to another. You're weighing in saying hold on a second.
They're using totally different criteria. They're testing at different levels. One's wearing masks. Clearly this one's doing better than this. But like the mask had nothing to do. We don't have any basis for where's the baseline on your information, right? Yes. Tell me about this. Sure. How this arbitrary nature that you referenced a lot of times when talking about
Dr.
Dr. Scott Atlas: Bergs. So here's the issue is that Yeah, there was no critical thinking being done and actually the stuff isn't that complicated. But what we saw from Dr. Burkes, for example, is [00:34:00] there were charts made up. First it started with three colors. These were arbitrarily assigned colors, red for danger, yellow for well, were a little bit worried green for okay.
We feel good. Okay. You might think that's a reasonable thing to do. If you had a scientifically valid reason for putting those numbers in. There's no valid reason for just simply saying, okay, if we have zero to 4% versus four to 10 versus greater than 10, we're just gonna sign these green, yellow, and red.
That's what was done. And so this was very arbitrary and really, I was shocked. This is not science at all. And then what had evolved into her to make it more scientific, There were five colors. We divided this, we, Dr. Burkes divided this into, oh, we're gonna say five colors. We're gonna go from red to green, but we're gonna have five gradations as if dividing
Del Bigtree: rain rainbow in there in the some nuance.
Dr. Scott Atlas: Yeah. [00:35:00] There's no validity to the numbers. I, it was one of the many times where I was looking around the room saying, am I the only one who's hearing this? This was really a combination of discussions that you read about in the book. Catch 22. Yeah. And mad Hatter's Tea Party and Alison Wonderland.
Just totally illogical, circular discussion going on. And you bring up the mask issue. Okay. This is, you have to realize now we're talking six months after everyone was insisting that masks were proven, even though they had been disproven months and months before. Even by the cdc. Yes. But. How
Del Bigtree: the one thing he had, was when he first answered about masks, he don't have work.
He
Dr. Scott Atlas: answered in his emails that were uncovered masks couldn't work because the size of the virus is smaller than the whole in a surgical mask, right? Let alone a cloth mask. But the CDC had published all this data in May, 2020 May didn't work to either stop the spread or to protect the wear. That's fact.
Anyone who says otherwise is really flat earth, or, but right. Separate from that, [00:36:00] there were places, there were times in the task force meetings by this point. It took me only a couple meetings to get really frustrated with it to the point of being, knowing these people are refractory to fact.
And at one point in say, September, Fauci holds up a chart and Redfield did the same at a different meeting saying, oh, I have proof that a, that mass work. And I, first thing I said was I. I thought you knew Mass worked for the last seven months, right? Why? Why is there a need to say you have proof that mass work, but Redfield holds up a chart and says this, we put the mass on and after the mass came on, the cases came down.
So I'm sitting there thinking, frankly, oh my God, this is not, this is so low level. That's like saying the sun came up and therefore mass, the cases came down that day. I don't know what he's correlating, and I didn't say anything because it was just be, frankly, it was just, it was I didn't even, I was speech speechless.
And [00:37:00] someone who was non-medical, purely non-medical staff person said Dr. Redfield, why couldn't it be that the cases just came down at the same time that the mass and that he, he didn't have an answer for this, right? This is like insane. And another time Fauci did the same thing, comparing two states.
He said I have proof that mass work, this was arbitrarily announced in the room. And so he says, in one state, With mass mandates, the cases came down in another state, the cases went up without a mass mandate. And one of the other non-medical people, SEMA Verma, the head of Medicare and Medicaid says Tony, that, that's not true.
There's a bunch of differences between these two states and everything. Why would you assign that as a cause and effect? Again, no answer. It was so low level. It's almost embarrassing to be affiliated with a group like that. It's shocking, I think, for viewers. Cause you have
Del Bigtree: so many to hear compounding issues to be there.
And the one that you argued the most throughout [00:38:00] this book, and we watched you when you were being heard, was what about herd immunity? How about the fact that when the infections went up, now all those people that were infected suddenly have her me were dry. Is it possible that we've hit the maximum, load with this virus and that's why things are coming down.
But Burkes kept trying to claim No, it's the lockdowns that are doing it. Yeah.
Dr. Scott Atlas: The fact is that and this is I think very important to, to understand is it was known since 2006 the classic articles on pandemics that lockdowns didn't work and they harmed people. They were destructive.
So this isn't new territory, but you, they have to wonder why did somebody think that lockdowns would work? And why did the public believe it? And I think there were it's really because there were two lies told. Okay. Number one lie was that if you said the lockdowns should be removed, you were somehow choosing the economy over lives.
Okay. [00:39:00] And that's that was a frank lie because for decades in the economics literature, we knew that severe economic downturns killed people. And the second lie that was told to the public was that if you choose to say you shouldn't be locking down, you're calling for let it rip. Herd immunity strategy. When I, and that, that was a lie, I never called for letting it rip. I called for increasing protection of older people and people who were more vulnerable. I called for increasing testing and I can get into that, but the point was that was somehow distorted as let it rip.
When I talked about herd immunity, I was describing the biologically known fact that is how. Virus infections that are raging through a population come down. No one was calling for letting it rip. The point was that's why people wanted to give widespread vaccination. That is simply a biological [00:40:00] phenomenon.
As my friend Mar Coor, if the Harvard epidemiologist says to say that you're against herd immunity is saying you're against gravity. This is a biological phenomenon. You don't have an opinion on herd immunity. No one in the White House ever asked or even discussed letting it rip. It was never discussed with the president, and that was all immediate creation to demonize people who said no lockdowns as being dangerous.
And that's called propaganda and that kind of propaganda to vilify people like they did with the unvaccinated. It's the same stuff. It's reminiscent to me of the most heinous re heinous regimes in modern history that use propaganda. To sway the public and to make people think that this other group is dangerous.
Del Bigtree: There's a part in the book where you lightly touch on your relationship with Fauci. At one point he really asks you very pointedly about [00:41:00] your perspective on herd immunity. And then, do you remember that moment? Sure. What's, what happened there? Okay.
Dr. Scott Atlas: So you're probably referring to Fauci called me up and early on and proposed to have a meeting.
He said, let's have a meeting with all the doctors and let's see if we have some kind of common ground and hear your perspective. And he meant Dr. Burkes, Dr. Fauci, Dr. Redfield and me. And I said, okay, that's great. I'd like to bring in some epidemiologists and other who are doing research on the pandemic, and I'd like to have a discussion.
And I had already been talking to people like Johnny Anitas at Stanford and Jay Char at Stanford, and Martin Calor had written me and said he's happy I was there and express interest in coming. I said, I'd like to have the discussion. Okay. So Fauci [00:42:00] immediately, that was the end of the conversation.
Okay. They didn't wanna have a discussion with people who were actually doing the research and knew the data. This was a group of government bureaucrats. You have to realize that Fauci was in his position for 38 years. Berks was a government bureaucrat for decades. Redfield was a government appointed bureaucrat who had a position of authority.
And their idea of this was to protect their own position to go to the media. They had friends in the media, they would refer to Sanjay Gupta if CNN by his first name. And I never, I didn't even know what was going on here. I had no friends in the media. That was, that became obvious, right? And they were working and in fact, Berks admitted early in 2021, that she fauci and Redfield had a pact with each other that if Trump had fired one of them, they would all resign.
And so this is not the way a scientist works, especially someone who wants to help his country, right? This is the way people who are [00:43:00] bureaucrats work, who wanna protect
Del Bigtree: their policy. Did you feel like, cuz you would get shredded once in a while in the media, were you, it seems like you're a little bit su suspicious that Fauci is going to the media and reporting on you.
Dr. Scott Atlas: So this was something I did write about in the book, was that after the first meeting at the task force that I was in on they asked me Doc, vice President Pence was talking about what's happening. And then I, and this was in New York, and I had all the data on who, what percent of people had antibodies in New York and what neighborhoods by zip code had antibodies.
It was clear that the low income neighborhoods were really hit with the virus and they had a lot of hospitalizations, but they also had a lot of antibody protection because as we know anyone who knows anything about biology, and this is not medical school, not PhD science, not virology, not epidemiology, it's high school, AP biology.
A lot of what we reported on here. Correct? Yes. And it's not complicated that if you recover from a viral infection, almost always you have very significant [00:44:00] protection, durable protection against a significant serious illness. And so I was pointing this out at the first task force meeting, quoting the numbers in New York and Berks and others were saying, oh, no, the cases started to come down because they had masks on.
And I said The curve of the cases going up and coming down was the same all over the world with this over time. Yeah. And it comes down because of a lot of reasons, but particularly including that people start getting antibodies and, there, it, this is how virus spread half every, we
Del Bigtree: feed in almost every country in the world time too.
And even over time, decades, we've decades watched decades studied them. Decades,
Dr. Scott Atlas: yes. And after the end of that meeting there was an article written in the Washington Post, I think saying that Scott Atlas's pushing herd immunity. I was explaining herd [00:45:00] immunity as a phenomenon in the meeting.
These people had very little knowledge frankly. And at the end of that, This article was written, and it, of course, that stuff gets picked up in national, international media, and it was an overt lie that I was saying we should try for herd immunity or something like this by letting the infection spread.
And it was in the newspaper and there was a tremendous amount of heat from that. And I was new to this, and so I was outraged. I'm not outraged anymore because it's the way it is. Yeah. The media's poison and harmful to the public. Good. Let's get into
Del Bigtree: that a minute, because there's a moment you call this the three, the Redfield Fauci and Berks, the Troika.
And that they'd as you said, they had this pact if one of us gets fired, we all quit as though they were had a sense that they were obviously diametrically posed to the president. But there's a [00:46:00] moment where you seem, there's one moment where you're really pushing to change the narrative and change the approach.
Let's stop testing all of the asymptomatic healthy people and creating this. Fear, let's try to start moving towards an opening up policy. And you're able to talk them all into working together. There's a, it's a moment. Tell me about what you achieved there. And it sounded like you were there then get taken away, but you really worked to get everybody to follow some science in the moment and probably in many ways might have been the pinnacle of anything you've achieved, at least in that task force it
seems.
Dr. Scott Atlas: I thought they were very happy. Vice President Pence and Brett Joar, who's a doctor, who was the testing are about how their testing capacity had ramped up from essentially nothing to a million tests a day or something. It was very powerful. And I said, okay.
Now the people are still dying. You're just testing testing. [00:47:00] Which is actually a mantra of many politicians Yeah. Test testing you're saying. And I said, why don't you use the testing to stop people from dying? Again, this is not a brilliant thing to say, but it's obvious you should use this powerful tool strategically because the goal is to stop people from dying, not just to test.
And Bre Ard said, yeah, this makes sense. Let's have a call and Ziar set up a call with me and Redfield to be talking about testing. And roar ended up devising a document. And the way documents circulate in the West Wing and in the west, in the White House, is that there's a draft of a document that goes around and dozens of people have input into it.
And so there was a revision of the testing strategy to use the testing tool powerfully to stop or limit the dying. And I was pushing for something that was in the testing document, [00:48:00] which was to get more free frequent testing of the nursing home workers, for instance. Because most cases.
People were dying at this point, 50 to 80% of deaths per state were in nursing homes. A controlled environment. You ought to be able to limit that. And I said to Burkes when she got enraged at me once, because I said we should use targeted, increased strategies to stop people from dying.
She said, we're already doing everything to stop people from dying who are elderly. And I said, okay. How often are you testing the nursing home workers? She said, once a
Del Bigtree: week they're going in and out.
Dr. Scott Atlas: Yeah, they're going in and out. The nursing home residents are inside. Because and she said once a week. And I said once a week. These are people who have exposure every single day in the community. I said, you should be testing three days a week, five days a week, seven days a week, the nursing home personnel. And so I said, we should send NER testing. Increased testing to senior centers, non-residential, where seniors [00:49:00] frequent and go hang out with their friends.
There was no testing going on in these places. I said we should send more testing to historically black colleges and universities. Faculty members are there, have higher risk profiles. So I pointed out we should use the testing for the point of it, which is to stop you from dying. So this document was written by Joar and circulated around Fauci, Redfield, Burkes.
Everybody saw it. Everybody agreed. We had a meeting about it at one of the task force meetings after the draft document was written. And this was on the agenda. Everyone agreed to, instead of just testing wasting things, and by the way, tests were taking days to get the results back.
It didn't even make sense what they were doing. Basically, instead of paralyzing low risk people and closing schools for people at very low risk, let's use it for the high risk people. That was the gist of it. The [00:50:00] document was changed and agreed upon, and all the doctors, Fauci, Redfield, Burkes, and Girard and myself were in on the agreement at the meeting.
The next meeting there was a, at the end of that meeting, there was a point of we need to basically put a separate section about nursing homes. Roar. The Redfield brought this up, which was smart. Yeah. And to get to the gist of the bottom line we all agreed the document was brought back to rere on because he wanted to separate out the section.
I look at the document at the end of the, of that subsequent meeting, and it was totally changed back to the original document, and so I said something's going on here. What's going on? And Redfield said we just wanted to change the order. I said, but the entire document that we agreed upon isn't there anymore.
So they had posted the, ultimately the revised testing agreement, the advised test revised testing [00:51:00] guidelines on the CDC page. Yeah. And there was a hell fire of backlash by the media. All of a sudden, they didn't agree it was a C D C document. Redfield wrote and finalized the document. The media got ahold of it, said, no, we don't agree with it.
Del Bigtree: All right we actually have this. Let me show you everyone what that looked like in the media. When everyone had finally agreed, let's change the guidelines. This is how the media treated that moment. There is
Dr. Scott Atlas: new guidance this morning from the C D C I have to ask you about this reversal from the CDC d c.
It's a bit of a head scratcher, some shocking new details about the Trump administration's pressure campaign on the CDC D from the New York Times, who reports this quote, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention was instructed by higher ups within the Trump administration to modify its coronavirus testing guidelines this week to exclude people who do not have symptoms of Covid 19, even if they have been recently exposed to the virus.
That's according [00:52:00] to two federal health officials, public health experts, and epidemiologists. Everyone agrees that we need more testing, not less. We have to catch every case in order to contain outbreaks. And the second thing that concerns me is the way that it was rolled out, which is that was basically, the website just changed overnight with no announcement, no explanation.
There's no backup. This is very unusual for the cdc, which has always been based in science and data. They're crafting an alternate reality where Covid isn't ravaging this country. The agency also did an about phase on the issue of quarantining. Previous CDC guidance prompted states like New York to implement a mandatory 14 day quarantine for anyone who traveled to a covid hotspot on Friday, the agency quietly dropped the quarantine recommendation.
The only explanation that makes any that makes any sense to me is that it is a very politically motivated change. We're not gonna follow the c D C guidance. I consider it political [00:53:00] propaganda.
Del Bigtree: Did Trump actually, that media basically said Donald Trump was pushing his agenda and that's what had happened
here?
Dr. Scott Atlas: No. That was a complete lie. What they said the reality was, and the immediate interviews after that, immediate interviews, Redfield said, everyone agreed on this guideline. No, we're not gonna quarantine people just because they may have been exposed to somebody with Covid. Roy is society.
What the new, and what the new guidance said was See your doctor and ask what you should do. He wanted to insert Redfield, specifically a physician into the equation about a decision. It was not about forbidding testing. And in fact, everyone agreed, including roar, the head of testing. Yeah.
Redfield Fauci. And so because of that backlash, First of all, those statements made by in the media were just completely [00:54:00] irrational. There were millions and millions of cases that one of the people there said that was interviewed we have to stop every case. That, that's this ludicrous. It was impossible.
That was already proven to be impossible. That isn't the point of testing. The point of testing is to stop or limit the deaths, right? And and the exposure of high risk people. And the immediate reaction was joar talking to the media, insisting that everyone agreed that it was his document with.
Red Fields's Redfield was the head of the cdc. He wrote, his CDC posted the document. It was not about pressure.
Del Bigtree: Didn't matter though. Media didn't seem to care. This how much, this is like the tail wagging the dog in so many ways, watching media assault, a perfectly scientific and reasonable approach assaulting you.
When you think about the media and what was happening there, how [00:55:00] much of it do you think was just because they just saw by you stepping in, going against the narrative that they'd been hearing, that they just thought, you are Trump, you're just Trump's mouthpiece. Did that hurt
Dr. Scott Atlas: you? I that, that is what happened, that they did take that.
Tack, I think in the beginning what was the big barrage of hate? The big barrage of hate was political in my view. People that are looking at things through a political lens, they think everyone else's political, right? It had nothing to do with it for me. But what eventually happened was, I think it became far more than political.
It was worldwide. It wasn't all about Trump. It was a hysteria. It was an obsession, and it was a huge display of not only ignorance and incompetence, but come complete lack of morality and ethics. But I think we have to look at it and say, this was a complete failure of critical [00:56:00] thinking of people.
And, fear, To be reasonable here. Fear makes people think irrationally do irrational things. But a lot of it was political. In fact, one of the first things I said to President Trump on my first visit to the Oval Office when he was asking me questions and we hadn't met before, and he asked me about hydroxychloroquine and I said, trying to be funny, but it was really true.
You should have said that hydroxychloroquine does not work because then the NIH and the FDA would've done the study right away trying to show that it worked.
Del Bigtree: There's a moment you speak about fear, cuz it's a huge part of this in the book when it's a meeting in Fauci starts spouting off. I think I have this excerpt from the book where you're really concerned.
Here it is. As often happened, Fauci spoke up to support Dr. Burke's concern saying people need to be warned even more strongly about the dangers of the virus spreading. He [00:57:00] claimed Americans didn't think the virus was serious and that was the reason cases spread. I was honestly surprised. I challenged him to clarify his point because I couldn't believe my ears.
So you think people aren't frightened enough? He said yes. They need to be more afraid. I replied, I totally disagree. People are paralyzed with fear. Fear is one of the main problems at this point. I think this last paragraph, let's bring it up, just the last statement here really is seems to be the heart of this book.
Instilling fear in the public is absolutely counter to what a leader in public health should do. To me, this frankly immoral, although I kept that to myself, they were pressing fear upon us.
Dr. Scott Atlas: Yes. I think that this is an unethical use of public health guidance and it's been rampant and repeatedly used here.
And that is that instead of persuading the public with facts and data we're a free society. [00:58:00] You're supposed to be. Yeah. We have thinking people I do not underestimate the intelligence of the average person. It's not that complicated anyway. Yet the way that this was done throughout the pandemic, Before the vaccine and after the vaccine was instead of using data, in fact, it was using filtration of information, fear partial information.
Don't wanna say that masks don't work because we want people to be cautious. Don't wanna say that. Vaccines don't stop the spread because we want them to get vaccinated. Don't want to talk about side effects because we want them to get vaccinated. And I think this is not just wrong I don't even know how to say it.
It is literally unethical as a public health leader to impose fear on people. That is I [00:59:00] don't know how to say that in, in any way better than what I have said. But I was shocked to hear fauci explicitly say that. That was stunning to me.
Del Bigtree: Let's just to wrap this up.
Obviously all of this happens underneath, arguably probably the most controversial president we've had. Even though I say that saying it just feels like each new president, we just get more and more divided and outraged. And now if you take that office, you are most certainly gonna be indicted and tried to be arrested.
And I'm not even sure if it matters what party you're in. Just the other side's gonna hate it. But you got to meet a man who is an enigma. I dunno, a very unique individual who some would think just shoots from the hip doesn't seem to have a deep logic base. Others, you had QAN on saying, this guy is thinking five D chess.
Who is Donald [01:00:00] Trump in your mind?
Dr. Scott Atlas: I can give specific examples to give the color to the answer. When I. Was in the Oval Office with President Trump. He asked good questions. He listened thoughtfully. He understood the answers. He had common sense. I brought in several outside experts from across the country back in September of 2020.
He went through us and asked individuals these very important questions about c o d. He understood the data. To say he's illogical, that just doesn't fit. You have a president who this is just my opinion, but he didn't have friends because he didn't probably have a lot of respect for politicians.
And, politicians are on both sides of the two party system. He had very [01:01:00] few people who he could trust. He trusted his families and his intimate advisors. He was under attack 24 7 in a very vicious way. The press briefing room, I was in the room to answer questions about Covid. And these, the reporters were frankly animals.
And I don't say that lightly. Theyre vicious sick people, despicable people shouting out vulgar things to the president loss of complete human decency there
Del Bigtree: and lying. What types of things? We are obviously not things that we're hearing on the news.
No.
Dr. Scott Atlas: See what happens is that the president gets up there, gives the remarks.
People are on, we are on the sideline to answer specific questions. If they come up, he would take his questions, then he would walk out, and then I and others on the side would walk out behind him. And it was very common that the reporters were shouting out things at him at, this is after the press conference was over [01:02:00] and people calling him a murderer and a liar, and just very I was shocked at that.
And, there's just uncivil poisonous media. Given all that it's a, he's in a, he was in a very difficult position now. That's not to excuse anything. And, I'm not political at all. I was an observer there of what's happening of the political side. But I would say that when you're in charge in the pandemic, okay you own the decision making.
The president owns the decisions. And when I got there I would've been happy to see disbanding of the medical side of the task force. Yeah. By the time I got there, you're talking August, 2020. The policies were wrong and they were failing, and they were failing to stop the death. They were failing to stop any spread of [01:03:00] infection.
Of course. Yeah. And they were destroying people. And
Del Bigtree: let's just say we have one of the highest death rates in the world. That's right. This incredible medical system, a free market medical system, we brag about and our death rates are among the highest the world. And yet I'm amazed at Berks and Tony Cher considered heroes at all in this?
Yeah.
Dr. Scott Atlas: This is very important. I would like to answer this way. The lock downers got what they wanted. The policy in the United States for most of the country was locked down. They own the outcomes. If you wanna say that there was a good outcome, then they should be congratulated. If you wanna say that there was a bad outcome under Trump and under Biden, because by the way, the deaths per day from Covid, it's a straight line for the first two full years from March, 2020 through April, 2022.
You're talking about over a year of Joe Biden. Yeah. The two years of the pandemic deaths per day, no change in the slope of the [01:04:00] line, even with the vaccine. Okay. And so the point is that the lockdowns got what they wanted. Their policy was implemented, their policy failed. There is no space, by the way, between the Trump administration policy and the policy of Fauci and Burke.
It's true. That's a really good point. They got their policy implemented. There's no space. And so what we're seeing here for your viewers is a rewrite of history and it's so illogical and bizarre. It's hard to even express. There's two things being said. Fauci and Burke somehow say they weren't for lockdowns, they weren't for school closures.
Okay, this is a complete lie. And the second thing is they're trying to blame the people who are opposed to what was implemented. The lockdowns right, for what was failed. As implemented the lockdown, right? They're trying to blame the failure of the lockdowns on people like me who oppose is what was implemented, right?
This is unacceptable and this goes to what we need to do. We need to have a public airing [01:05:00] of what happened here. I agree. We have an ethical society. We need our public needs. The truth about what happened during C O V I D if for no other reason than what they've been through. But the second thing is, and the important part here is we need to have a public demand for admission of error from Fauci Burke.
I agree. Redfield and the lockdowns. Why not? Because we think they're going to apologize. It takes integrity to apologize, as we all know from our personal lives. Yeah. When we're wrong, they're not going to apologize. They're not going to admit error, but we need to demand it because we need it in public because otherwise the people in power, they will do it again.
And they not only will do it again for a pandemic, which is inevitable, there will be more pandemics. I was gonna ask you, but there will be other things. Climate change. I anticipate there will be reasons made to do lockdowns. We cannot ever have this disastrous policy ever done in a free [01:06:00] society again.
They can do it in a country that has a barbaric human rights violating government like China. Yeah. But that's not what this country is supposed to be.
Del Bigtree: You in the middle of this and I, obviously nothing's going right. You're trying you, at one point I didn't realize until I read your book that that you were part of bringing this group together for the Great Barrington Declaration.
I don't wanna get deep into it. Because we don't have a lot of time. But Sinatra, Gupta, Jay Martin, Kor, of course you were talking to Joseph La Depo before that other great luminaries, John Ys, you were trying to bring them. It seems to me, reading this book, but I was also watching it in real time.
You're trying to bring them in, you're trying to get someone in the Trump administration. Will you let me put my side in front of the cameras and it just, Burke says No. Why does Burkes have that power? It just seemed to me, why didn't Donald Trump just say, here's Tony Fauci and Burkes. Here's Scott Atlas and Sintra [01:07:00] Gupta and the Great Barrington Declaration and the world.
You should all hear what they're arguing about. Because I, as president being asked to make a decision here, and it's not one sided like you think, why wasn't that his job shouldn't even just said, here it is to the public, and if you don't arrive, then Scott Atlas is gonna get the entire hour and his group.
Why did that never happen? It just seemed to me this would've solved everything.
Dr. Scott Atlas: It certainly would've been important, and I'll say what exactly happened. When I first got there, which was basically August 1st, 2020, July 30th I said, okay, I need to bring in people to speak to the president who are doing the research because Fauci, Burkes, Redfield, these are bureaucrats who don't know what they're talking about, and I am not enough alone.
So I brought in, I arranged a meeting. With Joe Oppo from UCLA at the time, cody Meisner from Tufts in Boston. Martin Calor from Harvard, Jay Char from Stanford. And we [01:08:00] five, this is in September of 2020. Yeah. We all came in to the White House and the day before the meeting, Burke sent it, and this was arranged so that Burkes could attend.
The day before the meeting, these guys are already flying out there. Burke says in an email, I'm not coming to the meeting. It's not good for me. And I thought to myself, okay, this person cannot take the scientific debate. Okay? That's not science. If you're afraid to stay your, that is, you can't have science without the debate.
Number one. There's obviously not the behavior of a scientist. That's the behavior of an insecure bureaucrat in my opinion. But in the meantime, I was called into Jared Kushner's office right then and said, okay, the meeting's off. And I said what do you mean the meeting's off? And I think it's actually the end of August, beginning of September.
And he said Berks isn't gonna come. And the secretaries around were saying, it's gonna look bad if we have it without bur. I [01:09:00] said Berks was invited. She's deciding not to come. This is way too important. Again, I went ballistic, said, if people are dying here, I insist they're coming to speak to the president.
Yeah. And so I was told there's five minutes instead of what I had wanted, which was a big meeting with a press conference. And reporters asking questions. That was the point of this. But no, five minutes I got. And so I said, okay. And so we went into the White House Oval Office. I told these guys, Meisner La Dapo Jay Char and Martin Calor, be very succinct.
We're there for a few minutes. Just answer his questions. Don't go off, just answer his questions. That's the role of an advisor. Yeah. And The president goes, and as I said, he starts going one by one, asking ques. The meeting went between 45 minutes an hour, and I kept getting tapped on the shoulder by people in the Oval office saying, Scott, we have a lot of other things on the schedule here.
I'm not gonna interrupt the president, number one. Number [01:10:00] two, he needs to know the information. And so we went on, he even had a video camera brought in asking me to narrate, although that video has disappeared. But we answered his questions and then what happened was a month or so later, I said, okay, it's still a disaster here.
I wanna bring in Sinatra Gupta. So by this point, I knew Martin and Jay. And I called up Martin. I said, do you know Sinatra? And he said yeah, we're talking to Sinatra. I'm trying to get her to come to the us. And so I helped arrange her security clearance to get her to come to the us because this is when flights were blocked and on the way they, they all stopped in Great Barrington, Massachusetts.
That was a way to, for them to get together. I don't think there was a real plan to do much except get together and maybe do an interview or something. And, because I had set up a meeting with Secretary Azar of Health in Human Services in, in in the [01:11:00] White House. And so they met there and then flew to Washington and we, for the three great barring, this was the day after the Great Barrington.
Yeah. Was written declaration, but it was not it was arranged way before. So we went and we answered Azar R's questions and of course that was reported by the poisonous media as somehow. He had a bunch of herd immunity advocates in there trying to push for letting it rip. And that was never even discussed.
There was never a discussion of that. We went through the data on children, on schools, on the harms from closing schools, on the fallacy of lockdowns on how to protect the elderly even better. That was the purpose of the meeting. So I thought we were gaining traction, but again, the media was frankly, very harmful to the public.
Good. There's a good comparison study of the Media of America versus non-American English speaking media. 90 plus percent of stories during [01:12:00] 2020 about the pandemic by American media were quantifiably negative. Even when the cases were going down, but outside the US, 54% were negative. They had the same pandemic.
Were these people,
Del Bigtree: Berks and them? We had these solutions that could have reduced, as you brought up hydroxychloroquine, did you ever hear them saying, like there's been a lot of censorship, huge censorship going on, we need to shut down. Like perhaps Dr. Peter McCullough and his conversation about Hydroxychloroquine or Dr.
Pierre, Cory and Ivermectin. Did you hear anything like going outta the way to shut that conversation
Dr. Scott Atlas: down? I didn't hear an explicit mention of those people or any kind of censorship. But what did happen was Redfield went to the press and said something like, everything Scott Atlas says is wrong.
Of course, everything I said was a hundred percent right. And it was known when I said it. It wasn't new knowledge, by the way, I wanna make that clear. This was not [01:13:00] learned during 2020 late or 2021 or 2022. It was all known in spring of 2020 that masks didn't work. That children were very low risk that you got protection after getting covid and recovering.
All these things were known. But what they did was use their leverage and with their friends in the media. To delegitimize people like me, that is a form of censorship. Not only that, but there was censorship that was uncovered in the emails directly commandeered by Fauci and unconscionably, the head of the nih, Francis Collins.
Yeah. That was later after October. And then of course my only, yeah, you found that they
Del Bigtree: had a hit basically on the Great Barrington Declaration. We need to strike this down. You're very busy and I know you have to get on the run. I want to ask you this question because you're in the middle of it.
[01:14:00] We are all sitting here saying why, what, why was a, was the virus that we now know for certain had a death rate? I think it's coming at about 0.035%. Across Really right as perhaps a bad flu, 3% maybe amongst the most, significantly at risk, at the highest points. But it, it was so specific, so easy to have protected.
Great Barrington Declaration made perfect sense. Let's just bubble wrap every nursing home in the world. The rest of us get out. Let's live our lives. If there's a vaccine here, great, but if not, colleges should stay open. You made great points. Colleges should stay open. Yes, they're catching it, but they're all walking around asymptomatic, not a single hospitalization or death on a college.
Instead, they shut 'em down, sent them home to infect their families, their grandparents, and keep spreading this thing. You were making sense the whole time. It made perfect reasonable science sense. As you said, it wasn't [01:15:00] brand new, it was basically high school science. Do you what? Do you think is the motivation in America especially, did they make a crisis, destroy our lives to get rid of Donald Trump as president of the United States?
Is that a motivating factor or is it to push a vaccine
Dr. Scott Atlas: program? You the question about motive and why is always the most difficult. So it's a, it's partly a guess. I saw many different motivations, but they had a common endpoint. Okay. I'm not a believer that everyone was, first of all, you're giving people too much credit to assume that they had the brains to organize some kind of a massive, I say that a lot on this show too.
Yes. They're very non, they're low level thinkers, frankly. And that's a broad brush, obviously. But I honestly think there were motivations of power. Power is very important to people, particularly people who are suddenly [01:16:00] famous. Like you take a guy who's an epidemiologist, who's never seen a TV screen, and all of a sudden he becomes well known.
You see a a complicit potentially guilt in the funding of research that caused the virus, right? We know for a fact that the NIH gave funding to the Wuhan lab, right? That's in the Wuhan publications, right? They list the grant numbers, okay? So if you, just hypothetical, if you were a guy who was one of the people who signed off on that funding, then there's this pandemic killing people.
You might wanna portray yourself as very safe, the safest person in the world. You may wanna say stuff like wear two masks. You may wanna say stuff like wear goggles. Which Dr. Fauci said in July of 2020. So I, there are different motivations. There's financial corruption, there's no doubt there's a linkage with big pharma there's [01:17:00] financial corruption of people.
Even with a subsequent position. There are people that were secretary or head of FDA is on the board of a company that owns Moderna. There were people that had their own personal motivations, and that's very sad. And there's also something we cannot ignore and cannot say enough really is gross incompetence.
Yeah. Yet people, Berks, Fauci and Redfield had a common thread, by the way, in their history, which is they all worked on aids, h i V, and aids. And they've, Burkes funded, directed funding toward Red Fields's Labs, et cetera. She did postdoc work with Fauci, their very longstanding relationship there.
But they also have a common mentality of. H I v. Okay. How does that virus spread? That's a virus that's is stopped by barriers. That's not a respiratory virus we all know. They had a different way to think about things that was grossly wrong. And by the way, you can look up Fauci s history on aids, which is well [01:18:00] known and well-documented where he was claiming even after it was known how AIDS spread that.
You gotta be careful. You might be able to get it through casual contact with your children in your home. This was spread. He wrote that he, that was said, he wrote that he was also all in on a vaccine for aids. And so he didn't push for drug treatment of aids. And the same pattern is what we see here.
One of the biggest failures. Maybe the biggest by the NIH and the FDA during this entire thing was they did not do rapidly clinical trials on drugs that were already safe and FDA approved. They didn't do it. Instead, they of that he, that's right. And this is really a huge failure that were going on as one of the historical epic failures in the management of this pandemic as they ignored, easy to do clinical trials for drugs that were safe and why, I don't know, maybe it was financial corruption.
Maybe it was because Trump came out prematurely and said, hydroxychloroquine works. He should [01:19:00] take it. But it became far bigger than politics, I think.
Del Bigtree: Just my last question because we sit here, we're being told by Bill Gates World Economic Forum. W h O is trying to now use all of this to, control the world the next time there's a pandemic.
They seem very excited about this idea of a pandemic around the corner. Doesn't matter that pandemics used to come every 50 years now. Apparently it's gonna be a bi-annual experience for the world. At least it seems that way. What is, what our audience is out here? I have a very intelligent audience.
They've been following all this science. You're talking about many of us we're trying to make a difference in this world. What do you think about the state of this country? Are we, did we learn anything? Are we ready for another pandemic or are we on the cut verge of being locked down? Shut down? Is it, when we think of the World Economic Forum, it's a great reset that they seem to want to take away all of our rights as a part of these things.
Dr. Scott Atlas: I think we're [01:20:00] in a precarious situation at the very least here. What we've seen here is not only the legacy of Fauci is that it, he presided over the biggest failure in public health guidance ever. Not only is it the massive destruction of a younger generation particularly poor people and shifting the burden unethically to the poor and to our children, not only is there now a loss of trust in all guidance, but.
I believe part of that legacy is a complete loss of basic civility in this country. And so we have a cohesion problem. We have a moral and ethical failure of shifting the burden toward poor people and toward our children. And we have a massive failure if you wanna be going into philosophy of what it is to be a virtuous society, the kind of society we thought we had, the kind of [01:21:00] society you must have in a free society, in a democracy where there's a diversity of views.
And what is the biggest absence in our country? It's an absence of courage. Okay. We have a void in courage in the people. That's what we have seen in my view. And as Aristotle has said, the cur is a predicate to all other virtues. You can't have a functioning. Moral civilization, ethical civilization.
If you don't have, people, have the courage to speak up against wrong. And I think that you mentioned it, it is true. We've had several presidents in a row now that don't understand that when they're elected to be leaders for everybody, including people who didn't vote for them. Okay. We need to reset our moral and ethical compass here. I wanna make something that your public [01:22:00] viewing may not even understand, is that we did all these mandates on children for vaccines and boosters and forced testing and did medical clinical trials on infants and toddlers that are bro breaking all medical ethics rules.
At Stanford, at Johns Hopkins, at all of our great medical centers, they did those clinical trials with the hope that it would, what shield for disease that young children have no significant risk from. Healthy children with the hope that it would shield adults from this infection. That, that I'm a father.
My children are not to be used as shields for me. Yeah. I'm a shield for my children. So we have to reexamine ourselves as a society. And by the way, the uk, Denmark, Sweden, Finland, dozens of countries did not mandate vaccines for children. They had the same data. They knew what the data was. [01:23:00] We are an outlier on what we did to our younger generation and now have a of a younger generation that we've inflicted an obesity crisis on the 52% of college aged kids.
Gained an average of 28 pounds during the lockdowns of 2020. That's an obesity crisis. Yeah. We've created a generation of young children, toddlers, who think they are a vector of disease, that they are a danger to their parents and grandparents, that everyone's a danger to them. This is what we're grappling with.
It's not the pandemic now. It's not about just reforming the funding of science, which is controlled by a cabal of people at the highest levels. We need to get decentralized funding. We need to make far more transparency in the discussions at the cdc. We need a complete house cleaning agreed of the fda, the cdc, and the nih.
And that's gonna require a real tough new president and new leadership. But we need something [01:24:00] more. And that is we need our people in this country to wake up. And what I said, rise up. Rise up means speak up. Okay. Make your voices heard. This is a free society because when you turn around, you've lost all the freedoms that you thought you had.
And that's not the kind of country we wanna leave. We wanna leave to our children.
Del Bigtree: Absolutely brilliant. You have a plan to catch. I could do this all day. Dr. Scott Atlas, it has been such a pleasure. Thank you for having me to spend this time with you. For everyone out there, Amazon tried to block your ability to buy this book, go out and get it.
We only covered just some of what's in here. This is one of the most important stories of our lifetime. We have to understand this because if we don't know our history, we are doomed. To repeat it, definitely check out the podcast that Dr. Scott Atlas does Independent Truth with Dr. Scott Atlas independent.org/scott Atlas.
Just Twitter same thing. There it is. And all of this will be available to you [01:25:00] if you're on our newsletter.
Dr. Scott Atlas on The Highwire with Del Bigtree