September 6, 2022
Dear Friends and Family,
In August 2020, five months after the formation of the White House Task Force, Dr. Scott Atlas, a healthcare policy expert from Stanford University joined the task force at the request of President Trump.
This segment provides summary excerpts of his critique of the task force as provided in Atlas’ book A Plague Upon Our House. Some elements of his critique include:
Happy Learning,
Harley
Dear Friends and Family,
In August 2020, five months after the formation of the White House Task Force, Dr. Scott Atlas, a healthcare policy expert from Stanford University joined the task force at the request of President Trump.
This segment provides summary excerpts of his critique of the task force as provided in Atlas’ book A Plague Upon Our House. Some elements of his critique include:
- Shock at the enormous power of government officials to unilaterally decree so many aspects to society – business and school shutdowns, restricted movements of people, and mandated masks and vaccines. Shock also at our citizens acquiescence to do so.
- The lack of common sense and ignoring of well-established principles of medicine by public health officials.
- The singular focus of the task force to stop COVID-19 at all costs, thus failing to analyze and adjust to the adverse effects of their policies.
- Dr. Fauci’s efforts to induce fear into the country in order to achieve compliance.
- Putting election results ahead of the safety and welfare of the populace.
Happy Learning,
Harley
COVID PANDEMIC CRITIQUE – SEGMENT 4
A COUNTER TO THE WHITE HOUSE TASK FORCE -- EXCERPTS
All of the Excerpts are from A Plague Upon Our House by Scott W. Atlas, MD (2021)
OBSERVATIONS: In considering all the surprising events that unfolded in this past year, two in particular stand out. I have been shocked at the enormous power of government officials to unilaterally decree a sudden and a severe shutdown of society – to simply close businesses and schools by edict, restrict personal movements, mandate behavior, regulate interactions with our family members, and eliminated our most basic freedoms, without any defined end and with little accountability. And I remain stunned at the acceptance by the American people of draconian rules, restrictions, and unprecedented mandates, even those that are arbitrary, destructive, and wholly unscientific. The acquiescence of the citizenry to such extraordinary and ill-conceived restrictions in a nation that was founded on the principles of freedom from an overbearing government, in a country that stands as the world’s beacon for independence and liberty, is nothing less than shocking.
Common sense and well-established principles of medicine were being ignored. Every second-year medical student knew that the elderly were almost certainly the most vulnerable group of people, since they were virtually always at highest risk of death and serious consequences from respiratory infections. Yet this was not stressed. To the contrary, the implication of reports and the public faces of official expertise implied that everyone was equally in danger. The one unusual feature of this virus was the fact that children had an extraordinarily low risk. Yet this positive and reassuring news was never emphasized. Instead, with total disregard of the evidence of selective risk consistent with other respiratory viruses, public health officials recommended draconian isolation of everyone.
The architects of the American lockdown strategy were Dr. Anthony Fauci and Dr. Deborah Birx. With Dr. Robert Redfield, the director of the CDC, they were the most influential medical members of the White House Coronavirus Task Force. Dr. Birx, Dr. Redfield, and Dr. Fauci -- often called “the nation’s expert in infectious disease” – dominated all discussions about the health and medical aspects of the emerging pandemic. One thing was very clear – all three were cut from the same cloth. First, they were all bureaucrats, sharing a background that crossed paths in government agencies. Second, they shared a long history in HIV/AIDS as a public health crisis. That was problematic, because HIV couldn’t be more different from SARS2 in its biology, its amenability to testing and contact tracing, its spread, and the implications of those facts for its control. Indeed, the three of them spent many years on the development of a vaccine, rather than treatment, for HIV/AIDS – a vaccine that still does not exist.
STRATEGY ADVICE: I advocated a more focused protection model that would entail increasing protection of the elderly, who were dying at high rates because they were not being protected by the lockdowns, while allowing younger, healthy people with an extremely low risk to function, so that the harms of the lockdown would end. I specifically urged “to institute a more focused strategy, like some outlined in the first place: strictly protect the known vulnerable, self-isolated, the mildly sick, and open most workplaces and small businesses with some prudent large-group precautions.”
FACTS: If you take the number of people who are going to die and you divide it by the people who are infected, they got 3% to 5%., which is very high. From data all over the world, including the US, a massive number of people have the virus that were asymptomatic. In fact, 50% of people that are infected have zero symptoms. And then another large percentage have nothing really significant that demands any medical care and certainly not hospitalization. So, when you look at the newer data that has come out, the estimates are that the fatality rate is very low, maybe 0.1%.
If you take away age, the number one underlying condition is obesity and diabetes … Although it’s not clear how impactful each one of these is. Also, other diseases contribute like kidney disease and congestive heart failure. Restating the bottom line:
A COUNTER TO THE WHITE HOUSE TASK FORCE -- EXCERPTS
All of the Excerpts are from A Plague Upon Our House by Scott W. Atlas, MD (2021)
OBSERVATIONS: In considering all the surprising events that unfolded in this past year, two in particular stand out. I have been shocked at the enormous power of government officials to unilaterally decree a sudden and a severe shutdown of society – to simply close businesses and schools by edict, restrict personal movements, mandate behavior, regulate interactions with our family members, and eliminated our most basic freedoms, without any defined end and with little accountability. And I remain stunned at the acceptance by the American people of draconian rules, restrictions, and unprecedented mandates, even those that are arbitrary, destructive, and wholly unscientific. The acquiescence of the citizenry to such extraordinary and ill-conceived restrictions in a nation that was founded on the principles of freedom from an overbearing government, in a country that stands as the world’s beacon for independence and liberty, is nothing less than shocking.
Common sense and well-established principles of medicine were being ignored. Every second-year medical student knew that the elderly were almost certainly the most vulnerable group of people, since they were virtually always at highest risk of death and serious consequences from respiratory infections. Yet this was not stressed. To the contrary, the implication of reports and the public faces of official expertise implied that everyone was equally in danger. The one unusual feature of this virus was the fact that children had an extraordinarily low risk. Yet this positive and reassuring news was never emphasized. Instead, with total disregard of the evidence of selective risk consistent with other respiratory viruses, public health officials recommended draconian isolation of everyone.
The architects of the American lockdown strategy were Dr. Anthony Fauci and Dr. Deborah Birx. With Dr. Robert Redfield, the director of the CDC, they were the most influential medical members of the White House Coronavirus Task Force. Dr. Birx, Dr. Redfield, and Dr. Fauci -- often called “the nation’s expert in infectious disease” – dominated all discussions about the health and medical aspects of the emerging pandemic. One thing was very clear – all three were cut from the same cloth. First, they were all bureaucrats, sharing a background that crossed paths in government agencies. Second, they shared a long history in HIV/AIDS as a public health crisis. That was problematic, because HIV couldn’t be more different from SARS2 in its biology, its amenability to testing and contact tracing, its spread, and the implications of those facts for its control. Indeed, the three of them spent many years on the development of a vaccine, rather than treatment, for HIV/AIDS – a vaccine that still does not exist.
STRATEGY ADVICE: I advocated a more focused protection model that would entail increasing protection of the elderly, who were dying at high rates because they were not being protected by the lockdowns, while allowing younger, healthy people with an extremely low risk to function, so that the harms of the lockdown would end. I specifically urged “to institute a more focused strategy, like some outlined in the first place: strictly protect the known vulnerable, self-isolated, the mildly sick, and open most workplaces and small businesses with some prudent large-group precautions.”
FACTS: If you take the number of people who are going to die and you divide it by the people who are infected, they got 3% to 5%., which is very high. From data all over the world, including the US, a massive number of people have the virus that were asymptomatic. In fact, 50% of people that are infected have zero symptoms. And then another large percentage have nothing really significant that demands any medical care and certainly not hospitalization. So, when you look at the newer data that has come out, the estimates are that the fatality rate is very low, maybe 0.1%.
If you take away age, the number one underlying condition is obesity and diabetes … Although it’s not clear how impactful each one of these is. Also, other diseases contribute like kidney disease and congestive heart failure. Restating the bottom line:
If you’re young and otherwise healthy, you have essentially zero risk of dying … If you’re under 18 in New York, you make up 0.6% of the hospitalizations. And if you’re over 60 you make up two-thirds. So, there is a very significant targeted population here. We need to protect them – that doesn’t need total isolation of everyone.
THE FALSE NARRATIVE: The false story – that this coronavirus was far more deadly than the flu by several orders of magnitude; that everyone is at high risk to die; that no one has any immune protection, because it is entirely new; that everyone was spreading the virus widely; that locking down and isolating everyone was urgently needed; and that the only protection would be from a vaccine, and that was years away – was an epic failure of both public health officials and the media, one that incited extraordinarily harmful, tragically misguided policies.
PUBLIC HEALTH POLICY GOAL ADVICE: I stressed that the appropriate goal of public health policy is to minimize all harms, not simply to stop COVID-19 at all costs. Treatments, including emergency care, for the most serious illnesses were also missed. Half of cancer patients deferred their chemotherapy. An estimated 80% of brain surgery cases were skipped. Up to half of acute stroke and heart attack patients missed their only chances for treatment, some dying and many now facing permanent disability. Meanwhile there was tremendous harm from closing schools, shuttering businesses, and confining people to their homes – and all these harms were worse for lower-income families. All this was already shown by the data. Why in the world was it being ignored, literally denied, by the experts we were relying on to guide our nation?
THE WHITE HOUSE TASK FORCE:
Failure of Leadership: The president believed that the country should reopen. Months earlier, in March 2020, he had warned, “The cure cannot be worse than the disease.” He opposed lockdowns and understood at a gut level their disastrous harms. The White House had already gone so far as to produce documents emphasizing reopening. In April 2020, their reopening guide stated, “A long-term nationwide shutdown is not sustainable and would inflict wide-ranging harm on the health and wellbeing of our citizens.”
Yet that fundamental policy of the president’s was ignored, overtly contradicted almost daily by Dr. Birx, who represented the White House Task Force to governors and regional media while visiting states. At times, she was accompanied by Vice President Pence, thereby providing an implicit endorsement. Fauci meanwhile was all over the map in his statements. By the time I arrived, lockdowns had already been implemented throughout the country for months. Those policies – the Birx-Fauci lockdowns – were widely implemented, and they were destroying America’s children and families. Meanwhile, hundreds of thousands of deaths kept piling up, including tens of thousands of elderly Americans – their policies were in place and were failing. Yet, that failure was not only disregarded, but it was also taken to mean that the lockdowns were needed even more.
One confusion that was amplified by the media was the division of responsibility for the management of the pandemic. Being a federalist system, the pandemic response was a joint effort between the federal government, the states, the local municipalities. In a practical sense, the federal government provided support for the state-based decisions, which were then implemented on a local level. All on-the-ground policies were the purview of the governors, the chief executive of each state, not the president. That authority was not “delegated” by President Trump – it is the constitutional authority of the governors in our federalist system. Each state designed its own lockdowns, mandates, school closures, and personal restrictions, and each governor bears responsibility for the outcomes of those policies.
That does not mean the president had no national leadership role – he clearly did. The vice president’s Task Force also had a significant leadership role, beyond its concern with logistics regarding the production and delivery of supplies. The Task Force provided strategic advice to the governors and state public health officials. The problem was that the president’s message – end the lockdowns and use a focused protection of the high-risk – was directly contrary to the lockdown message of the Task Force. Allowing the national policy message to be contrary to the message of the president of the United States was a gross error. It allowed the destructive lockdown policy to remain in place and presented a picture of a chaotic national leadership in the pandemic response. Those who advised the president to allow that to continue did him and the nation a tremendous disservice.
Structure: The Task Force was run entirely by Vice President Pence. The president was not part of the Task Force; in fact, he never once attended those meetings during my time in the White House. Dr. Birx was in charge. In her role as Task Force coordinator, she summarized the state of the pandemic for the vice president. She was nearly the entire public representation of the Task Force outside Washington. Birx directly advised the governors and public health officials. Contrary to the way it was portrayed in the media, very little on-the-ground policy was truly under the control of the federal government.
My first foray into the Task Force was mid-August. Birx stressed the need for social distancing, handwashing, and masks. I wondered why this still needed to be emphasized to this group, as if it was somehow a new idea to the Task Force. The national had been hearing this virtually 24/7 in all media outlets for more than eight months. Her mantra of “keeping cases down” with mass testing of asymptomatic people and quarantining of all those testing positive was then repeated and repeated again. Birx went on without anyone challenging her or even asking any questions, she reiterated the need for even more restrictions.
Pence noticed the look on my face and said, “Scott, I asked you here because I want to hear your opinions. Say what you’re thinking.” So, I began with two words, “I disagree.” “I disagree that ‘we brought cases down.’ That was the typical curve of the virus. It came down for other reasons – almost everywhere in the world had demonstrated a characteristic curve. Birx’s dates were wrong, so her trends weren’t accurate. That shift of the peak was usually at least two weeks – all because of relying on recorded date instead of the date of the actual death. This represented one of the most misleading inaccuracies in the reporting. Since trends were being used to define almost all policies, those trends absolutely must be accurate. But they were incorrect.”
I then talked about New York City, where Birx has also claimed that cases were declining due to government-issued mask mandates. I said, “I disagree that cases came down in NYC due to masks.” The mask mandate for New York was on April 15, yet the cases had peaked weeks earlier and were already in steep decline. Dr. Brix, seated diagonally across the table, was glaring at me. I asked her, very directly, why she thought NYC had no cases after their first massive wave of hospitalizations and deaths – in the face of huge crowds protesting in the streets, with all that entailed. I asked, “Do you think masks brought the cases down?” Birx was visibly angry. She insisted I was wrong. She raised her voice and angrily snapped and leaned forward, “Yes! And because of the lockdowns!!”
These were the people entrusted with the public’s confidence, placed on a pedestal as experts, to advise us in the biggest health crisis in a century? I never saw them act like scientists, digging into the numbers to verify the very trends that formed the basis of their reactive policy pronouncements. They did not act like researchers, using critical thinking to dissect the published science or differentiate a correlation from a cause. They certainly did not show a physician’s clinical perspective. With their single-minded focus, they did not even act like public health experts. Birx, Fauci, and Redfield focused solely on stopping cases at all costs, in media interviews and in their advice to governors, pushing their brain-numbing message of “wash your hands, stay away from others, wear your masks.”
As often happened, Fauci spoke up to support Dr. Birx’s concerns, saying people need to be warned even more strongly about the dangers of the virus spreading, about wearing masks and distancing. He claimed Americans didn’t think the virus was serious, and that was the reason cases spread. 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 was shocked at his thought process. Instilling fear in the public is absolutely counter to what a leader in public health should do.
Headlines were filling the screens, starting with the Washington Post, breathlessly quoting “several anonymous sources” said to be in the room who claimed I was “advising that we should let the virus spread” or “advocating a herd immunity strategy.” Of course, I had never said anything like that, not even remotely advocating that the infection be allowed to spread. Americans, already off the rails about the pandemic, fragile and filled with fear, were now going to think that his hand-picked advisor actually wanted the infection to run wild through the population. “My God,” I thought. “Truth did not matter one bit to these people. They had no shame when it came to achieving their goal; they lied and distorted the facts without any concern whatsoever about its effects.”
Birx had one game plan, and she stuck to it. She balked at the notion that we could do more. I challenged their notion. Why were we testing nursing home staff only once per week? We all knew that nursing home cases were almost always brought in by staff members. And many staff members worked in more than one nursing home, so that was and incredibly high-risk group to test. After the Task Force’s earlier failures on testing, they finally had an amazing testing capability; so why were we performing most tests in the low-risk groups? After voicing my concerns, one Task Force member did step forward. Administrator for the Center’s for Medicare and Medicaid Services, Seema Verma, and I had separately developed a productive, ongoing dialogue. We worked together on a refined set of guidelines for nursing homes and jointly recommended far more frequent point-of-care testing in residential settings for seniors. We added alerts of community activity to high-risk seniors living independently who were already known to Medicare. New incentives to performance and improving protection control with neighboring hospitals was also added. [NOTE: As the head of Medicare and Medicaid Services Verma could establish such incentives]. While many factors certainly helped, the data speaks for itself – as was proven month later, our measures helped reduce nursing home COVID mortality from April’s 21% to about half that by the time I left in November.
THE ELECTION: The closest advisors to the president, including the VP, seemed more concerned with politics, even though the Task Force was putting out the wrong advice, contrary to the president’s desire to reopen the schools and businesses. They had convinced him to do exactly the opposite of what he would naturally do in any other circumstances – to disregard his own common sense and allow grossly incorrect policy advice to prevail. For months, his inner circle feared “rocking the boat” ahead of the election. They stopped the president from getting rid of people who were grossly incompetent, purely because of the election, solely because those highly visible bureaucrats were viewed positively by the public. This president, widely known for his signature “You’re fired! declaration, was misled by his closest political intimates. All for fear of what was inevitable anyway – skewering from an already hostile media. And on top of that tragic misjudgment, the election was lost anyway. So much for political strategists.
THE RESULTS: The Birx strategy was not merely a failure at stopping the cases – it was far worse than that. The elderly kept dying and a massive health disaster was unfolding from the lockdown. Uninfected people were dying directly because of the closure of other medical care and their fear of seeking it. Meanwhile kids were being sacrificed, and families were being utterly destroyed from severe economic hardships, translated into drug abuse, spousal abuse, child abuse, and a host of other harms.
SUMMARY: One issue stands above all others – the urgent need to restore trust in our vital institutions. The management of this pandemic has left a stain on many of America’s once noble institutions. Earning it back will not be easy.
Trust in Government: Almost all governors made entirely arbitrary distinctions. Even if one believed in the health benefits of these diktats, they were handed down with shocking disregard for the potential damages and deaths.
Trust in public health leadership: There has been a repeated, erratic discussion coming from public health officials. On masks, America’s leading voice of public health issued a number of statements over a period of months that were in direct conflict with each other and with the data, and he still fails to recognize the most compelling studies. On testing, the CDC put up a guideline, then changed it, then took it down, then put back something close to the original. There was no science to prompt those changes. The most visible face of public health praised four northeast US states with the highest rate of fatalities for following his guidance, despite their deadly performance.
Trust in Science: The pandemic exposed grave problems with the essential functioning of science, research and debate. Elite research universities, public health agencies, and top scientific journals quickly fell in line with herd thinking about the pandemic. Instead of open and free discourse to seek the scientific truths underlying urgently needed solutions, we have seen silencing, censoring, and slandering of scientists whose interpretations differed from the desired narrative. That intolerance has fostered a climate of fear and inhibited other scientists and health experts from contributing to the discussion, effectively inducing self-censorship.
Trust in Educational Leaders: The priorities of teachers and their unions were exposed as self-centered, driven by fear for the adult teachers most of whom are very low risk, at the expense of the health and future of children. The same holds true for our university leadership.
Trust in Fellow Citizens: Policymakers in concert with the elite class inflicted great harm by undermining fundamental trust in our fellow citizens. Elites in the media have made “freedom” a selfish idea and politicized dissent on the efficacy of masks or various potential treatments. Restrictions on liberty were also destructive by inflaming class distinctions with their differential impact: exposing essential workers, sacrificing low-income families and kids, destroying single-parent homes, and eviscerating small businesses, while at the same time large companies were bailed out, and the ultra-rich got richer.
Assigning roles in the pandemic by level of government is a bit more complicated than a straightforward division of responsibilities, because by definition the president himself is the nation’s chief executive. Therefore, he has a unique responsibility to lead. He is also the one making the executive decisions. On this highly important criterion of presidential management – taking responsibility to fully take charge of policy coming from the White House – I believe the president made a massive error in judgement. Against his own gut feeling, he delegated authority to medical bureaucrats, and then he failed to correct that mistake.
Source: A Plague Upon Our House: My Fight at the Trump White House to Stop COVID from Destroying America by Scott Atlas, MD (2021- est. Spring)
The unabbreviated version of the above can be found in the pdf document below.
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