A Plague Upon Our House

My Fight at the Trump White House to Stop COVID from Destroying America

Scott W. Atlas

• Publisher: Bombardier Books
• Year: 2021
• eBook ISBN: 9781637582213
• Topic: Medicine
• Subtopic: Health Policy

National Bestseller as seen on Tucker Carlson, The Ingraham Angle, The Megyn Kelly Show, The Clay Travis & Buck Sexton Show, The Next Revolution with Steve Hilton and more! What really happened behind the scenes at the Trump White House during the COVID pandemic? When Dr. Scott W. Atlas was tapped by Donald Trump to join his COVID Task Force, he was immediately thrust into a maelstrom of scientific disputes, policy debates, raging egos, politically motivated lies, and cynical media manipulation. Numerous myths and distortions surround the Trump Administration's handling of the crisis, and many pressing questions remain unanswered. Did the Trump team really bungle the response to the pandemic? Were the right decisions made about travel restrictions, lockdowns, and mask mandates? Are Drs. Anthony Fauci and Deborah Birx competent medical experts or timeserving bureaucrats? Did half a million people really die unnecessarily because of Trump's incompetence?So far no trusted figure has emerged who can tell the story straight—until now. In this unfiltered insider account, Dr. Scott Atlas brings us directly into the White House, describes the key players in the crisis, and assigns credit and blame where it is deserved.The book includes shocking evaluations of the Task Force members' limited knowledge and grasp of the science of COVID and details heated discussions with Task Force members, including all of the most controversial episodes that dominated headlines for weeks. Dr. Atlas tells the truth about the science and documents the media's relentless campaign to suffocate it, which included canceled interviews, journalists' off-camera hostility in White House briefings, and intentional distortion of facts. He also provides an inside account of the delays and timelines involving vaccines and other treatments, evaluates the impact of the lockdowns on American public health, and indicts the relentless war on truth waged by Big Business and Big Tech.No other book contains these revelations. Millions of people who trust Dr. Atlas will want to read this dramatic account of what really went on behind the scenes in the White House during the greatest public health crisis of the 21st century.

Chapter 1

America off the Rails

It was February 2020, and for weeks I had been trying to finish my book on reforming the US health care system. I was under pressure to meet an impending deadline necessitated by the upcoming election, which I thought would center on single-payer health care. My focus was compiling data on the issues most poorly understood: single-payer health care, the public option, reforming Medicare, and improving health care quality and access for the poor. The failures of the Affordable Care Act seemed to generate a significant momentum toward all-out single payer rather than a reexamination of the causes of those failures and the consequences of the increased government regulations imposed by the ACA.

As always, I needed to be thorough and accurate. But this time more was at stake. Like many issues, health care reform had often been argued on emotion and with disregard for the evidence. I kept focusing on the final slide that I had used for years at Stanford’s Hoover Institution to end every one of my lectures: Facts Matter.

Like most people who spent most of their days on a computer, my tendency was to flip back and forth to other things on the internet, as a quick break from my own work. News accounts had been describing increasingly alarming information about a deadly new virus emanating from Wuhan, China. Separate from my general concern about the spread of the infection, I was confused about some of the basic numbers being aired. The overall message about the virus coming out of the World Health Organization (WHO) seemed to have obvious flaws. To my mind, the extremely high risk estimates seemed very misleading. The reported fatality rates were based only on patients who were sick enough to seek medical care rather than on the undoubtedly much larger population of infected individuals. I was stunned that this basic methodological flaw was being overlooked by almost everyone, while the exaggerated fatality rate of 3.4 percent was highlighted throughout the media. Every legitimate medical scientist should have called that out. I was puzzled at their silence.

In the United States and throughout the world, a naive discussion about statistical models ensued. To an extraordinary and unprecedented extent, these epidemiological models were featured front and center in news headlines, with no perspective on their usefulness. I simply presumed that every serious academic researcher understood the role and limitations of such models, particularly how the wide range of assumptions that go into them can dramatically impact their predictions. Reminiscent of other legendary frenzies in history, like the tulip bulb mania or the tech stock bubble, hypothetical extreme-risk scenarios went seemingly unchallenged and were given absolute credence in the media.

At the same time, common sense and well established principles of medicine were being ignored. Every second-year medical student knew that the elderly were almost certainly the most vulnerable group of people, since they were virtually always at highest risk of death and serious consequences from respiratory infections. Yet this was not stressed. To the contrary, the implication of reports and the public faces of official expertise implied that everyone was equally in danger. Even the initial evidence showed that elderly, frail people with preexisting comorbidities—conditions that weakened their natural immunological defenses—were the ones at highest risk of death. This was a historical fact shared by other respiratory viruses, including seasonal influenza. The one unusual feature of this virus was the fact that children had an extraordinarily low risk. Yet this positive and reassuring news was never emphasized. Instead, with total disregard of the evidence of selective risk consistent with other respiratory viruses, public health officials recommended draconian isolation of everyone.

The architects of the American lockdown strategy were Dr. Anthony Fauci and Dr. Deborah Birx. With Dr. Robert Redfield, the director of the CDC, they were the most influential medical members of the White House Coronavirus Task Force.

The Task Force at its January inception consisted of a small group assembled by President Trump that was coordinated through the National Security Council and advised by several US government agencies and science advisors. At its onset, the group was chaired by Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar. Other members included Robert O’Brien, assistant to the president for National Security Affairs; Dr. Robert Redfield, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention; Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases at the National Institutes of Health; Deputy Secretary Stephen Biegun, Department of State; Ken Cuccinelli, acting deputy secretary, Department of Homeland Security; Joel Szabat, acting under secretary for policy, Department of Transportation; Matthew Pottinger, assistant to the president and deputy national security advisor; Rob Blair, assistant to the president and senior advisor to the chief of staff; Joseph Grogan, assistant to the president and director of the Domestic Policy Council; Christopher Liddell, assistant to the president and deputy chief of staff for policy coordination; and Derek Kan, executive associate director, Office of Management and Budget. It was formally announced by the press secretary on January 29, 2020, with a statement that directly reflected the views of Dr. Anthony Fauci. It read in part: “The risk of infection for Americans remains low, and all agencies are working aggressively to monitor this continuously evolving situation and to keep the public informed.”

The Task Force quickly expanded over the next month to include a new chairman, Vice President Pence. The White House also announced that Dr. Deborah Birx would be the Task Force coordinator. Birx had worked in the State Department as the US AIDS coordinator under the Obama and Trump administrations—hence she was often addressed by the honorific “ambassador.” She had been working in the government since 1985. In the February 26 announcement by the White House, others were added to the Task Force, including Secretary of the Treasury Steven Mnuchin, Surgeon General Jerome Adams, and National Economic Council Director Larry Kudlow. The Task Force ultimately included representation from numerous federal agencies concerned with health, science, national emergencies and logistics, the economy, and many other relevant concerns.

The Task Force dealt with a number of issues at its origin. Since the country had not been well prepared for a pandemic, one of the primary tasks was to develop adequate testing, the mainstay of public health in early infectious disease outbreaks. The second main set of tasks centered around production and logistics of supportive medical equipment, including ventilators, personal protective supplies for hospitals, and extra beds and personnel to accommodate sick patients anticipated to overwhelm the system.

Dr. Birx, Dr. Redfield, and Dr. Fauci—often called “the nation’s expert in infectious disease”—dominated all discussions about the health and medical aspects of the emerging pandemic. One thing was very clear—all three were cut from the same cloth. First, they were all bureaucrats, sharing a background that crossed paths in government agencies. Second, they shared a long history in HIV/AIDS as a public health crisis. Almost the entire background of both Dr. Birx and Dr. Redfield was in HIV/AIDS. That was problematic, because HIV couldn’t be more different from SARS2 in its biology, its amenability to testing and contact tracing, its spread, and the implications of those facts for its control. Indeed, the three of them spent many years focusing on the development of a vaccine, rather than treatment, for HIV/AIDS—a vaccine that still does not exist.

It’s also worth noting the very relevant history of Dr. Fauci in regard to AIDS. He created headlines in New York Times, UPI, and AP articles for his alarmist speculations in his 1983 JAMA editorial that AIDS could be transmitted by “routine close contact, as within a family household.” It had already been known that transmission was via fluids through blood or sexual contact. Less than two months later, on June 26 in the Baltimore Sun, Fauci publicly contradicted his own explosive claim. “It is absolutely preposterous to suggest that AIDS can be contracted through normal social contact like being in the same room with someone or sitting on a bus with them. The poor gays have received a very raw deal on this.” That seemed like quite a flip-flop, with no new evidence or explanation given—more reminiscent of a politician than a reliable scientist.

Most others on the Task Force were juggling several concerns and had no medical background. This was one more responsibility added to their portfolios, so they deferred to those deemed medical experts. Drs. Birx and Fauci commandeered federal policy under President Trump and publicly advocated for a total societal shutdown. Instead of focusing on protecting the most vulnerable, their illogical and extraordinarily blunt response with predictable, wide-ranging harms had been instituted as though it were simple common sense.

Over those first several weeks, fear had taken hold of the public. Media commentators and even many policy experts, many of whom had no perspective on health care, were filling the airwaves and opinion pages with naive and incorrect predictions. This misinformation was going unchecked, and was indeed repeatedly endorsed and sensationalized in the media. Some whom I had previously considered among my smartest colleagues and friends expressed great confusion and a striking absence of logic in analyzing what was happening.

I asked myself, “Where are the critical thinkers?”

As a health policy researcher for more than fifteen years with decades in medical science and data analysis, I had never seen such flawed thinking. I was bewildered at the lack of logic, the absence of common sense, and the reliance on fundamentally flawed science. Suddenly, computer modelers and people without any perspective about clinical illnesses were dominating the airwaves. Along with millions of Americans, I began witnessing unprecedented responses from those in power and nonscientific recommendations by public health spokespeople: societal lockdowns including business and school closures, stay-at-home restrictions on individual movements, and arbitrary decrees by local, state, and federal governments. These recommendations were not just based on panic; they were responsible for generating even more panic. COVID had rapidly become the most important health policy crisis in a century. My policy book on the merits of a competition-based health system simply had to wait.

* * * * *

Over February and early March, I dedicated myself to studying the pandemic in detail to understand and generate the appropriate policy prescriptions. The more I studied the data and the literature, the more obvious it became that basic biology and simple logic were missing from the discussion. Instead, fear had seemingly displaced critical thinking about the data already at hand. No one seemed to remember many fundamentals of science taught in college and medical school. I began asking myself, “Where are the rational scientists?”

I soon found one. Dr. John Ioannidis, one of the world’s most renowned epidemiologists and a colleague previously unknown to me at Stanford University, authored an amazingly prescient piece in March entitled, “A Fiasco in the Making? As the Coronavirus Pandemic Takes Hold, We Are Making Decisions without Reliable Data.” His short essay will go down as one of the most important—and most infamously ignored—publications in modern medical science.

Ioannidis began with what should have been obvious to all critical thinkers with any medical knowledge. His key points:

• “Reported case fatality rates, like the official 3.4% rate from the World Health Organization, cause horror—and are meaningless. Patients who have been tested for SARS-CoV-2 are disproportionately those with severe symptoms and bad outcomes.”

• “The data collected so far on how many people are infected and how the epidemic is evolving are utterly unreliable…and probably the vast majority of infections due to SARS-CoV-2 are being missed.”

He went on to list some very preliminary estimates with simple statistics, implied by a Diamond Princess cruise ship that had been carrying an early group infected with the virus, a closed population, all of whom were tested:

• “The case fatality rate there was 1.0%, but this was a largely elderly population, in which the death rate from Covid-19 is much higher. Projecting the Diamond Princess mortality rate onto the age structure of the U.S. population, the death rate among people infected with Covid-19 would be 0.125%. But since this estimate is based on extremely thin data…the real death rate could stretch from five times lower (0.025%)...

Table of contents

• Plague Upon Our House
• Copyright
• Dedication
• TABLE OF CONTENTS
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction A Broken Trust
• Chapter 1 America off the Rails
• Chapter 2 Off to Washington
• Chapter 3 Welcome to the West Wing
• Chapter 4 The Mad Hatter’s Tea Party
• Chapter 5 The Politics of Testing
• Chapter 6 My Role as the President’s Advisor
• Chapter 7 Meet the Press!
• Chapter 8 Early Conflicts with the Task Force
• Chapter 9 Debating “the Science” about Schools
• Chapter 10 The Talented Dr. Redfield
• Chapter 11 “Don’t Rock the Boat!”
• Chapter 12 Inside the COVID Huddle
• Chapter 13 POTUS Meets the Real Experts…in Secret
• Chapter 14 Rebutting the Science Deniers
• Chapter 15 POTUS Gets COVID
• Chapter 16 The Election Approaches
• Chapter 17 The Florida Success Story
• Chapter 18 Speaking the Truth to the End
• Chapter 19 Assessing the Trump Pandemic Response
• Chapter 20 And That’s the Science!
• Coda 1984 Meets Cancel Culture