Ask Dr. Drew - Dr. Scott Atlas: Pandemic Task Force Expert Told The Truth About COVID & mRNA, Then Needed 24/7 Security From Death Threats – Ask Dr. Drew – Ep 414
Episode Date: October 20, 2024“I don’t care what people think of me—right is right. People were dying, I had to say the truth,” says Dr. Scott Atlas, a Stanford professor who was criticized by his peers for opposing pandem...ic lockdowns & mRNA injections of “experimental drugs into children that have side effects.” Dr. Atlas says the reaction was severe: “I’m not the only one here who’s had death threats and had to hire 24/7 police security in my driveway.” Dr. Scott W. Atlas is a health policy expert at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution who has served as a senior advisor to several Presidential candidates and members of Congress. He served on the White House Coronavirus Task Force in 2020. Dr. Atlas has authored over 100 peer-reviewed publications and several books, including “A Plague Upon Our House” about his White House experience. He received his MD from the University of Chicago and was awarded the 2022 Encounter Prize for Advancing American Ideals. Follow him at https://x.com/ScottAtlas_IT and learn more at https://scottatlas.com Read Dr. Atlas’ book “A Plague Upon Our House: My Fight at the Trump White House to Stop COVID from Destroying America” at https://amzn.to/4eMF1ea 「 SUPPORT OUR SPONSORS 」 Find out more about the brands that make this show possible and get special discounts on Dr. Drew's favorite products at https://drdrew.com/sponsors • COZY EARTH - Susan and Drew love Cozy Earth's sheets & clothing made with super-soft viscose from bamboo! Use code DREW to save up to 40% at https://drdrew.com/cozy • FATTY15 – The future of essential fatty acids is here! Strengthen your cells against age-related breakdown with Fatty15. Get 15% off a 90-day Starter Kit Subscription at https://drdrew.com/fatty15 • CAPSADYN - Get pain relief with the power of capsaicin from chili peppers – without the burning! Capsadyn's proprietary formulation for joint & muscle pain contains no NSAIDs, opioids, anesthetics, or steroids. Try it for 15% off at https://drdrew.com/capsadyn • CHECK GENETICS - Your DNA is the key to discovering the RIGHT medication for you. Escape the big pharma cycle and understand your genetic medication blueprint with pharmacogenetic testing. Save $200 with code DRDREW at https://drdrew.com/check • PALEOVALLEY - "Paleovalley has a wide variety of extraordinary products that are both healthful and delicious,” says Dr. Drew. "I am a huge fan of this brand and know you'll love it too!” Get 15% off your first order at https://drdrew.com/paleovalley • THE WELLNESS COMPANY - Counteract harmful spike proteins with TWC's Signature Series Spike Support Formula containing nattokinase and selenium. Learn more about TWC's supplements at https://twc.health/drew 「 MEDICAL NOTE 」 Portions of this program may examine countervailing views on important medical issues. Always consult your physician before making any decisions about your health. 「 ABOUT THE SHOW 」 Ask Dr. Drew is produced by Kaleb Nation (https://kalebnation.com) and Susan Pinsky (https://twitter.com/firstladyoflove). This show is for entertainment and/or informational purposes only, and is not a substitute for medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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very excited today to welcome dr scott atlas to the program he is a health policy expert
working full-time in health policy since 2012 he was at the center of the uh pandemic controversy
uh he has been vindicated on almost every opinion and i think he would say probably every opinion
that he held during that time i'm certain there were no apologies coming his way. I'd like to ask if anybody apologized,
which I, again, as you all know, I'm exercised about all this. His book is A Plague Upon Our
House. You can follow him on X at scottatlas underscore IT, also scottatlas.com. He was a
neuroradiologist and a professor, teacher of hundreds of neuroradiologists
back in the day before he came full-time to healthcare policy. He got his MD at the University
of Chicago, and he received 2022, the Encounter Prize for Advancing American Ideals. Scott Atlas
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I want to get right into it.
Please welcome Dr. Scott Atlas.
Happy to be here.
Welcome and thank you for being here.
Pleasure to be with you.
I'm so excited to have you.
There's a bunch of stuff I want to get out of the way up front.
One is just to sort of share with you my own love for neuroradiology.
I love nothing more than walking into the neuroradiology viewing booths with a neurologist
and having the neuroradiologist go,
well, have you thought about Halliburton-Spatz disease?
Or this is Toulouse-Hunt.
And I'm like, what are you talking about?
What are these things?
They would think of everything
and their command of the anatomy of the brain,
I just loved going in there.
So that was probably a fun field to teach.
Good to hear.
Yes, it was very fun.
In fact, it's one of the very, very specialized areas where I thought, okay, this is something I could learn, even though I wasn't very good at really neuroanatomy in the beginning in medical school.
But I thought, okay, this is so hard.
That's what I'm going to do.
It was really hard.
And that was in the days when MR was just coming online, right? And it was really sort of the frontier of neuroradiology.
Absolutely, yes. In fact, I am proud to say that I wrote at least one of the main, if not the main book in MRI of the brain, you know, 25 years ago. We had an MRI institute down here in Pasadena.
I don't know if you're aware of that.
And they were working, I think, with you guys.
I know they were working with Caltech.
And so I was in training when that was all getting going.
It was a very exciting time.
But amazingly, the neuroradiologists,
by the time I became a resident, were just on top of it.
It was just so fun. The other thing
was Russian TV, which you said nobody brings up. You had to apologize for Russian TV.
Before you bring up the apology, let me just, and I'll let you talk about what happened there.
But the fact that people remain exorcised about Russian TV, William Shatner has had a show on Russian TV since about 2019.
I was on it. Neil deGrasse Tyson was on it. They were just another network. They weren't somebody,
they weren't some spy operation. I just went onto the website and Shatner's got about 40 shows
there. Now, it only goes back to about 2021. I know there were more, which I found that odd, but whatever. The point is,
this was not a major Putin outlet at the time. But talk about what happened to you with Russian TV.
It's sort of comical, really. And nobody really asked me about this anymore. I'm not sure why,
but I was sitting there in the midst of everything in the White House.
Everything was hitting the fan, as they say.
And I was asked to do a lot of interviews.
And I was sort of on my own.
I didn't have a team of people or an entourage or anything.
And I got contacted by someone.
They called me up and they said, we'd like to do an interview.
And they sent me an email.
And the email showed that they were an outlet'd like to do an interview. And they sent me an email and the email showed
that they were an outlet in the UK, RTV. I didn't know it had anything to do with Russia, frankly.
I mean, I really was like Mr. Smith goes to Washington kind of thing. But I was asked if
I would do an interview on the pandemic. And the person called me on the phone, had a British accent. They were the number
one watch site broadcasting out of the UK. I looked at the email and they talked about the
previous interviews or with people like the UN Secretary General, Nobel Prize winners.
And they showed them the names of these people,
Jane Goodall. And I thought, okay, fine. I mean, I'm happy to do any interview. It doesn't matter
to me. It's not a problem. And I did an interview and actually it was one of my better interviews
and they posted it. And then because I think once you're a point and object of attack, you're attacked for everything.
It doesn't matter what.
And somehow I became accused of being a Russian tool or prophet.
I mean, this was insane.
And I looked at the interview that was posted, by the way, and they didn't do anything.
They didn't edit my interview.
I mean, it was a good interview.
And okay, they do their lead-ins and it's whatever.
I didn't know. I don't think it's a big deal. But in the event, in the shock of the whole thing,
I was called up by my boss and I was demanded, it was demanded of me that I write some sort of apology on Twitter.
And that may be one of the only, it's probably the only thing I regret in the entire fiasco of my three and a half months in Washington.
What I regret is that I wrote that apology. I had absolutely nothing
to apologize for. I should have never done that apology. It's irrational and bizarre to demand
an apology from me for doing an interview. And it's even besides the point that all these other people do those interviews.
So again, it's just one of the many, it's not important really, but it is funny because it's
really the only thing I think I did that I regret doing. Yeah. I likewise, though some of my
rhetorical excess, I disagree.
I would have done differently, but because I was getting frustrated with the panic,
I was trying to fight the panic.
That's what I saw being promulgated.
And I had to apologize as well for some of the rhetoric I was using
because they attacked my children and they were coming after them.
And I thought, well, I don't mind apologizing.
I have no problem with apologies.
It's weird apologizing for something that wasn't wrong,
but I guess I can find something to apologize for within what I was saying.
And I took, and I, as part of the apology, I said, you know,
I'm going to sign up for the, they had COVID sort of SWAT teams coming in in California and New York where you could sign up for the, they had COVID sort of SWAT teams coming in in California and New York,
where you could sign up and you could go do service in, let's say, New York. And it was
interesting. I went all the way through the interview process in New York, and then the
whole thing was over. So they didn't bring me out. It only took a few months for really the need for
more physicians to end. It was very, very quick. But one of the interesting things I learned with it, which I didn't realize,
is they are not training internists any longer to do ICU medicine. When they asked me,
can I do swans? Can I do vents? Can I manage vents? Can I put an A-line? Yeah, yeah, yeah,
yeah. They were like, what? Are you a hospitalist? No, we did all that. I did that for a decade and
a half in my practice.
They don't train them at all in that now,
which is shocking to me.
Yeah.
I mean, it's a separate topic.
I'm sure you don't want to get into it,
but I do feel there's been a dumbing down
of medical training in a variety of levels.
I was just having this conversation the other day
at dinner, actually a couple of days ago
with someone who's young and still in training.
And I think she was amazed at how many hours we had to work overnight and on call.
And okay, you could argue that you're not at your best, but that's the way you learn.
It was a real immersion.
And you actually become a doctor then.
You don't become a doctor during medical school.
No, that's right.
And I would argue that you can't see enough cases
unless you're there all the time, number one.
And then number two, the ability to put aside,
no matter how miserable you are,
and focus on the well-being of the patient.
I never made a mistake because I was tired ever.
And there were plenty of times in practice
I was tired later too, but I knew how to do that.
And yeah, I worked at a psychiatric hospital.
I ran an addiction medicine program.
I did ICU medicine.
I did general medicine in the hospital.
I did outpatient medicine.
You can't, no doctor sees the full human experience anymore.
You cannot do that.
And so it's just disturbing to me that we don't have that opportunity
to see the full spectrum of what
happens to humans. I agree. And I think it's going to be a result will be negative for patients.
I agree. I agree. So speaking of negative results, I early looked at what Dr. Birx was doing. Dr. Fauci is a little bit of a different story.
And I recognized her evangelical playbook torn straight from the pages of pain management in the 1990s.
It's how the opioid, I don't know if you're aware,
it's how they perpetrated the opioid pandemic.
A couple of evangelical physicians partnered with the drug companies, went around and got the control of the regulatory agencies, the VA, the state medical societies.
Pain is the fifth vital sign.
It's more important than your pulse.
I don't care if the pulse is zero.
What's the pain scale?
And that is how we got into the opioid disaster and
nobody seemed to understand that they want to blame the drug company who was certainly blowing
wind into the sails of these perpetrators but it was exactly the same playbook that burke's
followed when she went around and got all the governors and their state regulatory systems
health care systems to engage in lockdown.
Do you agree with that?
Did you see that at the time or am I misrepresenting that?
No, I-
Oh, we lost your mic.
There we go.
Very important for people-
We lost your mic for a second.
It's back.
Okay, good.
Sorry about that.
Go ahead.
You know, Deborah Birx was the head of the medical side
of the White House Coronavirus Task Force. She was
appointed February 29th, 2020. I didn't get to Washington until July 31st, August 1st, 2020. So
she had been in place for five, six months. She was the person, as you've correctly identified,
who wrote all of the official White House guidance to all the governors. She met with all the state and local public health
officials who were doing, and she wrote, do the lockdowns, test, test, test, quarantine
asymptomatic people, all this insane stuff about wiping down countertops, et cetera, but she was the person. And yes, she had a sort of a very strange authority.
You have to say that the authority was delegated to her. It was beyond what should have been done.
It was far beyond what should have been done. And it wasn't just that she was incompetent.
She was grossly incompetent. And what I mean by that is she didn't know the data.
She never brought in Xi, Fauci, and Redfield, the head of the CDC.
Not once did any of them bring down a single scientific paper to the White House Task Force
meetings I was in.
Not once did they have data that refuted anything I said.
I would bring in two dozen scientific papers.
We would say, okay, the agenda item is risk to children.
I would have all the data.
We would go through it.
They never had anything to say other than a single line, either silence or, Scott, you're
an outlier.
Okay, that's not a scientific criticism.
So that's a level of being completely incompetent.
They didn't know the data,
but instead of that, Dr. Birx, and I outlined this in my book, she would have color-coded
charts that she would arbitrarily make up. Green was okay. We don't have to be worried. Yellow,
we're not so sure. Red, it's very dangerous. And that was based on the test positivity rates okay in various states or
whatever you have to realize number one those categories were arbitrary there's no clinical
correlation that was just like made our our la county adopted those red green yellow things full
whole cloth and i had a nightly television program at the time where i was trying to update people on
information and as soon as i saw that i knew it was arbitrary i knew it meant nothing it was right And I had a nightly television program at the time where I was trying to update people on information.
And as soon as I saw that, I knew it was arbitrary.
I knew it meant nothing.
And I said, look, you guys, why do we even look at this?
Because we will never get to green the way this is written, ever.
It will never happen.
This is a pandemic.
This is going to be an endemic virus.
They want it to go to zero?
Never going to happen.
We will never be at green. We'll never be able to break up the lockdowns.
We're going to be locked down forever, according to these people. And beyond that, really, just
for the viewers here, when you say what, you make something about test positivity comparisons,
every state was different in what kind of people were getting tested. Some people were coming in
because they were sick. Other states, they were testing asymptomatic people. There was no...
Oh, lost your mic again. Your mic went out, Scott.
It goes in and out. It's weird.
That's so strange.
You've had this problem. There it is. You're back.
You're back again. Thankfully, it doesn't stay
away so good.
He's bumping a cable over on his side
I believe is what's happening.
Maybe it's the back of the mic.
We don't have you yet. No. Shoot. Is the mic
secure? I don't...
Is it working now? There it is. There you go. Yes, it's working now.
Stay away from the cable.
What I wanted to say was the the uh the relative comparison is not it's not possible when you don't
know who's being tested there's no standardized way so you had people or very she had this was
like the level of a middle school uh I don't know I always said it was sort of the this sounds mean
but I always said it was sort of the level of someone who worked in the science section of
the middle school library. I mean, it wasn't a scientific sort of way of thinking, and it was
very sad. And when people are like that, they have a tendency to be very insecure once somebody comes
in who actually is involved in academic scientific discussions. I mean, when I'm talking about a
scientific study, I look at the study
design, which is for your viewers called the methods section of a paper. And if the study
design is improper, it doesn't matter what the conclusion is. It's no good. It's irrelevant.
These people didn't do a critical, there was no critical thinking going on. There was no critical
assessment of what was happening.
And I think it was shocking. Why? What happened to them?
What happened to them? It was shocking.
The answer is honestly this, is that these people were not scientists. They were not doctors in the
sense of the word, other than having an MD. They were bureaucrats. Bouchu was in the bureaucratic
position for 38 years. Deborah Birx was in the bureaucratic position for 38 years. Deborah
Burks was in her bureaucratic government positions running agencies and things for 30 plus years.
Okay, this is really the case that I like to make for a couple of things. Number one,
the era of trusting people on the basis of their credential or title alone has to be over.
Also, we can't have people who are bureaucrats running things.
We need outsiders, people that don't have entrenched interests in covering their Washington,
D.C. career, who have friends in the media.
I mean, I could go on and on, but it was really shocking what I saw. It was completely antithetical to what I was used to in academic medical science, in health policy.
They didn't know what they were talking about, even in the things they tried to speak about.
And then this idea, as you introduced me, in health policy, they had no concept of health policy.
This was a health policy question.
It was not a question of virology or epidemiology alone. Those are pieces of the puzzle.
But health policy includes the economic, the impact of the policy itself, not just a virus.
And the policy itself caused massive death and destruction.
And so was it Redfield that finally admitted that they took no risk reward into account, that they just had a singular view of stopping the virus and no sense of what?
I mean, it's the opposite of the practice of medicine.
Every single decision I make, I'm always considering the risk reward.
And that risk reward analysis has to be buttressed by data.
And it's constant, every decision, whether it's
walking in the door of my office or whether it's putting somebody on a statin or something,
it's all a risk reward analysis. And this idea that they forged ahead without any,
it's what it looked like to me, like what happened to their decision-making?
Again, back to that television show I was doing, a school board member came in one night and said,
we're closing the schools.
I said, why?
Who advised you?
What's the data?
Oh, it's just the right thing to do.
This was the way things were being done.
I hope the history books reflect how insane this was.
This was a level of insanity, and it came from nowhere other than maybe China via Italy.
Where did it come from?
Yeah, you know, it's hard to explain, but, you know, back in March 2020, I didn't go until, like I say, August 1st, basically, to DC. March 2020, three of us, me, Johnny Anidis,
an epidemiologist at Stanford, and David Katz wrote in the New York Times the idea of,
this is wrong. We know there's a significant difference in the New York Times the idea of this is wrong.
We know there's a significant difference in the risk for older people and younger, healthy people.
We should never lock down.
That was against standard pandemic management, by the way.
And we called for something called targeted protection. They went against their pandemic policy.
They went against their pandemic.
Everything was ranked.
Now, did the fact that the Department of Defense got involved with it, that became a national security issue?
Do we know, did that somehow adulterate everything?
You know, it's impossible to identify one factor.
I don't know.
I wasn't in on the State Department meetings or Department of Defense meetings or anything like that.
You have to realize, some of this, people don't want to accept that
a lot of this was sheer incompetence,
sheer stupidity.
Yes, or panic.
I'll give them panic.
I'll give them panic and stupidity.
I'll give them that.
That's the one I will give them, panic and stupidity.
Panic and incompetence.
When you're in charge, you can't be stupid
and be fearful.
But these people had a background that's very interesting.
Birx, Fauci, and Redfield all had this sort of intertwining with the AIDS era.
Okay, now why is that important?
And I'll give you an example.
Fauci ran a lab.
Birx did a postdoc in it.
Birx did some work with Redfield.
She pushed funding
when she was working on AIDS in the Obama administration to Africa. And this is relevant
for a couple of reasons. Number one, AIDS is a virus, but it's blocked by a barrier.
Okay. The barrier is a condom. They thought a barrier, I actually believe that this is a simplistic, they were thinking
the barrier of a mask somehow was relevant here, even though this is spread by breathing.
Secondly, contact tracing and testing. You could trace your contacts when you're talking about
sexual intercourse, typically, but you can't trace your contacts if something is spread by
breathing in the air.
But they were really focused on things that were completely irrelevant in this type of virus.
And again, this was known.
So it was sheer incompetence.
But there were many different motivations, by the way.
I'm not minimizing the financial conflicts, the desire for power, the desire to cover their own reputations,
the possible cover-up of a potential lab origin. There's many, many different motivations here.
You know, you bring up AIDS, and I'm fantasizing about my neuroradiology days looking at all the toxoplasmosis before it was really understood what was going on there.
So I'm guessing that you saw, and also the leukoencephalopathies and things,
there's all this crazy stuff that was going on. I was deep in that pandemic. Fauci was kind of my hero during all of that. Here's the other correlation with HIV and AIDS, or HTLV-3, if you want to go all the way back with
me, that we used fear. We used fear, and we destroyed an entire generation of high school
students and college students. If you have sex with one person, you're having sex with everybody
they ever had sex with, which of course was a lie, which was not true. And we couldn't talk
about risk categories, if you remember back then, we were not allowed to.
It was everybody was equally at risk. Remember that? So that's the one AIDS correlation.
Yeah. And the other was using fear. And then when we had 200,000 dead as opposed to 2 million dead
with what we were predicting, we congratulated ourselves that the fear worked. Guess what?
That it came back during COVID.
Well, I mean, I can give you a couple of specific comments about this.
Number one, during one of the task force meetings, and this is, remember, the country was in a state of panic.
Okay, this is, I'm talking August, September 2020.
Fauci said to me across the table, the problem is, this is a quote,
the problem is people are not afraid enough. And I said, I couldn't believe my ears. And so, of course, I said, repeat that, repeat what you just said, because I couldn't believe what I,
and he said, the problem is there's not enough fear. They're not afraid enough.
And I said, people, this is,
first of all, to me,
it's unethical to use fear in public health. Yes, yes.
Unethical.
1,000%.
It's anathema.
It's anathema to public health.
It is.
Forget unethical.
It's the contrary of public health.
Yes, it's so sad to have that.
The second part,
there's another parallel with the AIDS thing
I just want to bring up.
Fauci was quoted, you can look this up, after the way that HIV and AIDS was spread, was known,
he was still saying in the journals, you got to be careful, you could get it from your children, casual contact.
That's the same kind of stuff he was perpetrating about COVID, even though we knew for months that not only was the
risk to children very, very extremely low, minuscule for a serious illness, but the risk of spread from
children was known from spring 2020 data all over the world to be much less than the risk from adults.
And yet he was perpetrating this stuff. Well, not not only that they had two slogans that were
uh crazy one was uh one death is too many i i kept saying if one death is too many we are not
in a pandemic anymore because they're going to be way more than one death i promise uh number two
uh was oh god what was the other one oh if, if one isn't safe, no one is safe.
I thought, well, no one is safe, period.
That's the way this works.
It was the weirdest stuff
and it was being chanted from all the media outlets.
I couldn't understand how they got these slogans even.
And I heard it from physicians too,
which was just, oh my God,
what are we going to do with these people?
I mean, the medical community really failed and we see the results of their failure.
First of all, they're trusted.
You know, we're doctors.
People are intimidated by doctors, but also we occupy a special position of trust in society,
almost blind trust.
People depend on you.
You have to take that role very seriously.
Now, what do I mean by that? That means when somebody comes in and asks you a question,
you don't just spit out a memorized guideline. You explain what the data is if they want to know.
You don't persuade by coercion and pressure. You persuade by showing people the facts. I mean, your role is to be the information
giver, not to coerce people. And they really failed. And I have to say, you know, doctors,
it's a disgrace what they did and how little they know about the data, a disgrace, in my opinion.
But you see it in the polling. You know, you realize that pre-pandemic, the high trust in doctors, 71%.
Now, January 2024, from 71% it plummeted to trust doctors a lot. Now that answer is 40%.
It's very disheartening. It may be continuing to drop. I've got to take a little break here.
Scott Atlas is with us. Dr. Scott Atlas. A couple of things. I'm going to take a little break here. Scott Atlas is with us. Dr. Scott Atlas. A couple of things.
I'm going to take a quick break here, Scott.
And we're going to talk about the death threats you got during all the nonsense.
And then I want to get into the vaccine a little bit, which is another, continues to be another layer of mishigas, to use a kind term.
Be right back after this.
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Scott Atlas is back with us.
And Scott, I wanted to sort of let you tell
the story of
assault you were through.
The consequences of these attacks.
They were real world consequences
of the personal attacks upon you. And I had
some of the similar stuff, but yours got to the point
you needed actual coverage.
Yeah, I mean, the problem was the lockdowners, I will call them, the narrative from the media, from the academic
so-called experts, et cetera, were comprised of two things. Number one, if you're against the
lockdowns, you're choosing the economy over lives. And of course, that was contrary to decades of
economics literature. If you have severe economic downturns, you kill people, particularly poor
people, by the way, which is another sinful legacy of this lockdown strategy. But the second one was
if you're against lockdowns, you're calling for something that they wanted to call let it rip.
But that's not targeted protection. Targeted protection is increasing the protection to people at high risk and stopping the destruction of
children and low-risk people. Which we were failing. We were failing the at-risk population.
You weren't even doing a good job of the people that were dying of COVID.
And most of the deaths were inside nursing homes, which should have been a lot easier to protect.
But in any event, the point is that they demonized, they vilified people who were against these lockdowns as if they were dangerous,
literally dangerous. And that inflamed people quite a bit. And of course, there's also data
that showed how poisonous the media was in the United States compared to non-US media, 91% of stories during 2020 about COVID were quantifiably negative.
Only half of stories outside the US were negative. It's the same pandemic. So they were inflaming
people, whether that was due to the politics of the election year or not, I don't know.
But in any event, when you do that, people that are slightly off or very fearful,
when you're fearful, you act irrationally, they're unhinged.
And so what happened, again, I actually blame Stanford for part of this because they added credibility to these attacks.
I had people in Washington, D.C.
I was in Washington until mid-November 2020, come up to me on the street shouting in my face.
And finally, the FBI had to get involved in
protection because I was worried. I'm just a regular person. I'm not political at all. I mean,
I didn't know what was going on. Then I came back to Stanford, which is this community which
no one would say is unsafe. I had so many death threats. I had to have 24-7 police security,
a live police within a car in my driveway
in Stanford, which is Palo Alto, California.
And another one circulating on my block, I had to install tens of thousands of dollars
worth of home security equipment.
I mean, this is really unacceptable.
That was caused by the people in the media. It was caused by people saying I was
angeloids, caused by people at Stanford saying these kinds of unhinged things. And I think,
again, another legacy, besides all the death and destruction, besides the disastrous long-term
effects, which we could talk about on our children. Besides the loss of trust in science and in
medicine and in all institutions, the other legacy is this residual tremendous hate,
this hateful division of people where we have a really think about 40 percent of people self-described democrats
said that the state should take your children away if you refuse to get them vaccinated I mean
this is a total a society that is unhinged out of control and we can't we can't function as a peaceful society, as a cohesive society,
if there's so much hatred. This idea that this statement, this is a pandemic of the unvaccinated,
a pandemic of the unvaccinated. And this was drummed into people's heads to the point where
they thought that the unvaccinated people are killing people, which of course is completely
false and proven false by the data.
And we really need to fix that.
We need absolutely apologies and admissions of wrongdoing by the people who are the lockdowners to heal people.
Because as we know, to restore trust, the first step, even in our personal lives, is
to say you're sorry, you're wrong, to admit it.
The problem is, and I don't think we should be naive, they will never admit they were wrong. Never. Literally never. Why?
Because that takes integrity. And so no apologies. I'm shocked. No apologies. That's amazing.
But I would argue that, as you mentioned, even in personal settings, it's not just apologies, it's amends.
And amends is cleaning up your side of the street, which make making things right, undoing what you've done.
And so my question to you is, are there any remedies out there?
Can we sue these media outlets?
Can we go after the public?
Something to make sure, not because you want
retribution, but to make sure this doesn't happen again. Absolutely. I agree with this concept and
I've called for it that there must be accountability, not for retribution, but the accountability is
theirs because they will do it again. And these are people that are still to a great extent in power. Okay, we know that.
We see new mask mandates going on in parts of Northern California today.
This is October of 2024.
This is insane.
It's completely pseudoscience, and they're still in power who part of their inability to admit error is to, I guess, keep pushing that they're right by keep doing the same thing.
So we need accountability, yes.
Now, the question you bring up, can we sue people?
There are lawsuits.
I don't think it's so easy to sue.
Certainly from, if you're deemed a public figure, okay, the defamation side of things is impossible, as I've learned, even though I was not intending to be a public figure, but as a
reluctant public figure, there's something called the New York Times versus Sullivan case, which put
the bar of suing for defamation so high that you have to prove malicious intent, And that's almost impossible to prove. So that's a problem.
There are other remedies, though. But I think that I have several things that have to be done.
One is to change the future. One is to institute term limits, not just for politicians, but for the people in the agencies, inside the CDC, the NIH, the FDA, not just at the heads, but all of them, because
they outlast presidents. They outlast administrations. The way that they stay in
their positions like Dr. Fauci for 38 years, not because of excellence, but because they're
very skillful at navigating highly politicized environments. So we need to have term limits.
We need to have a clear definition of a public health emergency with time limits,
because the public health emergency is the gateway, if you think about it, to everything
that was done. And they did an emergency use authorization for a vaccine that was experimental
in December of 2022 for children. There was no public health emergency in December of 2022
for children, yet they didn't emergency
use out there.
So we need to define and clarify and limit a public health emergency.
You know, we need to make sure that the CDC and these agencies, the NIH and the FDA, they
do not have any shared royalties from these drugs. You realize at $325 million were received by NIH employees in the 10 years
pre-pandemic shared royalties from drug companies. Why is that a conflict of interest? Because these
people research and have input into approval of these drugs. This is a gross conflict of interest.
Even if they're not doing something in an evil way, there's a definition of conflict of interest. Your objectivity is lost. We can't have something like that. We need to have the CDC not have any kind of authority. They're just information gatherers and they put forward information. They can put forward recommendations.
Always been that way.
But they're not in charge. They're not in charge of anything.
And then another important point is these people, FDA, CDC, these meetings that they were having.
I'll give you an example.
Late 2021, the FDA advisory group on the pediatric use of the COVID vaccines, the head of the New England Journal was quoted as saying, we just have to give it to see
how safe it is. That's just the way it is. Okay. If that was done behind closed doors,
I'm calling for complete accountability, meaning transparency of what is said in these meetings.
These people work for us, the FDA people, the CDC, the NA, these are employees. In fact, so is the President of the United States, by the way.
We employ these people.
They have no right to talk secretively behind the backs of the public.
We need to see the information.
As everybody knows, the best disinfectant is transparency.
We need to hold them accountable for what they say.
And we can't do that if we don't even know what they say. Well, now we're getting to these campaigns against even having
conversations like this, which is just mind-boggling to me, but here we are. You know, Paul Alexander
alerted me to two things. He was in the room when the six-foot distancing was pulled out of thin air.
There actually was discussion about aerosolized distances of 30 to 60 feet, but just arbitrarily
decided six feet is something they get compliance on. The fact that the whole world did that to me
with no evidence is just, I'll never get over that. But the other thing Dr. Alexander pointed
out to me was that he was pulled inside a State Department party
where they thought he was one of them, so to speak.
And they were saying to him,
oh, don't worry about these elected officials.
They only are here for four years or whatever.
They're not here.
We run the government.
We, the bureaucrats, we are in charge here.
Don't you worry about that.
That was one of the most disgusting,
and there were many disgusting revelations for me to choose amongst. That to me was one of the most disgusting, and there were many disgusting revelations for me
to choose amongst. That to me was one of the most disgusting of all. Well, I think that has a clear
ring of truth to it. I wasn't there, but I can tell you that that's obvious. These people in
the agencies, and here I'm including the bureaucrats like Fauci and Birx, they would do things like, they would say,
oh, I'm going to go and talk with Sanjay tomorrow.
They were talking about Sanjay Gupta of CNN.
They had friends in the media they called by their first name.
I mean, these kinds of unholy alliances are very, very,
they're, you know, it's immoral.
It's repugnant.
These people don't understand their place in society.
And I was very shocked and upset.
And unfortunately, you know, naive.
I was living in a world where, okay, people are dying.
The truth matters.
We're supposed to do everything we can here and not
try to have our own agenda or anything like that. So I think that was-
And do no harm. Do no harm, which was completely thrown out the window.
By the way, just a minor point, the six foot rule thing, it was more ludicrous than you even
realized because there were several countries
that said three feet four and a half feet uh you know and now why first of all that's like
ridiculous there was no science behind any of the stuff including masks including and the masks they
don't work period and we can talk about that but um certainly not surgical masks yeah well you know
the data is that the n95 masks were the same as surgical masks in
the cochran review but we we don't have to go down the detail but scott i would say that's because
that's because of the way they were used mask up between bites uh okay well what mask is going to
work when we're doing that well i mean the whole thing is is ludicrous, but the point about this is that these people were not,
they're not scientists. They're pretending to be scientific thinkers. They really weren't. It was
shockingly obvious and frightening that these people had power. So I agree, we need accountability.
Now, the problem is when people call for investigatory panels run by the Congress,
that's unrealistic.
I think we all know by now that all congressional panels are politicized, and even if they weren't, they're viewed as politicized,
and therefore they don't have credibility.
And so that's not the way to do it.
I don't know the answer, but I do know that we need good people
to step up and to be in the government and things.
But some of the things I've outlined, and I wrote a paper on this called Seven Steps to Restoring
Trust. You could find it on the internet. I think it was in Real Clear Politics. But I think we need
to get some of these things enacted because we should be very fearful that this will happen
again. And by the way, there are other issues that can be called health emergencies.
And one of the most obvious is climate change.
They are reserving the right to call a lot of things health emergencies as a way of having their way with the public.
And it's one of the gravest concerns I have right now.
But thankfully, more people are becoming aware of it. So one of the things that has me vexed
is that, you know, Alpha and Delta, let's be fair, was a really troubling, bad illness. I had,
it was awful. And it has lots of sequelae to it. You know, there's things that happen from Alpha and Delta that we are not seeing from Omicron.
It just really isn't happening.
If it is on a very limited basis or maybe at the same rate as the vaccine itself, still the journals are publishing data from January 2020 about long-term effects.
That's a different illness.
We are done with those illnesses.
Omicron is our current illness.
The vaccines are the one,
I had a patient take a booster this morning
that was literally,
the booster that's out right now
is literally two variants behind
what is hitting in our community.
XCC's coming in, they're back at JN1.
I guess the question is, what happened to our journals? What happened to the journals and the way people read them and report them?
Yeah, the journals are part of the disgrace, the big fail. The scientific journals became
apoliticized, all of a sudden writing political endorsements of presidential
candidates, New England Journal, JAMA, even Scientific American. This is outrageous.
Secondly, publishing editorialized papers. And there's a lot of examples of papers being
published and then editorializing their interpretation of the data that is contrary
to their own data. In addition, there were papers blocked from being published. So I think they've
really undermined their own trust. And rightfully so, you should not trust them. This is a disgrace
what was done, but they've destroyed their own credibility. And then, of course, you point out something else, which is that the virus
evolved like expected in a pandemic. Everybody who knows anything about pandemics, the virus
evolves, it mutates, whatever, and ultimately becomes something that's endemic, which is
basically much lower lethality, much less dangerous,
whether it spreads or not.
Okay, if you get a minor viral infection, that's one thing, but that's what happens.
Secondly, even in the 2020 data, I want to make sure this is clear, that the percent survival in the worst variant with no vaccine in healthy people under 20 was 99.997%.
Okay, so it was not dangerous for everybody, even at its worst.
And I think that, I don't want to go into the detail of it about long-term effects,
but there's a lot of issues with these ideas of long COVID, with the definition
of long COVID, with the difference of long COVID. We see long effects of viral infections like
influenza at almost the same rate as COVID. That's not unexpected. There are other viral infections.
These minor, okay, I don't even, I think you have to put everything in perspective here,
and this was missing from day one. The clinical perspective by people who know something about
anything in clinical medicine is that you don't kill people to stop them from getting mild fatigue
later, okay? The trade-off of the lockdown is not worth it to prevent long COVID, even if you think
long COVID is some unusual secondary thing.
It's not, and that's a separate issue.
And I think there's a lot of problems with what's being said now in what I call a frantic
attempt to somehow justify these draconian measures
that literally killed millions of people.
The lockdowns killed millions of people.
And I can cite the data.
And sacrifice the emotional well-being and cognitive development
of 8 to 15-year-olds.
I just looked at that age group and I said,
we're going to destroy that age group.
We're destroying them. They need to be at school. They need to be amongst their peers.
The most sinful, you know, I'm not a religious person. I wasn't raised religious per se,
but I know right from wrong. And I've never used sinful more frequently than when talking about
what happened during the lockdowns, particularly on children. We broke the societal contract we have
with our own children in several ways.
We shut down, we frantically ignored the data
and shut down schools and destroyed,
particularly poor people, but with learning losses,
shifted the burden to poor kids
while our affluent neighborhood kids, like where I live,
you could form a PhD
micro school of teachers that were way better than anything they would get. That wasn't a problem for
affluent people, the learning losses. But it was far more than that. As we know, nutritional needs
are met by lower socioeconomic group kids in school. We missed, in the spring 2020 school
closures alone, more than a quarter of a million cases of child abuse.
Why?
Because schools are where child abuse is noticed.
The child abuse didn't go away.
In fact, it exploded.
There's good data on this.
In addition, from the spring 2020 closures alone, there was a skyrocketing of anxiety and depression in college-age kids.
Oh, yeah. One in four college age students in the United States
from spring 2020, two month closure alone,
considered suicide, considered killing himself.
In June of 2020, this was known.
Okay, so when I went, and this was reported by the CDC.
And then during the 2020 lockdowns,
we saw an explosion by medical insurance claims,
explosion of psychiatric illness visits from teenagers, explosions of suicide in teenage
girls, double the triple of self-harms. What does that mean? In teenagers, self-harm is kids,
teenagers putting out cigarettes on their skin, slashing their wrists. This is a sin
beyond comprehension. It's unspeakable what we did. We had long-term now effects, including an
obesity epidemic in young people. More than half of kids college age from the 2020 lockdowns alone
gained 28 pounds average. That's an obesity epidemic.
Okay. We don't talk about this. I talk about it, but the people who did the lockdowners,
they did that. They should be confronted with that. They did that and they can't run from that.
And I think it's so tragic. And that's a reason we can never, ever let them happen again. And that doesn't even count, by the way, mandating experimental drug injections in our healthy children and students. Why? When their risk from the illness was minuscule. And the reason why was this bizarre, barbaric attempt to stop them from spreading to us.
I always say, I'm a father.
I'm a shield for my sons.
They're not to be used as a shield for me.
That's unacceptable.
Yep, I completely agree.
And listen, I've been saying for a while, I said on a Megyn's Kelly show, if you're a young male, you got myocarditis from the vaccine that you didn't need,
you got to sue the hell out of that institution.
That's the only way this will,
there is a suit that would have merit, it seems to me.
And that's where we get some attention for this.
Yeah, I agree with that.
I think though there's something else.
And again, like, okay, and maybe I'm naive,
but it's something important to say.
People died from the vaccine.
We've had 5 to 10 billion, with a B, doses of these mRNA vaccines worldwide,
and we still do not have a very detailed accounting of side effects and risks.
5 to 10 billion doses.
There's something wrong there.
And we could talk about things like Operation Warp Speed
because I think Operation Warp Speed was mixed reviews.
One of the biggest problems with it
was in an idea of trying to expedite vaccine development,
which was a good idea.
And it was logistically very well done to get rid of
things and do things quickly. One of the problems was the limitation of liability on these companies.
And I'm not an expert on this legally, but I do think it makes sense to do it early on. I think
just intuitively speaking as a layman here. But on the other hand,
there's somehow this idea of permanent absence of any liability as they're talking up vaccines,
distorting the efficacy, claiming that they were doing things that they weren't really,
distorting the positive efficacy to the public, coercing people
to take these vaccines, mandating vaccines for young people that were experimental drugs that
they didn't need. I just think there's so many wrong things that were done here that was done
by the private companies. And then the Biden administration took over. Because remember, the vaccine first injection was December 16, 2020.
But the Trump administration never mandated a vaccine.
It's one thing to offer a vaccine.
It's another thing to mandate it.
Yes, completely agree.
Yeah, the mandate part was the lockdowns and the mandates.
I've never really said the vaccine and the lockdowns.
I've always said the mandates and the lockdowns are what I was, and the school closures and the mandates. I've never really said the vaccine and the lockdowns. If I said the mandates and the lockdowns
or what I was, and the school closures
and the masking.
Those are the things that were,
I will never get over.
The rest of my life, I will never get over
that they did do that to us.
And I refer people to Hannah Arendt
and the banality of evil, how this happens.
I never thought I'd be referencing her
at this stage of my life, but here we are.
You know, I'm shocked you say that. I use this quote all the time of Hannah Arendt in her Eichmann in Jerusalem, the trial of Eichmann, the Nazi war criminal.
And her point, she had many, many important things, but the main one that I like to say is, while you might have anticipated
the reaction of being nihilism or confusion or stuff, she said there was a shocking confusion
of fundamental issues of morality. And we see that today. We saw it then, we see it today,
and we can't have a society. I refuse to live in a society like that.
We need to have a moral compass when you're in a leadership position, but even as individual
people with each other, we lost our moral compass. We lost our ethical compass as a society in the
things that we're done here. And we need to fix that. All of us who have children,
we care about the country that our kids are inheriting. This is not the same country.
And I actually have to say something else, which is this country is more off the rails. I travel a
lot. I give a lot of international talks in Europe and elsewhere. This country is uniquely off the
rails. The other countries did not mandate. In fact,
many countries in Europe are pure nations. They didn't just not mandate the vaccine for young
people. They said they forbid giving it. Finland, Norway, Sweden, no one was giving the vaccine in
to this day to young people, meaning people under 20, teenagers. Whereas in our country,
we're still mandating. Some colleges are still mandating vaccines.
I mean, this is unconscionable and almost,
I can't figure out how to even wrap my head around that.
Do you have any overarching theory
about what's happened to us?
Have we been, has a market force come come to bear has a media out of control come
to bear as an evil cabal had its way with us did china i think did the you know the chinese plan
this out and send it to us via italy the the not the crazy behaviors with their all their propaganda
what what do you think okay i i'm Okay. I think many things happen. I think
instead of saying there was a very organized effort here, because you're giving people too
much credit. They're not that smart. I mean, honestly, and I'm not being glib about that,
but I do think there's a confluence of interests and they have a shared
interest. And what is the shared interest? The shared interest, well, I mean, there was
pharmaceutical company corruption, that's clear. There was a personal ego got in the way. These
people, they love the idea of standing next to the president on the podium. I mean, the people like
the doctors, Fauci's and Burke's of the world who crave positions of authority, in my opinion, that's just my opinion.
That's the weirdest thing. That's a perverse motive.
I think that people generally- It's an odd, perverse motivation.
Yeah. Well, they want- It's hard to understand that even.
People like fame. People like, I mean, they're in a position of unique fame that they never had before.
I guess it's irresistible to people with no integrity.
But I also think there are people that want to control.
They're delusional people out there.
Many people have a lot of money who are delusional and have control and adulation from that.
So there's a lot of efforts to control people.
And I think that we need to be very strong as individuals.
We need to be critical thinkers.
We need to question authority.
I was raised that way, question authority.
I'm a certain kind of person.
I'm not in the elite background of some of these people at all. My parents didn't go to college. My dad drove a taxi as a second job and did all
kinds of things. And I'm saying that's been good for me. I don't believe in the so-called elite
world of control here. I think that we need to step up, take care of our families,
make good decisions and be, have a healthy degree of skepticism. Many people are broken though.
Okay. I do think there are people, there's a fear factor that is understandable. I was afraid in the
first few days of hearing about this. Of course we were all were. But I think the difference fundamentally between a person
and an animal is the ability to reason. This goes back to Aristotle, and I'm not trying to be,
I'm not trying to throw around names or anything, but the more you read about this,
and I've tried to grapple with what happened. I've read a lot of Hannah Arendt. I've read Dante's
Inferno recently. I've read Kafka. My favorite bookndt. I've read Dante's Inferno recently.
I've read Kafka.
My favorite book when I was a kid was Catch-22.
All these things came into play.
You see these people, and you have to be careful.
We can't assume that people know what they're talking about anymore.
I think you really need to be more personally involved.
You may not have to go through the data,
but you have to listen
very carefully and figure out who knows what they're talking about here. Who gives data? I
think you'll notice if you want to review the tapes, you may say, when I gave my interviews,
I was citing data. Okay. And people get bored by numbers and things. You never heard Anthony
Fauci give data.
And I think this is something that's very revealing.
He talked about things.
He said, wear goggles at one point.
He said, don't wear masks, wear masks.
But he never said the data.
He didn't know the data.
I was there.
I know for a fact.
But I'm just saying that you have to use some discernment now and who you would respect and talk to people
and go through things because this is going to happen again. I am certain it's going to happen
again in maybe a different form. And I think we need to have independent thinking, okay?
You need to be responsible for your family, for yourself. We can't delegate and just blindly
trust people anymore. I think that was always a mistake. By the way, I think people were exposed
by the pandemic. I don't think the pandemic created these things. I think the true nature
of someone comes out when you're challenged. I think we know this in our personal lives,
with your children, with your spouse, with whatever happens in your life, your true nature
comes out. And when you're challenged, you can be shrill and insecure and demonize people who
disagree with you, or you can go back and question and look at the numbers, look at the facts,
look at the data, think, reason. And I think we're in the phase now
where we can never blindly trust anybody.
I don't think it's so bad to lose trust.
It's bad to presume to go crazy
and start thinking of very, very odd things.
But I think it is smart to trust your own critical thinking
and go through.
And that's why when people question the vaccines, when people question things, I'm going to
err on the side of free speech.
I want to hear the questioning.
If you can't defend your position with the data, what are you afraid of hearing the question?
It's because you don't know what you're talking about.
They needed, the lockdowners at Stanford University and elsewhere where I work, they needed to demonize and delegitimize people
like me. Why? Because they couldn't win on the data. They couldn't do it. And so that was their
only tool. And unfortunately for people who are afraid, the public, when the public is afraid, they have a tendency to believe the worst. It's easier when
you're afraid to forget that you're supposed to be questioning what's told instead of just
believing. And so the demonization unfortunately works and it's part of the cancel culture.
I got hundreds of emails from medical scientists and professors all over the country begging me to keep talking,
saying, Scott, you're 100% right, but we are afraid for our jobs and our families.
These are medical scientists, including, by the way, inside the NIH.
I mean, that's how pervasive the fear of the backlash was.
By the way, if I can go on, I got thousands of emails a week from people all over the country and all over the world begging me to keep talking.
Because when you're in a public position, even though it's reluctant, you realize you have a burden of responsibility.
People depend on you.
They need to hear the truth.
And you're their voice.
And so I took that very seriously.
And when I was condemned by the Stanford Faculty Senate, which is totally, I mean, these people have to look at themselves in the mirror.
And their children have to live through the disgrace of what they said because they had no idea what they were talking about.
And they were 100% wrong.
Everything I said was 100% correct. But when you get emails
like I did, I'll give you one story. On a Friday, I got an email from a woman who had been emailing
me and I didn't answer emails because I had massive numbers, but I looked at my emails.
And one woman emails me and saying, Dr. Atlas, you're 100% right. I just want to tell
you, my husband killed himself this week because of the lockdowns. Please keep talking. We can't
have that happen. And I was, you know, I still get choked up. But two hours later, I got an email
from a woman who wrote me and said, my daughter tried to kill herself, and you're one of the reasons I give for her to keep living.
And this makes the criticism of impotent faculty members sitting around the room angrily voting on something.
I mean, this is dwarfed by the responsibility you have.
There are people, human beings,
millions of people were killed and destroyed
by the lockdowns separate from the virus.
Okay, we have to realize this was massively destructive,
the lockdowns.
You know, Johnny Anides wrote a paper just published this year,
1.6 million extra Americans died because we didn't do what Sweden did.
Okay, there's another paper by Bianchi.
Over the next 20 years, 1.2 million extra Americans will be dead from the unemployment alone. Nothing to do
with the virus. We killed people with the lockdowns, not to mention all of the non-lethal
destruction of children, of poor people, of minorities. All these things are much worse
for lower income families. I thought we were a country that cared about low income families and poor people.
That's all words.
When you're judged by your actions.
And this was a sin, a black mark on America.
Yeah, it was disgusting.
That's the word that keeps coming off to my lips.
But you mentioned a word that I want to just examine.
You've been very kind and generous
with your time here with us. And I think
I feel like I need another conversation
with you to go into the weeds about warp speed
and more vaccine. There's a
lot, lot, lot to unpack, as
I'm, of course, you're aware. But you used
a word that has been in my
mind. First of all, I want to recommend
you study the French Revolution, because the
Jacobins invented all this bullshit.
Everything we're dealing with, they invented it.
They were the first.
And some of the slogans and some of the things that were happening, you'll be shocked to hear it in 1790 France.
But that's one thing.
But the other thing that has been preoccupying me, I was very preoccupied with that for a while.
And now, lately, I've been preoccupied with delusionality.
You said the word delusion and you know for instance i never heard a healthy human being
mention nazis or hitler ever unless i was in the psychiatric hospital around psychotic patients
and then it routinely came out as part of their delusion and remind you i started working started working there in the 80s, which is only 30 years to the end of the
Second World War and things. And so, temporally proximate to the actual events in mind here,
the only people that ever brought it out were actually psychotic patients.
Now, so-called healthy people are preoccupied, and their thinking is rigid and fixed and unpersuadable in a similar vein.
It's a delusional rigidity with Nazi preoccupations, lo and behold, as part of their
sort of thematic. Do you make anything of this delusional quality of the mass formation that has formed in this country?
I'm very afraid of it. I'm frightened that this is the country, this is the world that we're living in. And I think I've tried to understand this. It's hard to understand what's going on,
really. I think one problem that I've come to recognize is that this idea of cognitive dissonance,
this idea that you're so bought into something that when you're confronted with the opposite
is true, you can't believe it. You don't want to believe it. But actually, I'm starting to think
this is a biological phenomenon. People have told me you can't expect people to admit they were wrong because they are
biologically not capable. They cannot. They cannot admit they were wrong because it's literally
impossible. That's possibly true. I also think, though, that it is a mark of a lack of integrity. I keep saying this, but I don't excuse it. I just think they think
that because they're going to double down on this, this is their way somehow to prove that
they were right. And we've seen this contamination of leadership in universities, in government,
of course, in the media, in science journals.
It's all the trust is really gone.
And I think we need to re-examine this.
And how do we fix that?
Really, we need good people to step up.
We have a deficit of, frankly, of courage in the society.
And that is, of course, the essential to doing anything that's right
in the face of any kind of challenge.
We need more courageous.
There are, most people are good people.
This is sort of, I'm going off on something else,
but most people are good people.
Most people believe and respect authority to a fault.
And so I think this is, we need the good people
to step up, to help speak out. And again, like this is very important. When you speak out,
it's not just to say the truth. You're empowering other people. People, not everyone wants to be the
tip of the spear. I can tell you that's not easy. I wouldn't recommend being the tip of the spear,
but I would recommend speaking out,
getting together with your friends.
And because when you speak out,
it turns out a lot of people agree with you.
Probably most people, they're just afraid
and it emboldens them.
And I think so the mass psychosis,
I think there's a very impactful effect of propaganda.
We knew this, this is decades old, right? I mean, you know, the famous Nazi and the Nazi propaganda. Joseph Goebbels is quoted as saying,
if you repeat a lie often enough, it becomes the truth. And he went further to say, and you too start believing it
is true. And I think that is what happened with COVID. I think people honestly believe this stuff,
many of them. And so what do we do about it? I think we can't necessarily convince those people.
I don't think we should even try to convince those people. But what I'm trying to do is focus on younger people. Okay, when you have people who are in their 20s, 30s,
young people, they may have strident opinions just like older people do, but they're also open
to listening more. I think older people are a little bit less likely to change. So I think we
should focus on young people, have the discussion,
and I'm doing that with things I teach through Hoover Institution at Stanford, also with the
Global Liberty Institute that I've begun. And I think this is very important, but we can't live
in a society where people don't think. And that's what we're seeing here. It's very frightening. And if you
believe like a, you know, we are a sort of a herd mentality culture. That's bad. I mean, I want my
children to be independent thinkers. You know, I always say to my own wife, don't get worried when
they question what you're saying saying because if they can't question
us they're not going to be able to question anybody
we want people to question
we want people to ask the questions
to not accept blindly
there's no positive
in doing that
yeah two
last comments from me I never thought
at this stage of my life I'd be talking about
courage and freedom fighting but that is the those are what you're advocating, and I completely agree. That has now
become an organizing sort of priority in my life, much to my amazement. The other thing is, to go
back to your neuro background, when things really become unpersuadable or unperceivable, now you're drifting into the world of anosognosia,
which is, you know, it goes sort of cognitive dissonance and denial all the way into the
delusional and anosognosia. And I think you're right. I think we're down in these sort of
biological, I don't know why, but we seem to be in these almost biologically rigid conditions.
And it worries me greatly.
I'm trying to figure out how we got here,
but here we are.
But listen, you've been extremely,
extremely generous with your time.
And I would love to have another conversation with you because I've got another couple hours of material
I want to get to,
but I will be kind to you and the audience
and my wife who needs me downstairs
and just say thank you. And if you have any last words, this is the time.
Well, thanks for having me. And I hope if nothing else, people learn one thing here,
which is that you have to be an independent thinker. You have to be a critical thinker.
There's more of a burden on you now, but that's okay.
That's a positive development.
I don't believe much good will come from the top.
I think it's going to come from the good people
that we know we live with in this country and elsewhere
who have a moral compass, who have an ethical compass,
and frankly, who have common sense.
And I think that's going to come in.
It's very important to realize that.
I agree.
I'm hearing more about common sense all of a sudden recently,
which is really good.
Dr. Scott Atlas, scottatlas underscore IT.
Thank you so much.
And again, put the book up there one more time, Caleb,
so we can give it its due.
It's a plague upon us.
There it is.
A plague upon our house.
I recommend it most highly.
Scott, I hope to talk to you again soon.
Thank you for all the work.
I hope so.
Thanks for having me.
Cheers.
And for the rest of us, coming up, Asimul Hatra in here tomorrow at noontime. He's the cardiologist that has been
raising,
blowing the whistle
on the vaccine concerns
for quite some time.
Elizabeth Pipko
next week.
Cheryl Atkinson
should be very interesting.
Viva Frye coming back
with Emily Kaplan.
Carrie Lake
and Jack Posobiec
on the same show.
That is all the genius work
of Emily Barsh,
everybody.
Debbie Lehrman,
Lisa Moran,
Salty Cracker, back on November
7th to do a post-mortem on
the election, if it is
settled by then, which I have my doubts.
Thank you so much. Caleb, anything from
your front? Yeah, you have
the event coming up
with Jimmy Dore.
Their tickets might actually be sold out.
I'm not sure yet, but if they go and look this up,
it's Rumble Time with Jimmy Dore coming up on November 8th.
It'll be live online too if people can't make it in person.
Exactly.
Jimmy very kindly asked me to be a part of that.
He does that once in a while.
And anything for Jimmy sounds like a good time to me.
So that should be interesting.
And thank you, Caleb.
Thank you, Caleb, for putting that out there.
And thank you all for being here.
Let me look over on the rant,
see what's going on with you guys,
see if there's anything of note.
You guys have been very active.
They want Pierre Corey back in here.
Okay, easy enough.
We can make another go round of people.
I was telling Dr. Atlas before the show
that he's the last piece on my chessboard
of all the people that I've been wanting to talk to
throughout this debacle as Dr. Victory says, we've got to bring Dr. Victory back in here too
I got to show this again too because let's compare what was happening to him in 2020
and then let's just fast forward a few years as they start to regret
shutting down all of the people who were telling the truth at that time
so yeah it's great he's right though there needs it is great to see. It is great to see, but it's not a safeguard against it happening again.
There needs to be some sort of amends, some reckoning, some something, some action, something where we put at least some safeguards in place that these people cannot run amok.
Once again, here's somebody that was canceled.
I hope you all had the same experience I did where you were learning something more about how this thing happened.
I didn't realize how scientifically unsophisticated
our bureaucrats were and how bureaucratically oriented,
should that surprise me, the bureaucrats are.
Thank you for being here.
We'll see you tomorrow, Ed.
Oh, go ahead.
It's that other thing of trust the experts,
but just not these experts.
Come on, guys.
Yes, and he is telling us
to be very, very careful with that,
which is indeed,
you become a culty at a certain point
if you're not careful.
So no one wants to be
in that kind of world.
All right, everybody,
we'll be back tomorrow at noon
with a Seymour Hot Tree.
You'll like him as well.
Don't miss it.
Ask Dr. Drew is produced by Caleb Nation and Susan Pinsky.
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