Fully aligned with the President’s coverage and the whole lot that I’ve been advising him on.
As readers of SBM know, Dr. Scott Atlas was one of many pioneers and main advocates of the We Need Them Contaminated motion. Although he now claims he solely cared about youngsters’s schooling, Dr. Atlas spent a lot of 2020 advocating for herd immunity by the mass an infection of unvaccinated youth.
As readers of SBM additionally know, this failed plan was formalized within the Nice Barrington Declaration, which was printed in October 2020. Dr. Atlas was in routine communication with its authors and was highly effective sufficient to rearrange a “secret assembly” for them President Trump in August 2020. The day after the Nice Barrington Declaration was printed, Dr. Atlas organized for its authors to fulfill with Well being and Human Providers Secretary Alex Azar. In keeping with an article titled Trump Advisers Seek the advice of Scientists Pushing Disputed Herd Immunity Technique:
The Trump administration’s well being chief met Monday with a trio of scientists who again the controversial principle that the USA can shortly and safely obtain widespread immunity to the coronavirus by permitting it to unfold unfettered amongst wholesome folks.
The assembly with Well being and Human Providers Secretary Alex Azar, which additionally included Trump adviser Scott Atlas, is the most recent instance of administration officers — together with the president himself — searching for out scientists whose contrarian views justify the federal government’s dealing with of a pandemic that has killed 210,000 folks and contaminated almost 7.5 million to date within the U.S.
“We heard sturdy reinforcement of the Trump Administration’s technique of aggressively defending the weak whereas opening colleges and the office,” Azar tweeted after his assembly with Harvard medical professor Martin Kulldorff, Stanford medical professor Jay Bhattacharya and Oxford epidemiologist Sunetra Gupta.
Mainstream medical and public well being consultants say that searching for widespread, or herd, immunity within the method the scientists prescribe may end result within the deaths of a whole bunch of 1000’s and even tens of millions extra U.S. residents.
The trio, who Azar described as “three distinguished infectious illness consultants,” favors transferring aggressively to reopen the financial system whereas sidelining broad testing and different basic public well being measures. “Three months, possibly six is adequate time for sufficient immunity to build up … that the weak may resume regular lives,” Gupta mentioned Monday night time in look on Laura Ingraham’s Fox Information present.
That aligns with the “herd-immunity” technique endorsed by Atlas, who Bhattacharya mentioned was their “level of contact” for the assembly. Atlas, a neuroradiologist and senior fellow at Stanford College’s Hoover Establishment, has emerged as a popular adviser to the president regardless of his lack of knowledge in public well being, infectious illness or epidemiology…
As a reminder, none of those medical doctors truly handled COVID sufferers.
Medical doctors who didn’t deal with COVID sufferers, set coverage for medical doctors who did deal with COVID sufferers
Unsurprisingly, Dr. Atlas particularly credited the Nice Barrington Declaration with influencing his strategy to the pandemic. He mentioned this shortly after it was signed:
The extended lockdowns should finish, and I simply wish to level out that now that is actually meshing fairly exactly with a rising physique of a number of the world’s prime epidemiologists and scientists who this previous week signed one thing known as the Nice Barrington Declaration. Scientists led by folks from Harvard, Stanford, and Oxford College, would-renown infectious illness and epidemiology scientists, have fully aligned with the President’s coverage and with the whole lot that I’ve been advising him on, and this actually refutes this form of unusual narrative that that is purely politically primarily based, that one way or the other the President doesn’t take heed to the science. That is the science, that is what he’s been suggested by me and others.
Certainly, this was the message Dr. Atlas had been speaking to the President, who was clearly paying consideration. Within the video from September 2020 under, the President credit Dr. Atlas and Stanford medical doctors for his or her recommendation on “herd mentality”. Primarily based on what he was informed, the President believed the virus would go away “in a short time” with a vaccine and that we had been “rounding the nook”.
1 million People have since died of COVID.
I’ve by no means actually learn by the whole lot within the Nice Barrington Declaration.
Nevertheless, in January 2022, throughout his testimony to the Home Choose Committee On Coronavirus Disaster, Dr. Atlas spoke very otherwise concerning the Nice Barrington Declaration. As soon as it turned clear their imaginative and prescient of herd immunity in 3-6 months was only a fantasy, Dr. Atlas testified “he wasn’t conversant in it in any respect.” He had this change:
Q. Do you view the Nice Barrington declaration to stipulate the identical technique because the focused safety technique that we have now been discussing all through immediately?
A. Nicely, the Nice Barrington, I don’t communicate for what Nice Barrington Declaration represents. I didn’t write it. I didn’t signal it and it didn’t exist after I organized this assembly. So I wasn’t conversant in it in any respect. I didn’t even, know there was going to be any type of declaration written, after I organized this assembly. So I’m conversant in the broad elements of it that I simply said.
Q. Sitting right here immediately, do you imagine that it’s outlining the identical basic technique that you simply known as focused safety?
A. I believe it’s outlining the final technique of accelerating the safety of the high-risk folks and ending the harms of the lockdowns. So in that sense, sure.
Q. Are there any variations between the 2?
A. I’m not — I don’t actually — you already know, like I say, I didn’t signal the Nice Barrington Declaration. I haven’t actually — I don’t know what’s the main points of it. I by no means learn the complete Nice Barrington Declaration web site and the whole lot.
Q. Did you assessment or present any enter on the Nice Barrington Declaration previous to its launch?
A. No. Like I mentioned, I wasn’t even conscious it was being written.
Q. Did you’ve gotten any conversations about it at a broad degree previous to its launch?
A. No. The truth is, I used to be by no means — I’m not even positive there was a recognized intent to put in writing one thing. I don’t know what they had been doing. I wasn’t concerned, they being the group of people that had been writing the Nice Barrington Declaration.
Q. Sitting her immediately, are you able to recall if there’s something that you simply disagree with within the Nice Barrington Declaration?
A. Nicely, like I say, I haven’t learn the element of it. I’m not intimately conversant in each single element. I’ve by no means actually learn by the whole lot within the Nice Barrington Declaration, however the basic thrust of Nice Barrington Declaration that I mentioned already of accelerating the safety of the high-risk folks and lowering and eliminating the huge harms of the lockdowns, these two issues, I completely agree with.
So what was Dr. Atlas’s relationship with the Nice Barrington Declaration? Dr. Atlas desires you to imagine:
And I simply wish to level out that now that is actually meshing fairly exactly… with one thing known as the Nice Barrington Declaration… fully aligned with the President’s coverage and with the whole lot that I’ve been advising him on.
He additionally desires you to imagine:
I haven’t actually — I don’t know what’s the main points of it. I by no means learn the complete Nice Barrington Declaration web site and the whole lot… Nicely, like I say, I haven’t learn the element of it. I’m not intimately conversant in each single element. I’ve by no means actually learn by the whole lot within the Nice Barrington Declaration.
Dr. Atlas was a key authorities advisor in 2020. He significantly influenced our pandemic response. And he claims that his recommendation to the President of the USA was primarily based on a document- a very transient document- he didn’t even hassle to learn.