How Fauci Politicized America's Scientific Community with Dr. Scott Atlas, M.D.
Charlie welcomes Scott W. Atlas, M.D., the Robert Wesson Senior Fellow in health care policy at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. He's also the author of the new book, "A Plague Upon Our House: My Fight at the Trump White House to Stop COVID from Destroying America." On August 10, 2020, President Trump announced that Dr. Atlas would join his administration as an advisor on the administration's COVID-19 policy response team. Dr. Atlas explains what it was like helping guide federal policy while coming in late to the Trump Administration, including working with Dr. Birx and Dr. Fauci. Who came up with locking down the entire country including the healthy? Why on earth did the United States close schools? And finally, how does Dr. Fauci control a cabal of scientists within the country's medical establishment?Support the show: http://www.charliekirk.com/supportSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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Winning the Culture War00:02:09
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Hey, everybody.
Welcome to this episode of the Charlie Kirk Show.
With us today is a wise and courageous man, Dr. Scott Atlas, who is the author of a new book that everyone should go purchase and pick up.
It is titled A Plague Upon Our House.
Dr. Atlas, welcome to the Charlie Kirk Show.
A Critical Thinker's Background00:06:54
Okay, thanks for having me.
So let's start with just introduce yourself, a little bit of your background, and how did you get into this entire national conversation around COVID, our reaction around it, and talk a little bit about your time in the Trump White House.
Sure.
So, you know, I'm a health policy scholar at the Hoover Institution of Stanford University for the past 15 plus years.
And I have a 25-year background as a professor in clinical medicine and medical research at Stanford University, where I was professor and chief of neuroradiology there before taking the health policy job, which I've been doing for 10 years full time.
And I was working and noticed back in February that the country was off the rails.
The whole narrative about the pandemic, the pronouncements from the federal government, as well as many places in the world, were not sensible.
They were not actually reflecting a logical common sense approach to a viral disease.
And the country was off the rails with the lockdowns.
And so in March of 2020, I began to research and write full time about the pandemic and was writing about a more logical approach, which was we knew who was at risk.
We knew who to protect.
We should protect them directly.
Instead, what was being done was we knew who was at risk, but we were ignoring that.
And we were going to lock down all of society, close schools, close businesses, and stop functioning of everyone, even the lowest risk people.
And that was against the data and the science and all logic.
And so I started to work on that.
And then basically, toward the end of July, I was called up by the White House and asked if I would come and speak to the president.
Given that it was, you know, the biggest healthcare crisis in the century, and I'm a healthcare policy expert with a background in medical science.
Of course, the answer is yes, I'll come talk to the president.
So I came to speak to the president, and he asked me a bunch of questions.
And I was very forthright and direct.
And I spoke to a bunch of other people.
And at the end of the day, Jared Kushner said to me, We'd like you to help.
And so I said, I just want to make sure you know what you're getting here because I'm not going to ever change what I say no matter who tells me to, if I think I'm right.
I'm not going to sign on to any sort of group statement if it's not what I believe.
And I'm not going to say anything that someone else wants me to say unless I think it's correct.
And to his credit, he said, that's exactly why we want you.
And so I felt reassured at that at the end of that day.
And then he said something that was a little bit nerve-wracking, which is, you know, if this becomes public, you're going to be destroyed.
And I'm very concerned about that, Jared said.
And so that, of course, threw me a little bit because, you know, I'm basically not political in any way.
And I was doing this because the answer when the president asks you to help is yes.
So at that statement, I said, well, maybe I'll try to help from home.
And after a few days, it wasn't working.
Things were real time.
And meantime, there were all kinds of nonsense being spewed out by the people on the task force, which was the voice of the federal policy.
And so I said, okay, I'll come and help.
So I started working there, you know, at the end of July, beginning of August, and I stayed for my temporary position, which was a 130-day temporary position.
And, you know, this was how it worked there.
And so basically, you know, this was a shock to me.
And I think this is what people will understand from the book about what actually happened, what the thinking was, and what the actions were and the level of knowledge and critical thinking, which was absent on the task force.
Well, I mean, the point is that, you know, I was used to being, I'm a critical thinker.
That's the job.
You don't have to be a scientist to be a critical thinker, but if you're going to be a scientist, you better damn well be a critical thinker.
And so I came into the task force in the middle of August, actually.
And what I saw was shocking.
There were the medical people in the task force.
It was run the medical side by Dr. Deborah Burks.
And Dr. Fauci wasn't running it, but he was the most influential public face of the task force.
And Dr. Redfield was the head of the CDC and on the task force.
And these three people, you know, they were basically, these people are bureaucrats.
Burks and Fauci were in the government positions for 40 years.
Okay, I had a totally different background.
I'm a health policy and medical science scholar, and I'm used to being challenged and presenting from the data and analyzing in a critical way the data.
So I would come into the meetings, there'd be a question.
I had a dozen or 20 different scientific papers from all over the world in my briefcase, and I would go through the data.
And in response to that, they would have nothing to say to refute it.
They would have no refutation based on science.
They would never cite a scientific article, but instead, they would just go to their friends in the media or just say, you're fringe, or you're speaking without against the experts.
In the meantime, you know, I had been speaking with the experts almost every single day, expert epidemiologists, virologists, public health doctors, infectious disease scientists, almost every single day for months, including every day when I was in the White House.
And, you know, I just was at a different level.
I mean, the second part to realize, I think, for everyone who's listening is that the policies of the federal government advice were run by Dr. Burks.
Dr. Burks was the task force coordinator.
She was the official representative of the task force months before I walked in, during the months I was there, and afterwards.
And so she gave the advice to all the governors in writing.
She was on the road visiting them, dozens of states and public health officials.
I visited one single state, and that was Florida at the request of Governor DeSantis, who did something very different.
And so when you see in the news this Orwellian rewrite of history by Burks and others, somehow blaming people who were opposed to what was implemented for what was implemented on her advice, you know, this is the kind of world we're living in.
Hey, everybody, Charlie Kirk here.
Stopping the Spread Myth00:14:40
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Yeah, so there's so many, there's so many different directions I want to go with that.
So let's just start with who on earth came up with this idea of locking down a country?
Where did this come from?
What was the data behind it?
Why was this able to happen with such consensus and agreement?
And still happening in parts of our country, not as much, but in parts of Europe, they're still entertaining lockdowns.
Doctor, where did this come from?
So this was counter and in fact against what had been written in previous pandemic literature in previous iterations.
This was something that originated with this idea of quote stopping the spread.
Okay, so that made some logical sense.
Stopping the spread meant slowing the spread, not stopping the cases, but slowing things so that hospitals wouldn't get overrun in a temporary mode.
And that original, if you may remember, 15-day, let's, you know, 15 days to slow the spread.
We're still in part.
We're still in that.
Right.
And so, you know, this sort of made sense.
I think everybody was all in on this temporary 15 days to slow the spread so we wouldn't overrun the hospital.
But what that happened was it evolved into this sort of obsessive and irrational, frankly, non-scientific idea that you could stop the spread of a virus by locking down.
And so the lockdowns in the end were instituted.
These are what I call the Burke Spauchy lockdowns.
And don't forget what the public health figures in the United States say has extreme influence on the world.
Believe me, everybody in the world knows and hears what our public health figures say.
Excuse me.
So when we see this kind of irrational idea from people that were not used to working with this sort of virus, by the way, Burke Spauci and Redfield share something that people don't realize, and that is they worked on HIV together.
AIDS and HIV is transmitted very differently.
It's a completely different virus.
And by the way, these people were all in on developing an HIV vaccine instead of drug treatments, if you read the literature.
And this sort of may explain some of their approach to this.
But in any event, this kind of obsession with stopping all cases was irrational.
Even at the point of the spring and summer of 2020, tens of millions of Americans had the virus.
This was even admitted by the CDC.
This is a virus that's transmitted by breathing.
And so, you know, it's sort of irrational to do what they did.
And what they did, again, failed to stop the infection and destroyed families and literally killed people.
And this is the data.
The data on the lockdowns were that they failed to stop the spread.
And in fact, the most important paper written is in June of 2021, this year.
And your listeners should look at this if they're interested, which is, it was a study by the RAND Institute in USC in June 2021.
And it showed that the lockdowns actually resulted in increased deaths.
The lockdowns actually were instituted.
And when the deaths were coming down in 43 countries and in the United States, deaths increased.
The lockdowns killed people.
And that makes sense because economic damages are severe.
And when you lose jobs, you have, as we see, an explosion of deaths in explosion of drug abuse, explosion of sexual and child abuse, explosion of psychiatric visits, explosion of suicides in teenagers, explosion of self-harm tripling from the isolation, not from the virus, of self-harms in teenagers.
This is people putting cigarettes out on their skin or cutting their wrists here, as a big predictor of suicide, by the way, from the lockdowns.
The U.S. stands out, by the way, in following the Burke's Fauci advice of closing schools.
In the fall of 2020, our peer nations in Europe already recognized the data from the whole world's data that the schools were not a place where the cases spread, in fact, to adults.
In fact, children had extremely healthy children, extremely low risk from COVID.
That was proven by them a year and a half ago.
And it was already proven that children are not a significant source of spread to adults.
And it was also proven that teachers do not have a high risk in school settings from the world's data.
Yet the United States kept its schools closed for the full year in almost the entire country, Western Europe open.
This is a tragic abuse of children in the United States, really a breaking of the social contract between society and its children.
Well, Doctor, I completely agree.
And we were harsh critics of the lockdown, citing your commentary in your writings early and often.
However, what confuses so many members of our audience, and since you were on the front lines, I'd love your take on this, it seems obvious.
Then why do we keep on doing it?
Why is it that we were ruled by people that were more ideological?
I'm being nice, right?
I mean, these decisions have major and serious consequences.
And we're completely at odds with the data.
You know, strip all the politics aside, just looking at it empirically, you could not justify more lockdowns, more school closures, yet we did.
Can you give us any insight into the internal dynamics?
Did Fauci and Burks have a separate pile of data they weren't telling anyone?
Or was it there's another side of the story where they just didn't care?
I'd love your take on that.
Okay, so I'll first state what I believe, and I think everyone should believe people do want the pandemic to end.
I mean, I don't think that I would never ascribe a motive as evil as that.
There was no separate data.
In fact, like I tried to say here, these people didn't have that.
What they thought was data was just simple tabulations of cases.
Okay, that's not an analysis.
That's not critical thinking.
I'm talking about the world's literature, the world's data, the evolving science.
They never brought that forward in my presence at any of the meetings.
I never heard them talk about studies.
I never saw them critique a study like a critical thinking scientist should.
And I never heard anyone refute what I said by quoting studies.
Never, not once.
So that wasn't really the reason.
Now, the question why, of course, is very difficult to answer.
People at some level are in too deep.
These people will never admit they were wrong.
That I guarantee.
I mean, just as sort of an aside, the Catholic Church admitted after 359 years that Galileo was right, the Earth moved.
The heliocentric theory of the Earth.
Sure.
Yeah, I'm going to take the over, if you want to speak in betting language, on how many years it'll take for lockdown advocates to admit they were wrong.
These people's whole careers are in there.
Now, why did we follow?
So there's another reason, which is, of course, there's a conflict of interest in people.
There is this very insidious but sort of evil cabal in science.
And the science has been politicized.
And they, for instance, a scientist wrote the article to The Lancet in February 2020, claiming it was already known that the virus absolutely was of natural origin.
And anyone who said otherwise was a conspiracy theorist.
Okay, this is not a scientific statement.
This is a political statement.
And of course, it was incorrect in that no one knew that the virus was of natural origin.
I don't know what the origin of the virus is, but we certainly did not know in February 2020 absolutely that it was of natural origin.
That's ludicrous and in fact overtly false.
And there were other defamatory things written by scientists and published in scientific journals about people like me and others.
So why would that happen?
Well, number one, partly it was political.
You know, I mean, it's undeniable that there's a massive bias on one side of the aisle about politics.
I'll give you an example.
At Stanford University, the zip code of Stanford, California went two to one Biden to Trump.
Stanford was 95% Biden, 3% Trump.
Okay, so there's a political sort of take on that.
And particularly in other ways, it's obvious.
It's in the book.
But the second part is there's a conflict of interest in funding in science.
The NIH and Dr. Fauci personally controls a massive amount of the funding of research.
This is a fact.
The second fact that people don't understand is that the main thing that underlies scientific promotions in universities, faculty promotions, successful research, journal publications, is NIH funding of the research.
And then the people in charge of the scientific journals are the same people who review the research funding.
And so there's this very sort of nepotistic, I don't know how to describe it.
It's a cabal.
They control the careers of all the scientists, the funding stream, and they control the funding stream.
And so it would be very risky, as a hypothetical, for funded young, particularly by assistant associate professors in universities.
It would be very risky for them to start saying something that countered what Dr. Fauci said, for instance.
So there's this sort of conflict of interest built into the system that's very nefarious and is now interfering with seeking the truth.
Okay, we're in a country here where science has been politicized and where there is intimidation that prohibits the free exchange of ideas.
And this bodes very poorly for being able to solve future crises.
And we know this is not the last healthcare crisis or other crisis that we will see.
So, and then the other part of this is financial, of course.
When you have companies making tens of billions of dollars per year, their incentive is to make the money.
And so, you know, you have a company, let's just say company X is pushing boosters for vaccines.
Now, boosters for vaccines, these vaccines are experimental.
They work in terms so far the data shows that they prevent people who have a risk of dying from dying.
Okay, that's critical to understand.
That's good.
Their protection against infection wanes after four to six months, significantly wanes.
So they're not protective really long term at all against getting infected and against spreading the infection.
They're protective against death, and that is the reason why a high-risk person should take the vaccine.
This is an experimental technology, though.
We don't have long-term data on safety.
Typically, safety data on a vaccine takes five to ten years.
We don't have the vaccine for five to ten years.
Obviously, it was approved emergency use after a very short study on tens of thousands of people.
And then after the EUA, the emergency use, it turns out that all the people in the placebo arm, almost all of them got the vaccine.
So we don't have a placebo arm.
We never did a long-term study.
But even worse than that is the booster stuff.
When you have a company who's making tens of billions of dollars and they're pushing the boosters, and then you have scientists who are not public health leaders who are not using the normal thinking about saying things should be used like boosters where we have no significant safety data on an experimental technique, experimental drug, the safety data from Israel is on 30 days of observation, as far as I know, 30 days in a few thousand people.
This is not the way you judge safety.
And we already know half the people have had the infection about in the United States.
They have natural immunity.
And so you have an experimental drug with known side effects.
We don't have transparency on the side effects.
There's not a transparency on the side effects from the vaccine.
And we have people pushing vaccines on young people, children, and very young adults who are healthy, who have extremely low risk from the illness.
And we're expected to push vaccines and boosters eventually on these people.
I think you have to wonder who is who, where are the bioethicists here?
Okay, where are the, this is really, you have to question the morality of what's going on in this country.
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Well, I definitely would.
And so I'm just disappointed and confused, I guess, that as wealthy and as powerful our nation is, that the obvious was ignored by the people in charge of our public health.
I would have thought that we were at a place post-enlightenment that we could look at the data, look at it non-dogmatically, non-politically, and say, you know, the lockdowns are not helping.
The, you know, the massive vaccine, you know, inoculation campaign might not be wise or prudent with certain populations.
But, doctor, you touched on this, you know, profit incentives, you know, Fauci controlling the funding.
But what we're really getting at, though, is that science, as they always say it, is not the primary motivation here.
It isn't.
There's other things at play.
Am I reading that right?
Yeah, I think it's a fair statement to say that decisions were made that were not just counter to science and denying decades of scientific knowledge.
We still see that today, but they were really against the public health interest of the country.
They were counter to the public health interest, and they still are being made, that are counter to the health interests of the country.
When you talk about what the public health leadership did, the task force people, the doctors, Burke, Spauci, and others, their opinions on what to do were focused on one thing, stopping COVID-19 pieces at all costs.
That's an inappropriate leadership of public health.
My focus as a public health policy expert here was the appropriate focus, which is you have to consider all of health.
You never do a public health policy without considering the impact of the policy itself on the public health.
It's not just about stopping COVID.
We know that we destroy people.
The public health impact of this lockdown part of our history is not going to be completely felt for years, if not decades.
There's one study in the National Bureau of Economic Research that says that over the next 15 years, there will be 900,000 deaths of Americans extra from the lockdowns, not the virus, from missed medical care, from the unemployment, from all the things that I sort of partly articulated here.
And when we see that, that is really an unconscionable - this is the greatest error of public health policy probably in the history of the modern world.
That's a huge statement, and I agree with it.
Yeah, I mean, it's a tragic abuse.
And by the way, one more thing: it was much more impactful on lower-income families, on children in lower-income families.
This was lockdowns are a luxury of the rich.
Okay, when you have people who are in this elite class, including the class that I'm in, my job goes on from Zoom meetings.
You get Amazon delivering things, but the people that have regular jobs, the people that clean the bathrooms in the restaurant, it's not just the restaurant owner, it's all the people that work there in the small businesses.
These people lost everything.
And not only that, many of them were deemed essential workers.
So they got exposed to COVID more.
They're delivering your stuff from Amazon.
They're driving the bus.
While the people who are in the elite class, huddled up with their masks on in their home, they're not impacted significantly.
This is a heinous, really abuse of social class here.
I mean, I have so many thoughts on that.
The book is a plague upon our house.
So, doctor, let's talk about kind of where we're at now.
And there's some outlying questions about the vaccine.
And I know you've come out, I believe, against vaccinating children.
I don't want to put words in your mouth.
I might have read that.
Maybe I'm mistaken.
But there are outlying questions as why are the countries that are so vaccinated having spikes in COVID?
Israel, Singapore, Gibraltar, Vermont is the most vaccinated state in the country, and they have the highest COVID rate right now in America.
What's your thought on this?
Because to clarify the position that I, my opinion is that high-risk people should really, you know, I'm not anybody's doctor.
You should make a judgment in consultation with your doctor.
I hope you have a rational critical thinking.
That's the point.
It's not.
That's not.
Yeah, that's an assumption, exactly.
But assuming you have that in theory, you should make a judgment on your own risk from the illness and your own risk or benefit from the vaccine.
So high-risk people, I personally think, should take the vaccine.
I think high-risk children should take the vaccine, high-risk from COVID.
Okay, but high-risk children are not most children.
And so basically, what's happening to answer your question lies with the data on the vaccine.
When you look at the studies from the UK, from Israel, from Qatar, and as a side statement here, I never thought I'd see the day where I trust the data from other countries more than I trust the data from our own country.
I agree with you.
I want to get that.
I am in that.
Yes.
We are in that stage right now.
But in any event, when you look at the data, and the best study recently I read was from Sweden, and these studies all show the following pattern.
They show, this is the answer to what's going on in part anyway.
You know, they show that the protection against infection is very temporary.
It's short-lived with the vaccine.
You can vaccinate people with these vaccines, and after three to five months, you have a precipitous drop in the protection against being infected.
Okay, so when you look at that, that happened in Israel, that it has 39% efficacy after six months.
You look at Qatar, which showed that the and the other Israel studies that compared natural immunity, the studies that are important in Sweden, the studies show that the protection against death stays there for very, very good.
As far as we know, we don't even have a year after vaccine yet.
But if you look at Sweden, after nine to 10 months, still very high, 80% protection against death, unless you're over 80, the people who are over 80 starts to drop after about nine months.
Doesn't mean it's dropped to zero, but it's still pretty high.
You have to realize vaccines generally don't are not foolproof.
I mean, the flu vaccine, you know, half the people who die from flu had vaccination.
Okay, so, you know, it's not a surprise that it's not perfect even against death.
But against infection, there's a precipitous drop down to anywhere from zero to 20% after six months.
So that's very different from people who have had the infection and recovered.
The study from Israel is the best one that showed this in a large study that showed that there's 27-fold higher incidence of symptomatic COVID in people who were vaccinated compared to people who were recovered naturally from the infection.
The best immunity data that we see, if you compare two groups, people who were never infected but had the vaccine, compared to people who were infected and didn't get the vaccine, the people who were infected and didn't get the vaccine have a much more durable immunity, eight-fold better, eight-fold reduction in hospitalizations compared to people who got the vaccine.
So the vaccine, okay, it isn't as good as what was hoped in terms of preventing infection.
And so people, we've had the vaccine now going since mid-December in the U.S.
So plenty of people have had it after six months.
If you're high risk, that's a case to get a booster.
Okay, high-risk people, meaning people have high risk to die or get serious illness.
But people who have a low risk, I think that's a different kind of question.
So it's not a surprise given the data that we're seeing increasing cases even in populations that have been vaccinated.
We have to remember one other thing, Charlie, if I can, which is the idea that mandating vaccines, even for people who are low risk, low risk from illness, people who are children, all these kind of sort of inappropriate mandates, in my view, are undermining the confidence in the vaccines.
The worst enemy of vaccine acceptance is inappropriate mandating of the vaccine.
Okay, this is really causing people who should get the vaccine to say, wait a second, I don't want the vaccine.
By the way, we know there are complications from the vaccine.
Why Internet Privacy Matters00:02:32
It's not clear how frequent, but very serious complications in young males, myocarditis.
It's a small percentage, but it's serious.
Other countries are issuing warnings about this.
Other countries, England's group, the group consulting the UK's government, has said for now they do not recommend because of the cost-benefit ratio here, meaning risk-benefit, they do not really recommend people under 16 getting the vaccine.
Okay, we're busy trying to mandate vaccines for school children here.
I don't, there's something uniquely off the rails in the United States.
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Challenging Mandated Vaccines00:03:27
And you can't, how can we, how can you pinpoint it?
I mean, it's just all the different factors you already talked about, I guess.
There's an inappropriate, you know, there's a government overreach here that is contrary to the science.
The CDC has made statements contrary or ignoring natural immunity.
Okay, we're the only country that I know of in the Western world that just simply ignores the fact that half of our population has immunity, very good immune protection from COVID.
We don't care.
We're just mandating vaccination for people.
I mean, this is sort of contrary to science.
This is really talking about misinformation, pseudoscience, very dangerous.
And frankly, we had the wrong people in charge of the public health leadership in the United States.
So we have two minutes, three minutes.
I want to be really respectful of your time.
And everyone, please go check out Dr. Atlas's book, The Plague That Came Becon, The Plague Upon Our House.
Is that right?
Plague Upon Our House.
That's right.
Plague Upon Our House.
But so, just to kind of complete it all together, Doctor, it doesn't seem like there's many people like you.
I can name them a short list, but why is there so much silence amongst the American medical community?
Partly, yeah, partly because of this complicated relationship of their own careers depending upon funding from the NIH itself.
But, you know, this points out something very important: the censorship, the censure by the intimidation by academia on people who are speaking the truth or at least wanting to have the debate is effective.
The intimidation is effective.
I had more than 100 scientists in the country email me saying, Scott, what you're saying is correct.
We're afraid to step forward.
These were scientists at universities, at Stanford University.
There are still people afraid to step forward because they saw what happened to me.
There are people inside the NIH that wrote me encouraging words and saying they were afraid to step forward.
We must stop this politicization and this attempt to censor people.
This cancel culture has impacted science.
And if you have impacted science without scientific truth and the seeking of truth by the free exchange of ideas, what kind of society do we have?
Well, that's what we're living through.
And it's an unhappy society.
It's a confused society.
It's an increasingly irrational society.
And it's too bad because we have the instruments to fix this.
Mostly our reason.
That's the most important thing that we have.
That's right.
People have to step forward and become critical thinkers on their own.
Make the effort.
Trust people who are consistent in what they say.
And you will arrive at a logical conclusion for what's best for you and your family.
I agree.
Dr. Atlas, thank you so much for joining us.
We deeply appreciate it and keep up the great work.
Thank you so much.
Okay, thank you.
Thanks for having me.
Thanks.
Thanks so much for listening, everybody.
Email us your thoughts, freedom at charliekirk.com.
God bless you guys.
Speak to you soon.
For more on many of these stories and news you can trust, go to CharlieKirk. com.