The Highwire with Del Bigtree - DR. SCOTT ATLAS: INSIDE TRUMP’S COVID TASK FORCE

Episode Date: July 1, 2023

Health policy expert and former and White House Coronavirus Task Force Advisor, Scott Atlas, MD, gives Del his inside look into his 2020 battle within the Trump Administration’s COVID-19 Task Force. He describes a tumultuous scene where Dr. Deborah Birx, Dr. Tony Fauci and Dr. Robert Redfield, among others, fought against sound scientific data in favor of lockdowns, masking and school closures.Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-highwire-with-del-bigtree--3620606/support.

So many of us watch this incredible experience happen before our eyes. We lost our jobs. Our children were kept home. Many of them getting depressed. We saw our economy destroyed all by a White House and a set of decisions by a task force that seemed, especially if we're watching the high wire, to be going against the science of what we actually saw happening around the world. At the center of it, there was a moment where there was a bright, shining light, at least from our percentage. that stepped in there. His name was Dr. Scott Atlas. He has been called a hero. He has been called a villain. And when you watch him in the news, this is what that has looked like.

Dr. Scott Atlas, President Trump's special advisor on the pandemic. Scott is a very famous man who's also very highly respected. Chief resident at Northwestern, fellowship at the University of Pennsylvania, expert in neuro-radiology. We have a man with us who's a great expert from Stanford, he's working with us, he's consulting with us, Dr. Scott Adleris. Okay, thank you, Mr. President. It's a great honor to be asked to help out in any way I can. I'm a healthcare policy person, and I have a background in medical science.

My role really is to translate medical science into public policy. Herd immunity or population immunity exists when enough people in a population, you know, get an infection, have their own establish immunity and break the chains of connectivity of contagiousness to people, particularly the vulnerable. That's just a known fact. That's an immunological concept. We know that the risk of the disease is extremely low for children, even less than that of seasonal flu. We know that the harms of locking out the children from school are enormous. And we also know that educating America's children is right at the top of the list for our nation's priorities. In the cities, in the states, countries that had a mass mandate, the cases exploded. And when you compare, which I think is really

striking, what happened in this fall surge, fall winter between Florida and California? Because they're distinctly opposite in how the governors handled things. Florida did better than California. This kind of isolation is one of the unspoken tragedies of the elderly who are now being told, don't see your family at Thanksgiving. For many people, this is their final Thanksgiving. believe it or not. What are we doing here? Dr. Atlas, okay, a guy with no pandemic experience. Dr. Scott Atlas, whose public stance on the pandemic echoes Trump's unscientific claims. If you don't believe that herd immunity exists as a pathway to block, as a way to block the pathways to the vulnerable in an infection, then you would never really advocate or believe

in giving widespread vaccination. That's the whole point of it. A man who has no background in infectious disease. He's a radiologist. All righty. It's like getting a podiatrist to work on your spine. Dr. Atlas repeatedly questioned the efficacy of face masks. He talked about the potential benefits of herd immunity. He also wondered whether all children essentially should go back to school without changing guidelines.

It is incontrovertible that there is extremely low risk to children from this illness. not only low risk, but lower risk than seasonal influenza for both hospitalization and death. Americans hear one thing from the CDC director and another thing from you. Who are we to believe? You're supposed to believe the science, and I'm telling you the science. Not telling a science. I'm telling you the science, and that's the answer. And if you want to look up all the data, you're free to.

This is the most irrational public policy probably in modern history. You don't lock down the children because you are personally afraid. It's totally outrageous. Dr. Scott Atlas, President Trump's special advisor on the pandemic, has resigned his post. I don't just blindly accept CDC data. They've been erratic in what they've said. He was serving a 130-day detail, which was set to expire this week. That's why he submitted his resignation yesterday in a letter to the president.

He defended his views. I actually thought that, you know, truth mattered, that facts mattered in my role. was to provide the best possible advice in a big crisis. If you don't know this stuff, you shouldn't be in the CDC. If you don't know this stuff, you should not be advising the president of the United States. And if you don't know this stuff, you certainly should not be on TV talking to the American public. It is absolutely my honor and pleasure to be joined by Dr. Scott Atlas. Thank you so much.

Thank you for having me. So your book, A Plague Upon Our House. It's obviously worn out. I've read it several times. I have like a million things I would love to talk to you about. We will never get to all of it, but all I can say is this truly is a bucket list moment for me. We have, I've been so curious about what happened, you know, inside the White House. We were watching it from the outside. But to begin with, when the pandemic hit, what first inspired you to start investigating it and, and, you know, starting to write articles about it. Sure. So I was working, as I have been doing for over a decade in health care policy, which basically combines my medical science background of 25 years with how we should have our health care system to increase access and quality.

And I was working on a book that because I thought, frankly, that the 20-year would be an issue of importance, health care system reform. So I was writing this book and the data, the numbers, the studies about the princess diamond ship of Japan and the fear and the World Health Organization information on this infection fatality rate that was stratospheric came out. And so I was saying, well, what's going on here because it's obvious who's at risk? and the infection fatality rate was being calculated incorrectly because they weren't considering in the denominator of that fraction everyone who would be infected because most people, a large

percentage anyway, with a respiratory infection, are asymptomatic. Right. So this number was calculated on the base of who was really sick enough to go see a doctor. So I'm home, and I start explaining this to my own son. And my kids are, you know, I have two sons, and they're both smarter than I am, and that's good. That'd be amazing. Doesn't mean they know more, but they're smarter. I'm one of those.

So I'm explaining this to my sons, and they don't understand what I'm talking about. And I'm saying to myself, wait a second, this is obvious stuff. This is not complicated. You don't lock down low-risk people and not protect the high-risk people and watch the high-risk people, the elderly in the nursing homes, particularly die. This was a failed strategy. and yet people were frantic because of the media, because of the WHO, because of a lot of reasons. And so I said, okay, if you don't understand this, then I need to get working on researching it and explaining it. And so I dropped everything about my book and I started working on specifically researching the pandemic

and going through all the data, going through the article, speaking to epidemiologists every day, every other day, and became visible in the news because it became very obvious in March of 2020 when I wrote a piece saying, end the lockdowns, this is the wrong strategy, and increase the protection of the people who are high risk, meaning the elderly, and I called it targeted protection. Here is the article in the Hill. The data is in, stop the panic and end the total isolation. In fact, you had several articles out in the Hill. The COVID-19 shutdown will cost American millions of years of life.

science has opened the schools. I mean fear first, education last. All of these things we were reporting on actually and you popped up in fact one point we were doing a show and celebrating that there were several voices that were not being heard just to give you a sense of sort of how we've been tracking you take a look at this. The global data showed at the very beginning and appeared to show to this day that 98 to to 99% of all cases are mild. While lockdowns were justified initially, their perpetuation may risk many lives.

Treating COVID-19 at all costs is severely restricting other medical care and instilling fear in the public, creating a massive health disaster in addition to the severe economic harms that would generate a world poverty crisis with incalculable consequences. Does anyone else out there wish you could vote

on like who's gonna run this country, since clearly presidents aren't and prime ministers aren't around the world. Now it's doctors, and we should be allowed to vote, right? I wanna vote out Fauci and Birx, maybe voting, Atlas, Cats, Ionidis, and Mr. Roy, all of these people, brilliant scientists that have established medical schools in this country.

I'd like them making a decision in this country, wouldn't you? That was May. We were talking about what you were writing, and I wanna give you this opportunity, because I think it's one the issues. The media, and we'll talk about this, really defined who you are, but what is your background? I mean, someone say, oh, he's a di-oh, he's a radiologist. What does he have to do

in this space? When you say, you know, you're a health specialist in sort of populations in health, what do you mean by that? What is your background? My background is I'm an MD. I was educated at University of Chicago School of Medicine. I did a, I was all academic medicine for the first 25 years of my career, which means that I did my training at Northwestern and then at University of Pennsylvania. I was an assistant professor at University of Pennsylvania. I ended up working for most of my career there and then I came to Stanford. And for those 25 years, I worked as a professor and a researcher and teaching other doctors. and a clinician doing medical procedures, etc. in neurologic disorders of the brain and spine.

I wrote the main book, most people would say, in magnetic resonance imaging, MRI of the brain and spine. So when we're getting MRIs, our doctors that are doing that are well aware of the work that you've done because that's a huge part of your back. Yes, I mean, the book is considered one of the books in MRI, if not the main book. And then over the course of my academic career, I have over 100 scientific publications in peer-reviewed journals. I've been funded over 30 different grants. I've been given visiting professor lectures over 600 times at every major medical school in the country. And when I came to Stanford in 1998, I started to work also on health policy.

And so I had sort of two positions. I was the professor and chief of neuroideology in the Stanford University Medical School, and I worked simultaneously on health policy, which was integrating information and knowledge about medical science with economics and access and quality of health care, medical care delivery, because most people that are in health policy don't really understand medicine. They understand economics of health care, but that's it. health care, but that's it. And so then in 2012, which is maybe more information than the

ask for, but I was offered an endowed chair at Hoover Institution, which is a public policy institute as part of Stanford University. And I resigned from the medical school in 2012 because I don't like to dabble in things. I don't think it's, I think it's hard enough to do one thing very, very well, expert level. And so I quit the medical school and went over to work on health policy in 2012. So for over a decade, I'm working on health policy. And what this crisis of COVID, the pandemic, required, was health policy. That's my lane. It's not a surprise that most of the Stanford University medical school professors don't know the data, didn't understand what to do with this pandemic. Because the job of a health policy person is to integrate all the information

and figure out how to address all public health, not just focus on stopping a single infection. So the breadth of knowledge of a health policy person is far broader than someone who, say, a virologist or an epidemiologist. Those are parts of the puzzle, but the puzzle is very complicated. I'll just give you a very crude example.

You could line up everybody on a wall and shoot them and you'll stop COVID. You're not going to do that because you're going to kill them. And, you know, this kind of unifocal, really irrational focus on stopping all cases of COVID at all costs was known from the beginning to be completely harmful and wrong. And one of the articles you noted there that I wrote in May of 2020 was with some economists because it's one of the known parts of the whole health area that if you have a severe economic downturn, you kill people. Right. Particularly by the way, the low income and poor families. Right. And so what's amazing, too, is though you were sort of dragged through the media on these issues, you're even a unicorn inside of health policies. You said you're not just an economist,

you're not just a bureaucrat. You've been a practicing doctor diagnosis is the center of your specialty, your first 20-something years. And so you brought all that together. To me, you were like the most perfectly qualified. person to be stepping into this space. So how did that happen? How did the White House, how did you, did you reach out to that? How did you make contact? Sure. So I started to become visible because I wrote in this one from March that we should use targeted protection with Johnny and Edie also wrote it and David Katz formerly at Yale. We all sort of almost at the same time but independently wrote in March of 2020 that we need to end the lockdowns and use targeted protection. And then over the summer, I started to do more of the work and was on TV somewhat.

And it's sort of a funny story. It turned out my mother-in-law was watching the press conferences of the White House over the spring and summer of 2020. And she's in her 90s and she called me up once and said, well, Scott, Kaylee McAnney, the press secretary, is quoting your data and your statements. And I didn't know that. And she said, yeah, you're going to the White House. My mother-in-law said. And so I said, well, I'm not going to the White House. I don't want to go to the White House. No. And then I get a call, actually, a couple weeks later in July from the White House Office of Personnel saying, would I come speak to President Trump? And, of course, okay, people are dying this is the President of the United States.

It's obvious the answer is yes. It has nothing to do with politics either way. I mean, there'd be something wrong with you, frankly, if you wouldn't go and speak to the president of your country. And so I did, and I say it that way because there are people who don't, believe it or not. And so I go in and spend a day at the White House having meetings, individual meetings, with everybody from, you know, Vice President Pence, Kaylee McAnney, the president, Jared Kushner, etc. And went through a series of meetings and they were asking about the pandemic and what I thought about this and what I thought about that.

Many of them were taking notes. And at the end of the day, Jared Kushner said to me, well, we'd like you to help advise the president. And I said, okay, but this is what you're going to get. because, you know, frankly, I've always been very direct and outspoken, and so I wanted to make sure they understood what this was. I'm not a political person. And so I said, this is what you're going to get. I'm going to say the truth of what I see, no matter who tells me not to. I'm not going to agree with someone just because somebody else tells me to, including the president of the United States.

I'm not signing on to a group statement that I don't agree with. And Jared Kushner said, well, that's exactly why we want you. And I remember being struck and very happy to hear that. But the problem was the next sentence, he said, he goes, I'm concerned though. They're going to destroy you once it becomes public. And, you know, that shocked me because, first of all, I didn't think Jared Kushner would care about that.

But it shocked me more because I'm not really interested in being destroyed. I'm not insane. And so I said, well, why don't I go back to California and try it from there? And so he said, okay, let's do that. And so I went back to California for a few days. It became obvious. This was not going to work because it was a very sort of chaotic situation. People were feeding the President of the United States the wrong, grossly wrong information.

And the public was extremely fearful, and so I went back to Washington. I remember the moment you did, we actually celebrated on the show. just to one last time show you how much we were following you. We actually changed the opening of our show. This is a flashback to the moment that you were invited into the White House. Take a look at this, everybody. It's kind of fun. Bum, bum, boom.

Dude, good evening. Wherever you are out there in the world, it's time to step out onto the high wire. Well, what does all this have to do with Atlas? Well, you know, when I watch the comments in the show, A lot of times I'll see it written in the comments, oh, from your lips to God's ears, Del. Well, this week, perhaps the next best thing.

It went from our lips to President Trump's ears. As you know, here on the high wire, we have been showing you that really the majority of scientists, biologists, doctors around the world disagree with the draconian measures of lockdowns, masks. They disagree that waiting for a vaccine is the way to go. Many of them talking about herd immunity. Well, finally, finally, it's now in the middle of August. We are seeing some moves in the White House. And one of those guys that I was

talking about, that's right, you got it. Dr. Scott Atlas was announced by Donald Trump as a part of the new task force. We were pretty excited, obviously, about that announcement. And we'd been following the work that you were doing. We were very much looking. at the science. At that point, by August, it was clear. It was so crystal clear, even starting in China, then watching Italy. Of course, he had the cruise ship, and Johnny Anidis was doing these great breakdowns. I think at that point, he was guessing that the overall death rate was somewhere in the 0.025 to 0.035% for everybody. Clearly a much higher risk rate amongst the elderly, kids point zero zero zero something and so you were making a lot of sense what is going on here what is

with the terror this looks to be really for most people a flu a very bad flu for a very small group of people so going to the white house what was what was it you imagined you could do well you know this was sort of a tricky situation obviously because uh i'm not I was sort of naive about the political welcome that I would get, and I say that in quotes, but I was not naive that there would be complete resistance to what I was saying. And so I was asked to be an advisor to the president. But then at the same time, I was told, but it's important I'm part of the task force too. And I frankly said I don't want to be part of the task force.

There's no point. These people are dug in. And Berks had been running the task force since end of February, Fauci and Berks were the most important parts of the task force. And they were there for five, six months already. There was no point in me saying, oh, I'm going to try to change their minds. But it was, of course, important that I hear what they were saying and do my best. So I went into the task force meetings.

The first one was in the second week of August, really. I had been advising the president, frankly, about a couple of things before that, which was during, when I got there, July 30th, 2020, which was number one, it's very important that he resumes his press conferences and talks to the people and says the data. Okay, even that alone, the public, if you remember, was in a tremendous amount of fear. Yeah. Fear is debilitating. Fear makes people think irrationally.

if you're a leader, your most important thing is to say the facts and allay any unnecessary fear. Right. Don't stream fire in a crowded room. Absolutely. Let's try to put some fires out and get some peace and sanity going on here. And I thought that the most important way to eliminate fear is to eliminate the unknown as much as possible, which was to say the data. So I was trying to help give some data to the president in his prepared remarks. And then I was sitting in on the task force.

And the task force, it was as bad, really worse than I imagined. And in a way worse because the amount of, you know, there's two parts of the task force, basically, the logistical side, which was very good, actually. But the medical side of the task force was run by Dr. Deborah Birx. Deborah Birx was the task force coordinator. She wrote all of the White House official policy to every governor. She visited every state with or without Vice President Pence.

She was the head of the medical advice. Fauci, Dr. Fauci was not in charge of anything, but he was the most visible voice of the government. Yeah, he was the one we were following thinking was driving policy because you heard a lot more from him. You always just sort of saw her in the background of the new scarf, but didn't get this sense. driving. Right. She was literally the person who was writing the policies. And that, the White House

Task Force was the federal policy. So Fauci was on TV and the media influencing the public. And then the third doctor of importance was Dr. Redfield, the head of the CDC. And so among the people of the, when I went to a task force meeting, there were about eight of us at this table with Vice President Pence, who was the official head of the task force. Yeah. But President Trump, Trump had nothing to do with the task force. President Trump did not visit the task force meetings. President Trump, in fact, was saying something very different from the message of the task force. And this was part of the problematic leadership under that administration because they had two separate messages going to the public. President Trump was saying before I got there that the schools should be open, that businesses should be open,

that we're killing people with the lockdowns. But the task force, and that is the official policy, was telling the public, but also all the governors, all the local health officials, lockdown, closed schools, mask up, et cetera, et cetera. Let's talk about some of the personalities inside of the White House. One of them that you mentioned, Deborah Birx, like that she's in charge. In the book, you talk about that at first it sounds like they're trying to shuffle you around and not really get around her, as though everyone's like, I don't know how this is going to work out. seemed to be a paranoia. And then the moment you meet her, I think we had the excerpt from the book,

let me just read this. After an initial and quick meeting with Dr. Berks, I saw that Kushner's concerns were fully warranted. She seemed threatened right away by my presence. She was noticeably uneasy, even though I told her, I'm just here to help in any way I can. She instantly asked with slight hesitancy in her voice, how long will you be there?

I said it wasn't clear, which was certainly true. My White House badge, a sign of some permanence, was tucked inside my laptop cage. she wasn't happy to see you. Well, my impression was she was nervous, and that is a personality, by the way, it's very consistent with someone who doesn't know that much. People are intimidated.

You know, I was an outsider. Okay, so I'm an academic medical science and health policy expert. I didn't care about my position in the White House. I didn't need that job. I was there because people were dying. and it's my country. Right.

So, you know, I wasn't there to wield power or to make sure that I had a position intact. So when I was meeting and I was told I had to meet with Dr. Berks, and that's fine, she was agitated a little bit and asking, and I literally did not know how long I'd be there. In fact, in the beginning, it wasn't clear. It wasn't necessarily known because we were going to see how it goes.

But, you know, when I got into the task force meetings, it became very obvious that it was very threatening to Dr. Burks and others, partly because they had wheeled, this is my own opinion, but they were busy with their entourages walking into a room full of non-medical people, the task force and the other COVID meetings that were being held. And so, in my opinion, most people are sort of intimidated and somewhat deferential to people that are doctors or PhDs or scientists. And so they don't feel comfortable speaking out. And so when she would speak, okay, there was a natural deference to her or Dr. Fauci. I wasn't there to be deferential. I was there to say the truth. I was sort of, frankly, a little bit. I was frantic by this point because the data was known for months.

And the lockdowns were literally killing people and destroying our children on top of it. And so I wasn't really, I didn't care about making friends. I wanted to do whatever I could to change the dialogue and inform people. And so I would walk into a task force meeting. And in the first one, Vice President Pence, her and I says, well, Scott, what do you think about one of the first couple, about the risk to children? Yeah. And I said, well, and I had about 15, 20 manuscripts of the current data in my briefcase. I already discussed everything with all the epidemiologists who I knew.

And so I gave a 10-minute presentation on the data. And basically the bottom line is it's extraordinarily low risk for healthy children. And schools should open. And the data was known all over Europe, all over Western European peer nation. they were opening their schools from the Netherlands, Italy, France, Sweden. Even in the face of lockdowns, they knew that the risk of children was low and they were opening the schools. And the harms of children were extremely high if not opening schools. Pence then turns to Dr. Birx and Fauci and says, well, what do you think?

There was silence. They had no data. In fact, there was never a single task force meeting, not one, were any of the other doctors brought in a scientific. paper, zero. And Dr. Birx's only comment at that meeting and in the future was, you're an outlier. Okay, that's not a scientific rebuttal. There's no data there. And then at that same meeting, I remember this vividly because it was so really tragically depressing the level of incompetence and lack of knowledge in these doctors on the task force. He turned to Dr. Redfinery.

and said, what do you think, Bob, about the risk of children in opening schools? And Redfield leaned back, and this is after massive day of the known published all over the world, he leaned back and he said, well, let's just say the jury's still out. And so, you know, I was sort of, I didn't know what to say, and then we just went on as if my presentation didn't exist. And this was a repeated pattern. I mean, these people, I have never worked with such low-level people. And I always used to say none of these people could be an assistant professor in the departments that I worked in. Wow, that's an incredible statement.

And I'm watching it from the outside because our show has been very diligent in following all the science. We were reporting on Israel, as you're saying, Sweden, Denmark, all of these studies were coming out. We were so clear what was going on. And that was my question. What are they looking at in there? What are they looking at? How are they, you know, all of these just random, let's flatten the curve. We're going to flatten the curve.

And then that goes whipping by, and that just seemed to be a way to just start taking away all of our rights. And I think it was supposed to be 14 days or something like that. It goes on forever. What was your opinion to flatten the curve? Was that the right move at the moment? Okay. So flatten the curve was the statement of Dr. Burke's back in the spring early on. Right.

15 days to slow the spread. or flatten the curve. And I think that if we want to be completely fair, which we do, it is rational to try a very short-term measure to flatten the curve. Now, the key here is, what does flatten the curve mean? Flatten the curve means slow, bring down the peak of cases, and prolong that. Why? So that we can function as hospitals. So that we can treat people. with other illnesses, not just with COVID. Rather than overwhelm hospitals. And this was a reaction to what was seen in Italy

where they did have hospitals overrun. And a lot of that, frankly, is that their hospital system is a disaster. It's a disaster. Much older population in Lombardia and these places where they're having serious issues. That's right. And there were reasons why they were overrun.

But it's rational. It's reasonable to say, Okay, let's try two weeks of flattening the curve. But you'll notice something here that's very important. There was never a goal or even a possibility of reducing the number of deaths or cases with flattening the curve. If you want to be a math person, you would say the area under the curve doesn't change with flattening the curve. The total number of cases, the total number of deaths, that was not even the goal. It was just simply slowing things down.

Of course, that didn't really work. And what happened, though, is what the problem was. What happened was it became stop-all cases of COVID. Right. And so you ask what data were they using. There were these sophomoric tabulations of cases, cases per day, cases per week, based upon a non-surveillance level of testing, so it was erratic. The numbers were irrelevant because every state, every place was testing for different criteria.

I want to drill into this because you talk about in the book, and it's kind of a funny part, where you talk about how Birx keeps flying into the room with these arbitrary colored charts, you know, of, you know, infection cases that they're seeing in different states, comparing one state to another. You're weighing in saying, well, hold on a second. They're using totally different criteria. They're testing at different levels. One's wearing masks.

Clearly, this one's doing better than this. But like, the masks have nothing to do. We don't have any basis for, where's the baseline on your information, right? Yes. Tell me about this. I mean, how this arbitrary nature that you reference a lot of times and talk about Dr. Burgs. So here's the issue is that there was no critical thinking being done.

And actually the stuff isn't that complicated. But what we saw from Dr. Birx, for example, is there were charts made up. First, it started with three colors. These were arbitrarily assigned colors. Red for danger, yellow for, well, we're a little bit worried, green for, okay, we feel good. Okay, I mean, you might think that that's a reasonable thing to do if you had a scientifically valid reason for putting those numbers in. There's no valid reason for just simply saying, okay, if we have zero to four percent versus four to ten versus greater than ten, we're just going to assign these green, yellow, and red.

what was done. And so this was very arbitrary and really, I mean, I was shocked. This is not science at all. And then what it evolved into were to make it more scientific. There were five colors. We divided this. We, Dr. Burke, divided this into, oh, we're going to say five colors. We're going to go from red to green, but we're going to have five gradations. As if dividing in a little rainbow in there and some nuance. Yeah. I mean, you know, there's no, there's no validity to the numbers. was one of the many times where I was looking around the room saying, am I the only one was hearing this? I mean, this was really sort of a combination of discussions that you read about in the book Catch-22 and at Mad Hatter's Tea Party and Allison Wanderland, just totally illogical, circular discussion going on. And you bring up the mask issue. Okay, this is you have

to realize now. We're talking six months after everyone was insisting that masks were proven, even though they had been disproven months and months before, even by the CDC. But. Fouch, the one thing he had right was when he first answered about math. When he first answered in his emails that were uncovered, masks couldn't work because the size of the virus is smaller than the hole in a surgical mask, not alone a cloth mask. But the CDC had published all this date in May 2020. Mass didn't work to either stop the spread or to protect the wear. That's fact. Anyone who says otherwise is really flat earther. But separate from that, that, there were places, there were times in the task force meetings. By this point, you know,

it took me only a couple meetings to get really frustrated with it to the point of being, knowing these people are refractory to fact. And so at one point in, say, September, Fauci holds up a chart and Redfield did the same at a different meeting saying, oh, I have proof that mass work. And the first thing I said was, well, I thought you knew mass work for the last seven months. Why is there a need to say you have proof that mass work? But Redfield holds up a chart and says, well, this, we put the mass on and after the mass came on, the cases came down. So I'm seeing they're thinking, you know, frankly, oh my God, I mean, this is not, this is so low level. It's like saying the sun came up and therefore, you know, mass, the cases came down that day. I mean, I don't

know what he's correlating. And I didn't say anything because it was just, frankly, it was just It was, I didn't even, I was speechless. And someone who was non-medical, purely non-medical staff person said, well, Dr. Redfield, why couldn't it be that the cases just came down at the same time? And he didn't have an answer for this. This is like insane. And another time Fauci did the same thing comparing two states. He said, well, you know, I have proof that mass work.

This was arbitrarily announced in the room. And so he says in one state with mass mandates, the cases came down in another state, the cases went up without a mass mandate. And so one of the other non-medical people, Seema Verma, the head of Medicare and Medicaid, says, well, Tony, you know that's not true. There's a bunch of differences between these two states and everything. Why would you assign that as a cause and effect?

Right. Again, no answer. I mean, it was so low level. It's almost embarrassing to be affiliated with a group like that. It's shocking, I think, for viewers. Well, because you have so many confounding issues. to be there. And the one that you argued the most throughout this book, and we watched you when you were being heard, was what about herd immunity? How about the fact that when the

infections went up, now all those people that were infected suddenly have hurted me were dry? So, you know, is it possible that we've sort of hit the maximum, you know, load with this virus? And that's why things are coming down. But Berks kept trying to claim, know, it's the lockdowns that are doing it. Yeah. Well, I mean, the fact is that, you know, and this is, I think, very important to understand is it was known since 2006, the classic articles on pandemics, that lockdowns didn't work and they harm people. They were destructive. So this isn't new territory, but they have to wonder, why did somebody think that lockdowns would work and why did the public believe it? And I think it's really because there were two lies told. Okay. Number one lie was that if you said the lockdowns should be removed,

you were somehow choosing the economy over lives. Right. Okay, and that's, that was a frank lie, because for decades in the economics literature, we knew that severe economic downturns killed people. And the second lie that was told to the public was that if you choose to say you shouldn't be locking down, you're calling for let it rip.

Right. So called herd immunity strategy. And that was a lie. I never called for letting it rip. I called for increasing protection of older people and people who were more vulnerable. I called for increasing testing, and I can get into that. But the point was that that was somehow distorted as let it rip. When I talked about herd immunity, I was describing the biologically known fact that that is how virus infections that are raging through a population come down.

No one was calling for letting it rip. The point was that that's why people wanted to give widespread vaccination. That is simply a biological phenomenon, as my friend Martin Koldorf, the Harvard epidemiologist, says, to say that you're against herd immunity is sort of like saying you're against gravity. This is a biological phenomenon. You don't have an opinion on herd immunity. No one in the White House ever asked or even discussed letting it rip. It was never discussed with the president.

And that was all a media creation to demonize people who said no lockdowns as being dangerous. And that's called propaganda and that kind of propaganda to vilify people like they did with the unvaccinated. It's the same stuff. It's reminiscent to me of the most heinous regimes in modern history that use propaganda to sway the public and to make people think that this other group is dangerous. There's a part in the book where you sort of lightly touch on your relationship with Fauci. At one point, he really asked you very pointedly about your perspective on herd immunity. And then, you know, do you remember that moment? You know, what was happening there?

Okay, so you're probably referring to Fauci called me up and early on and proposed to have a meeting. He said, let's have a meeting with all the doctors. And let's see if we have some kind of common ground and hear your perspective. And he meant Dr. Birx, Dr. Fauci, Dr. Redfield, and me. And I said, okay, that's great. I'd like to bring in some epidemiologists and others who are doing research on the pandemic. And I'd like to have a discussion. And I had already been talking to people like Johnny Anidis at Stanford and Jay Batachari at Stanford.

Stanford and Martin Koldorf had written me and said he's happy I was there and expressed interest in coming. I said I'd like to have the discussion. Okay, so Fauci immediately, that was the end of the conversation. Okay, they didn't want to have a discussion with people who were actually doing the research and knew the data. This was a group of government bureaucrats. You have to realize that Fauci was in his position for 38 years. Berks was a government bureaucrat for decades. Redfield was a government-appointed bureaucrat who had a position.

of authority. And their idea of this was to protect their own position, to go to the media. They had friends in the media. They would refer to Sanjay Gupta of CNN by his first name. And I didn't even know what was going on here. I had no friends in the media. That became obvious. And they were working. And in fact, Berks admitted early in 2021 that she, Fauci and Redfield had a pact with each other that if Trump had fired one of them, they would all resign. And so this is not the way a scientist works,

especially someone who wants to help his country. This is the way people who are bureaucrats work who want to protect their power. Did you feel like because you would get shredded once in a while in the media? It seems like you're a little bit suspicious that Fauci is going to the media and reporting on you. So this was something I did write about in the book

was that after the first meeting, at the task force that I was in on, they asked me, Vice President Pence was talking about what's happening, and this was in New York, and I had all the data on what percent of people had antibodies in New York, and what neighborhoods by Zipco did antibodies.

It was clear that the low-income neighborhoods were really hit with the virus, and they had a lot of hospitalizations, but they also had a lot of antibody protection. Because as we know, anyone who knows anything about biology, and this is not medical school, not Ph.D. science, not virology, not epidemiology. It's high school AP biology. A lot of what we reported on here. Yes. And it's not complicated that if you recover from a viral infection, almost always you have very significant protection, durable protection against a significant serious illness.

And so I was pointing this out at the First Task Force meeting, quoting the numbers in New York and Birx and, and others were saying, oh, no, the cases started to come down because they had masks on. And I said, well, the curve of the cases going up and coming down was the same all over the world with this over time. Yeah. And it comes down because of a lot of reasons, but particularly including that people start getting antibodies and, you know, this is how virus spread happens. Is it a curve we've seen in almost every epidemic throughout time, too?

And even over time, we've watched, studied them. And so after the end of that meeting, there was an article written in the Washington Post, I think, saying that Scott Atlas is pushing herd immunity. I was explaining herd immunity as a phenomenon in the meeting. I mean, these people had very little knowledge, frankly. And so at the end of that, this article was written. And then, of course, that stuff gets picked up in national, international media. And it was an overt lie that I was saying we should try for herd immunity or something like this by letting the infection spread. And it was in the newspaper.

And there was a tremendous amount of heat from that. And I was new to this. And so I was outraged. I'm not outraged anymore because it's the way it is. The media's poison and harmful to the public good. Let's get into that a minute because there's a moment. because there's a moment you call this the three, the Redfield, Fauci and Berks, the Troika, and that they sort of like, as you said, they sort of had this pact.

If one of us gets fired, we all quit, as though they were sort of, you know, had a sense that they were obviously diametrically opposed to the president. But there's a moment where you seem, there's like one moment where you're really pushing to sort of change the narrative and change the approach. Let's stop testing all of the asymptomatic, healthy people. and creating this fear, let's try to start moving towards an opening up policy, and you're able to talk them all into working together. It's a moment.

Tell me about what you achieved there, and it sounded like you were there, then you'd get taken away, but you really worked to get everybody to follow some science in the moment, and probably, in many ways, might have been the pinnacle of anything you've achieved, at least in that task force, it seems. Well, so I thought they were very happy, Vice President Pence, and Brett Girouar, who's a doctor who was the so-called testings are, about how their testing capacity had ramped up from essentially nothing to a million tests a day or something.

I mean, it was very, very powerful. And I said, okay, now the people are still dying. You're just testing, testing, testing, which is actually a mantra of many politicians. Test tests, they were saying. Right. And I said, why don't you use the testing to stop people from dying? Again, this is not a brilliant thing to say, but it's obvious you should use this powerful tool strategically because the goal is to stop people from dying, not just to test. Right.

And so Brett Girwar said, yeah, this makes sense. Let's have a call. And Zirwar set up a call with me and Redfield to be talking about testing. And so Jirwar ended up devising a document. And the way documents circulate in the West Wing and in the White House is that there's a draft of a document that goes around and dozens of people have input into it. And so there was a revision of the testing strategy to use the testing tool powerfully to stop or limit the dying. And I was pushing for something that was in the testing document, which was to get more frequent testing of the nursing homeworkers, for instance. because most cases, people were dying at this point, 50 to 80% of deaths per state were in nursing homes. The controlled environment.

I mean, you ought to be able to limit that. And I said to Burke's, when she got enraged at me once because I said we should use targeted increased strategies to stop people from dying. She said, we're already doing everything to stop people from dying who are elderly. And I said, okay, how often are you testing the nursing home workers? Right. She said once a week. They're going in and out. Yeah, they're going in and out.

The nursing home residents are inside. Right. And she said, well, once a week. And I said, well, once a week. I mean, these are people who have exposure every single day in the community. I said, you should be testing three days a week, five days, weeks, seven days a week, the nursing home personnel. And so I said we should send testing, increased testing, to senior centers non-residential. Where seniors frequent and go hang out with their friends, there was no testing going on in these places.

I said we should send more testing to historically black colleges and universities. Faculty members are there, have higher risk profiles. So I pointed out we should use the testing for the point of it, which is to stop people from dying. So this document was written by Girouwer and circulated around Fauci, Redfield, Berks. Everybody saw it. Everybody agreed. We had a meeting about it at one of the task force meetings after the draft document was written. And this was on the agenda. Everyone agreed to, instead of just testing, you know, wasting things.

And by the way, tests were taking days to get the results back. It didn't even make sense what they were doing. So basically, instead of paralyzing low-risk people and closing schools for people who had very low-risk, let's use it for the high-risk people. That was the gist of it. The document was changed and agreed upon. and all the doctors, Fauci Redfield, Berks, and Juerre and myself were in on the agreement at the meeting. The next meeting, at the end of that meeting, there was a point of we need to basically put a separate section about nursing homes.

Gerard, I mean, the Redfield brought this up, which was smart. And to get to the gist of the bottom line, we all agreed the document was brought back to re-agree on because he wanted to. separate out the section. I look at the document at the end of that subsequent meeting, it was totally changed back to the original document. And so I said, well, something's going on here, what's going on? And Redfield said, well, we just wanted to change the order. I said, but the entire document that we agreed upon isn't there anymore. So they had posted the, ultimately, the revised testing agreement, the revised testing guidelines on the CDC page. Yeah.

And there was a hellfire of backlash by the media. All of a sudden, they didn't agree. It was a CDC document. Redfield wrote and finalized the document. The media got a hold of it, said, no, we don't agree with it. All right. Well, we actually have this. Let me show everyone what that looked like in the media.

When everyone had finally agreed, let's change the guidelines. This is how the media treated that moment. There is new guidance this morning from the CDC. I have to ask you about this reversal from the CDC. It's a bit of a head scratcher. Some shocking new details about the Trump administration's pressure campaign on the CDC from the New York Times. Who reports this, quote, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention was instructed by higher-ups within the Trump administration to modify its coronavirus testing guidelines this week to exclude people who do not have symptoms of COVID-19, even if they have been recently exposed to the virus. That's according to two federal health officials.

Public health experts and epidemiologists, everyone agrees that we need more testing, not less. We have to catch every case in order to contain outbreaks. And the second thing that concerns me is the way that it was rolled out, which is that it was basically the website just changed overnight with no announcement, no explanation, there's no backup. This is very unusual for the CDC, which has always been based in science and data. They are crafting an alternate reality where COVID isn't ravaging this country. The agency also did an about face on the issue of quarantining. Previous CDC guidance prompted states like New York to implement a mandatory 14-day quarantine for anyone who traveled to a COVID hotspot. On Friday, the agency quietly dropped the quarantine recommendation.

The only explanation that makes any, that makes any sense to me is that it is a very politically motivated change. We're not going to follow the CDC guidance. I consider it political propaganda. I mean, did Trump actually, that media basically said Donald Trump was pushing his agenda, and that's what had happened here. That was a complete lie what they said. The reality was, and the immediate interviews after that, immediate short-term interviews, Redfield said,

everyone agreed on this guideline. We're not going to quarantine people, just because they may have been exposed to somebody with COVID. Roya society. And what the new guidance said was, see your doctor and ask what you should do. He wanted to insert, Redfield specifically, a physician into the equation about a decision.

It was not about forbidding testing. And in fact, you know, everyone agreed, including Girouar, the head of testing, Redfield, Fauci, Burks. And so because of that backlash, first of all, those statements made by in the media were just completely irrational there were millions and millions of cases that one of the people there said uh that was interviewed well we have to stop every case i mean that's this ludicrous it was impossible that was already proven to be impossible that isn't the

point of testing the point of testing is a stop or limit the deaths and so uh and the exposure of high risk people and so uh the immediate uh reaction was jirwar to talking to the media, insisting that everyone agreed that it was his document with Redfields. Redfield was ahead of the CDC. He wrote, his CDC posted the document. It was not about pressure. Didn't matter, though. Media didn't seem to care.

I mean, this is like the tail wagging the dog in so many ways. Watching media assault, you know, a perfectly scientific and reasonable approach, assaulting you. when you think about the media and what was happening there, how much of it do you think was just because they just saw you, by you stepping in, going against the narrative that they've been hearing, that they just thought you are Trump, you're just Trump's mouse piece. Did that hurt you? Well, that is what happened, that they did take that attack.

I think in the beginning, what was the big barrage of hate? The big barrage of hate was political, in my view. You know, people that are looking at things through a political lens, they think everyone else is political. I mean, it had nothing to do with it for me. But what eventually happened was, I think, it became far more than political. It was worldwide. It wasn't all about Trump.

It was a hysteria. It was an obsession, and it was a huge display of not only ignorance and incompetence, but complete a lack of morality and air. ethics. But I think we have to look at it and say this was a complete failure of critical thinking of people. And fear, to be reasonable here, fear makes people think irrationally, do irrational things. But a lot of it was political. In fact, one of the first things I said to President Trump on my first visit to the Oval Office when he was asking me questions and we hadn't met before and he asked me about hydroxychloroquine,

and I said, you know, trying to be sort of funny, but it was really true, you should have said that hydroxychloroquine does not work because then the NIH and the FDA would have done the study right away trying to show that it worked. There's a moment you speak about fear because it's a huge part of this in the book when it's a meeting in Fauci starts spouting off.

I think I have this excerpt from the book where you're really concerned. Here it is. As often happened, Fauci spoke up to support Dr. Berks' concern saying people need to be warned even more strongly about the dangers of the virus spreading. He claimed Americans didn't think the virus was serious and that was the reason cases spread. I was honestly surprised. I challenged him to clarify his point because I couldn't believe my ears. So you think people aren't frightened enough? He said, yes, they need to be more afraid. I replied, I totally disagree. People are paralyzed with fear. Fear is one of the main problems. at this point. I think this last paragraph, let's bring it up just to the last statement here,

really seems to be the heart of this book. Instilling fear in the public is absolutely countered to what a leader in public health should do. To me, it is frankly immoral, although I kept that to myself. They were pressing fear upon us. Yes, I think that this is an unethical use of public health guidance, and it's been rampant and repeatedly used here. And that is that instead of persuading the public with facts and data, you know, we're a free society. You're supposed to be. We have thinking people, I do not underestimate the intelligence of the average person. It's not that complicated anyway.

Yet the way that this was done throughout the pandemic before the vaccine and after the vaccine was instead of using data and fact, It was using filtration of information, fear, partial information. Don't want to say that masks don't work because we want people to be cautious. Don't want to say that vaccines don't stop the spread because we want them to get vaccinated. You know, don't want to talk about side effects because we want them to get vaccinated. And I think this is not just wrong. I don't even know how to say it is literally unethical as a public health leader to impose fear on people. I mean, that is, I don't know how to say that in any way better than what I have said,

but I was shocked to hear Fauci explicitly say that. I mean, that was stunning to me. Let's just sort of wrap this up. obviously all of this happens underneath arguably probably the most controversial president we've had, even though I say that saying. It just feels like each new president, we just get more and divided and outraged. And now if you take that office, you are most certainly going to be indicted and tried to be arrested. And I'm not even sure if it matters what part you're in, just the other side is going to hate it. But you got to meet a man who is an enigma, I don't know,

a very unique individual. who some would think just shoots from the hip, doesn't seem to have a deep logic base. Others, you know, you had Q&ON saying this guy is thinking 5D chess. Who is Donald Trump in your mind? Well, I can give specific examples to give the color to the answer. When I was in the Oval Office with President Trump, he asked good questions.

listened thoughtfully, he understood the answers. He had common sense. I brought in several outside experts from across the country back in September of 2020. He went through us and asked individuals these very important questions about COVID. He understood the data. So to say he's illogical, I mean, that just doesn't fit. You know, you have a president who, this is just my my opinion, but he didn't have friends because he didn't probably have a lot of respect for politicians. And, you know, politicians are on both sides of the two-party system. He had very few people who he could trust. He trusted his families and his intimate advisors. He was under attack 24-7 in a very vicious way. I mean, the press briefing room. I was in the room to answer

questions about COVID. And these, the reporters were frankly animals. And I don't say that lightly. They're vicious, sick people, despicable people shouting out vulgar things to the president, loss of complete human decency there. And the lines. I mean, we're obviously not things that we're hearing on the news. No, well, see, what happens is that the president gets up there, gives the remarks, people are, we are on the sideline to answer specific questions. If they come up, he would take his questions, then he would walk out. And then I, I and others on the side would walk out behind him. And it was very common that the reporters were shouting out things at him. This is after the press conference was over. You know, and people calling him a murderer and a liar.

And, you know, just very, I was shocked at that. And, you know, there's just uncivil, poisonous So given all that, he was in a very difficult position. Now, that's not to excuse anything. And, you know, I'm not political at all. I was sort of an observer there of what's happening of the political side. But I would say that when you're in charge in the pandemic, okay, you own the decision-making. The president owns the decisions. And, you know, when I got there, I would have been happy to see disbanding of the medical side of the task force.

By the time I got there, you're talking August 2020, the policies were wrong and they were failing, and they were failing to stop the death. They were failing to stop any spread of infection, of course, and they were destroying people. And let's just say we have one of the highest death rates in the world. That's right. This incredible medical system, a free market medical system we brag about, and our death rates are among the highest in the world. And yet I'm amazed that Berks and Tony Fauci are considered heroes at all in this. Well, this is very important. I would like to answer this this way.

The lockdowners got what they wanted. The policy in the United States for most of the country was lockdown. They own the outcomes. If you want to say that there was a good outcome, then they should be congratulated. If you want to say that there was a bad outcome under Trump and under Biden, because by the way, the deaths per day from COVID, it's a straight line for the first two full years from March 2020 through April 2020. You're talking about over a year of Joe Biden.

Yeah. The two years of the pandemic, deaths per day, no change in the slope of the line, even with the vaccine. Okay. And so the point is that the lockdowners got what they wanted. their policy was implemented, their policy failed. There is no space, by the way, between the Trump administration policy and the policy of Fauci and Birx. True.

That's a really good point. They got their policy implemented. There's no space. And so what we're seeing here for your viewers is a rewrite of history, and it's so illogical and bizarre, it's hard to even express. There's two things being said. Fauci and Burke somehow say they weren't for lockdowns. They weren't for school closures. Okay, this is a complete lie.

And the second thing is they're trying to blame the people who are opposed to what was implemented, the lockdowns, for what was failed as implemented, the lockdowns. They're trying to blame the failure of the lockdowns on people like me who opposed to what was implemented. This is unacceptable, and this goes to what we need to do. We need to have a public airing of what happened here. I agree. We have an ethical society. We need our principles.

public needs the truth about what happened during COVID if for no other reason than what they've been through. But the second thing is, and the important part here is we need to have a public demand for admission of error from Fauci, Berks, Redfield, and the lockdowners. Why? Not because we think they're going to apologize. It takes integrity to apologize, as we all know from our personal lives when we're wrong. They're not going to apologize. They're not going to admit But we need to demand it because we need it in public because otherwise the people in power, they will do it again. And they not only will do it again for a pandemic, which is inevitable, there will be more pandemics,

but there will be other things. Climate change, I anticipate there will be reasons made to do lockdowns. We cannot ever have this disastrous policy ever done in a free society again. They can do it in a country that has a barbaric. human rights violating government like China. But that's not what this country is supposed to be. You in the middle of this, and obviously nothing's going right. At one point, I didn't realize until I read your book

that you were part of bringing this group together for the Great Barrington Declaration. I don't want to get deep into it because we don't have a lot of time, but Sinetra Gupta, J. Abadacharya, Martin Koldorf. Of course, you were talking to Joseph Latipo before that. You know, other great luminaries, John Ionidis. You were trying to bring them. It seems to me reading this book, but I was also watching it in real time.

You're trying to bring them in. You're trying to get someone in the Trump administration. Will you let me put my side in front of the cameras? And it just, Burke says no. Why does Birx have that power? It just seemed to me, why didn't Donald Trump just say, here's Tony Fauci and Birx, here's Scott Atlas and Sinatra Gupta and the Great Barrington Declaration,

and the world you should all hear what they're arguing about. Because I as president being asked to make a decision here, and it's not one-sided like you think. Why wasn't that his job? Shouldn't he just said, here it is to the public. And if you don't arrive, then Scott Atlas is going to get the entire hour and his group. Why did that never happen? It just seemed to me this would have solved everything.

Well, it certainly would have been important. And I'll say what exactly happened. When I first got there, which was basically August 1, 2020, July 30th. I said, okay, I need to bring in people to speak to the president who are doing the research because Fauci, Berks, Redfield, these are bureaucrats, they don't know what they're talking about, and I am not enough alone. So I brought in, I arranged a meeting with Joe LaDapo from UCLA at the time, Cody

Meisner from Tufts in Boston, Martin Koldorf from Harvard, Jay Batacharia from Stanford. And we five, this is in September of 2020. We all came in to the White House. And the day before the meeting, Burke sent it. And this was arranged so that Berks could attempt. The day before the meeting, these guys were already flying out there. Burke says in an email, I'm not coming to the meeting. It's not good for me.

And I thought to myself, okay, this person cannot take the scientific debate. okay that's not science if you're afraid to stay your that you can't have science without the debate number one there's obviously not the behavior of a scientist that's the behavior of an insecure bureaucrat uh in my opinion but in the meantime i was called into jared kushner's office right then and said okay the meeting's off and i said well what do you mean the meeting's off uh i think it's actually the end of august beginning of september and and he said well burks isn't going to come and the secretaries around were saying you know it's going to look bad if we have it without her. I said, well,

Burks was invited. She's deciding not to come. This is way too important. Again, I sort of went ballistic. If people are dying here, I insist they're coming to speak to the president. And so I was told there's five minutes instead of what I had wanted, which was a big meeting with a press conference. And reporters asking questions. That was the point of this. But no, five minutes I got. And so I said, okay.

And so we went into the White House overall. office, I told these guys, Meisner, Lodapo, Jay Batichari, and Martin Koldorf, be very succinct. We're there for a few minutes. Just answer his questions. Don't go off. Just answer his questions. That's the role of an advisor. And so the president goes in, as I said, he starts going one by one asking, the meeting

went between 45 minutes an hour. And I kept getting tapped on the shoulder by people in the Oval Office saying, you know, Scott, we have a lot of other things on the schedule here. I'm not going to interrupt the president, number one. Number two, he needs to know the information. And so we went on, he even had a video camera brought in asking me to narrate, although that video has disappeared. But we answered his questions.

And then what happened was a month or so later, I said, okay, it's still a disaster here. I want to bring in Sinatra Gupta. So by this point I knew Martin and Jay, and I called up Martin. I said, do you know Sinatra? And he said, well, yeah, we're talking to Sinatra. I'm trying to get her to come to the U.S. And so I helped arrange her security clearance to get her to come to the U.S.

Because this is when flights were blocked. And on the way, they all stopped in Great Barrington, Massachusetts. That was a way for them to get together. I don't think there was a real plan to do much except get together and maybe do an interview or something. And because I had set up a meeting with Secretary Azar of Health in Human Services in in the White House and so they met there and then flew to Washington and we four the three Great Barrington this is the day after the Great Barrington was written declaration but it was

not it was arranged way before so we went and we we answered Azar's questions and of course that was reported by the poisonous media as somehow he had a bunch of herd immunity advocates in there trying to push for letting it rip, and that was never even discussed. There was never a discussion of that. We went through the data on children, on schools, on the harms from closing schools, on the fallacy of lockdowns, on how to protect the elderly even better. That was the purpose of the meeting. So I thought we were gaining traction, but again, the media was frankly very harmful to the public good.

I mean, there's a good comparison study of the media of America versus non-American English-speaking. media. 90 plus percent of stories during 2020 about the pandemic by American media were quantifiably negative, even when the cases were going down. But outside the U.S., 54% were negative. They had the same pandemic. Were these people, you know, Berks and them, I mean, we had these solutions that could have reduced, as you brought up hydroxychloroquine. Did you ever hear them saying, you know, like there's been a lot of censorship, huge censorship going on. We need to shut down like perhaps Dr. Peter McCullough and his conversation about hydroxychloroquine or Dr. Pierre-Corrie and Ivermectin, did you hear anything like going out of the way to sort of shut

that conversation down? Well, I didn't hear an explicit mention of those people or any kind of censorship. But what did happen was Redfield went to the press and said something like everything Scott Atlas says is wrong. Of course, everything I said was 100% right. And it was known when I said it. It wasn't new knowledge, by the way, I want to make that clear. This was not learned during 2020 late or 2021 or 2022.

It was all known in spring of 2020 that masks didn't work, that children were very, very low risk, that you got protection after getting COVID and recovering. You know, all these things were known. But what they did was use their leverage and with their friends in the media to delegations. legitimize people like me. That is a form of censorship. Not only that, but there was censorship that was uncovered in the emails directly, commandeered by Fauci and, unconscionably, the head of the NIH, Francis Collins, that was later after October. And then, of course, Yeah, you found out they had a hit basically on the Great Barrington Declaration. Right.

We need to strike this down. So, I mean, you're very busy. And I I know you have to get on the run. I want to ask you this question because you're in the middle of it. We're all sitting here saying why. What? Why was a virus that we now know for certain had a death rate? I think it's coming at about 0.035%, you know, across. So really right as perhaps a bad flu, 3% maybe amongst the most, you know, significantly at risk at the highest points.

but it was so specific, so easy to have protected. Great Barronton Declaration made perfect sense. Let's just bubble wrap every nursing home in the world. The rest of us get out. Let's live our lives. If there's a vaccine here, great. But if not, colleges should stay open. You made great points.

Colleges should stay open. Yes, they're catching up, but they're all walking around asymptomatic, not a single hospitalization or death on a college. Instead, they shut them down, sent them home to infect their families. their grandparents and keep spreading this thing. You were making sense the whole time. It made perfect, reasonable science sense. As you said, it wasn't brand new.

It was basically high school science. What do you think is the motivation in America especially? Did they make a crisis destroy our lives to get rid of Donald Trump as president of the United States? Is that a, is that a motivating factor or is it to push a vaccine program? Well, you know, the question about motive and why. is always the most difficult, so it's partly a guess. I saw many different motivations, but they had a common end point. I'm not a believer that everyone was, first of all, you're giving people too much credit

to assume that they had the brains to organize some kind of a massive thing. I've said it a lot on this show, too. They're very non, they're low-level thinkers, frankly, and that's sort of a broad brush, obviously. But I honestly think there were motivations of power. Power is very important to people, particularly people who are suddenly famous. Like you take a guy who's an epidemiologist who's never seen a TV screen, and all of a sudden he becomes well known. You see a complicit, potentially guilt in the funding of research that caused the virus, right? We know for a fact that the NIH gave funding to the Wuhan lab.

That's in the Wuhan publications. They list the grant numbers. Okay, so if you're just hypothetical, if you were a guy who was one of the people who signed off on that funding, and then there's this pandemic killing people, you might want to portray yourself as very, very safe, the safest person in the world. You may want to say stuff like wear two masks. You may want to say stuff like wear goggles, which Dr. Fauci said in July of 2020. So there are different motivations.

There's financial corruption. There's no doubt. There's a linkage with big pharma. You know, there's financial corruption of people even with a subsequent position. There are people that were secretary or head of FDA is on the board of a company that owns Medina. I mean, there were people that had their own personal motivations, and that's very sad. And there's also something we cannot ignore and cannot say enough really is gross, gross incompetence. You had people, Burke's Fauci and Redfield had a common thread, by the way, in their history,

which is they all worked on AIDS, HIV and AIDS. And so, you know, Burke's funded, directed funding toward Redfield's labs, et cetera. She did postdoc work with Fauci. They're a very longstanding relationship there. But they also have a common mentality of. HIV. Okay, how does that virus spread? Well, that's a virus that is stopped by barriers. That's not a respiratory virus, we all know. They had a different way to think about things that was grossly wrong. And by the way, you can look up Fauci's history on AIDS, which is well known and well documented, where he was claiming even after it was known how AIDS spread, that, well, you've got to be careful, you might be able to get it through casual contact with your children and your home. This was spread. He wrote that. That was said. He wrote that.

He was also all in on a vaccine for AIDS. And so he didn't push for drug treatment of AIDS. And the same pattern is what we see here. One of the biggest failures, maybe the biggest by the NIH and the FDA during this entire thing, was they did not do rapidly clinical trials on drugs that were already safe and FDA approved. They didn't do it. People died of that. That's right.

And this is really a huge failure that will go on as one of the historical epic. failures in the management of this pandemic as they ignored easy to do clinical trials for drugs that were safe and why? I don't know. Maybe it was financial corruption. Maybe it was because Trump came out prematurely and said hydroxychloroquine works. You should take it. But it became far bigger than politics, I think. Just my last question, because we sit here, we're being told by Bill Gates world economic forum. W.H.O. is trying to now use all of this to, you know, control the world the next time there's a pandemic. They seem very excited about this idea of a pandemic around the corner. It doesn't matter that pandemics used to come like every 50 years. Now apparently it's

going to be a biannual experience for the world. At least it seems that way. What is, what, our audience is out of here. I have a very intelligent audience. They've been following all the science you're talking about. many of us were trying to make a difference in this world. What do you think about the state of this country? Did we learn anything? Are we ready for another pandemic? Or are we on the verge of being locked down, shut down? Is it when we think of the World Economic Forum?

It's a great reset that they seem to want to take away all of our rights as a part of these things. Well, I think we're in a precarious situation at the very least here. What we've seen here is not only the legacy. of Fauci is that he presided over the biggest failure in public health guidance ever. Not only is it the massive destruction of a younger generation, particularly poor people, and shifting the burden unethically to the poor and to our children, not only is there now a loss of trust in all guidance, but I believe part of that legacy is a complete loss of basic civility in this country.

And so we have a cohesion problem. We have a moral and ethical failure of shifting the burden toward poor people and toward our children. And we have a massive failure, if you want to be going into philosophy, of what it is to be a virtuous society. The kind of society we thought we had.

The kind of society you must have in a free society, in a democracy, where there's a diversity of you, And what is the biggest absence in our country? It's an absence of courage. We have a void in courage. In the people, that's what we have seen, in my view.

And as Aristotle has said, the courage is a predicate to all other virtues. You can't have a functioning moral civilization, ethical civilization. if you don't have people have the courage to speak up against wrong. And I think that you mentioned it, it is true. We've had several presidents in a row now that don't understand that when they're elected, they're elected to be leaders for everybody, including people who didn't vote for them. Okay, we need to reset our moral and ethical compass here.

I want to make something that your public viewing may not even understand is that we did all these mandates on children for vaccines and boosters and forced testing and did medical clinical trials on infants and toddlers that are breaking all medical ethics rules at Stanford, at Johns Hopkins, at all of our great medical centers. They did those clinical trials with the hope that it would, what, shield for a disease that young children have no significant risk from, healthy children, with the hope that it would shield adults from this infection, I'm a father. My children are not to be used to shields for me.

I'm a shield for my children. So we have to re-examine ourselves as a society. And by the way, the U.K., Denmark, Sweden, Finland, dozens of countries did not mandate vaccines for children. They had the same data. They knew what the data was. We are an outlier on what we did to our younger generation and now have a younger generation that we have inflicted an obesity crisis on.

The 52% of college age kids gained an average of 28 pounds during the lockdowns of 2020. That's an obesity crisis. We've created a generation of young children, toddlers who think they are a vector of disease, they are a danger to their parents and grandparents, that everyone's a danger to them. This is what we're grappling with. It's not the pandemic now. It's not about just reforming the funding of science, which is controlled by a cabal of people at the highest levels. We need to get decentralized funding. We need to make far more transparency in the discussions at the CDC. We need a complete house cleaning of the FDA, the CDC, and the NIH. And that's going to require

a real tough new president and new leadership, but we need something more. And that is we need our people in this country to wake up and what I said, rise up. Rise up means speak up. Make your voices heard. This is a free society because when you turn around, you've lost all the freedoms that you thought you're had. And that's not the kind of country we want to leave to leave to our children. Absolutely brilliant. You have a plan to catch. I could do this all day. Dr. Scott Atlas, it has been such a pleasure. Thank you for having me. To spend this time with you for everyone out there.

Amazon tried to block your ability to buy this book, go out and get it. We only covered just some of what's in here. This is one of the most important stories of our lifetime. We have to understand this because if we don't know our history, we are doomed to repeat it. Definitely check out the podcast that Dr. Scott Atlas does, Independent Truths, with Dr. Scott Atlas, independent.org slash Scott Atlas. just Twitter, same thing. There it is. And all of this will be available to you if you're on our newsletter.