It only took a few days for Scott Atlas to alarm top US health officials after he became a White House COVID-19 adviser in mid-August of last year.
Anthony Fauci and Deborah Birx had already been sidelined and were struggling to combat falsehood after falsehood spread by former president Donald Trump. Yet the pair quickly realized that Atlas — a senior fellow at Stanford University’s conservative Hoover Institution who routinely downplayed the pandemic on Fox News — was about to make their fight against the virus even harder, according to emails obtained through a public records request and shared with BuzzFeed News.
“I am more convinced than ever the dangers of Dr. Atlas’ views on the pandemic,” Birx, the White House’s coronavirus response coordinator at the time, wrote to Fauci and other top health officials in an Aug. 21, 2020, email — 11 days after Trump had announced that Atlas, a neuroradiologist, would be his newest adviser. She accused Atlas of “providing information not based on data or knowledge of pandemics — nor pandemic responses on the ground but by personal opinion formed by cherry picking data from nonpeer reviewed COVID publications.”
“This is dangerous and a true threat to a comprehensive and critical response to this pandemic,” she added. “Dr Atlas views appeal to a subsection of American citizens and if allowed to gain traction will reverse months of incredibly hard won gains.”
“I agree and share your concerns,” Fauci, the nation’s top infectious disease scientist, responded on a thread that included former FDA head Stephen Hahn and former CDC chief Robert Redfield. He added, “He is a very clever guy and knows the literature (in his own way). It is in the interpretation of the literature that we differ.”
The emails — obtained by Charles Seife, a New York University journalism professor — show how alarmed Fauci and Birx were about Atlas, who became one of Trump’s most influential advisers and one of the loudest sources of COVID-19 misinformation in the US.
He infamously advocated for a controversial approach to the deadly virus: letting it spread unchecked among non-elderly people in the absence of a vaccine so that the population at large could develop immunity. Infectious disease experts at the time argued that this strategy would be incredibly dangerous, inevitably leading to large numbers of unnecessary hospitalizations and deaths. But the idea held sway with the president: Weeks after Atlas started on the job, Trump proclaimed on TV that the virus would “go away” once people developed “a herd mentality.”
Fauci and Birx, meanwhile, were almost entirely shut out of the Oval Office, according to their correspondence at the time. “I don’t see the President so I don’t have a counter balance opportunity to this Atlas Dogma,” Birx wrote. “Tony and I did not brief the President nor speak to the President between 22 April and the end of July beyond one vaccine briefing in July.”
Now they want to put Fauci in jail.
I guess they both could have spoken out. But They probably should have. But what good would it have done/ Trump always did what he wanted, irrespective of public opinion. He liked Atlas because Atlas told him he could stop testing (keep the numbers down), let people die in huge number and it would all be better in the long run because he would win re-election, which was all that mattered. Nothing was going to change that.
Sometimes I read one of these Trump in the final days stories and it just hits me in the gut. These pandemic stories do that every time. They killed people. On purpose. For Trump’s sickening, evil narcissism. And he’s out there still pushing his January 6th, Big Lie revolution and may very well get back in the White House in three years if they manage to degrade our election processes enough to make it possible.