She cited a report published by the Centers for Disease Control about a hair salon in Missouri, where two stylists infected with Covid had worn masks that supposedly prevented the virus from infecting their customers. In one of Atlas’s first meetings with her, he asked her what she considered the strongest scientific evidence for the efficacy of masks against Covid. As Pence’s chief subordinate on the Task Force, she shaped its agenda, participated in the regular “Covid huddle” with White House officials, and traveled the country, successfully pressuring state and local leaders to issue mask mandates and close businesses and schools. To me, it is frankly immoral, although I kept that to myself.”įauci got the most media attention of the troika, but Atlas thinks that Birx did the most damage. Instilling fear in the public is absolutely counter to what a leader in public health should do. ‘So you think people aren’t frightened enough?’ He said, ‘Yes, they need to be more afraid.’ To me, this was another moment of Kafkaesque absurdity. “I challenged him to clarify his point,” Atlas writes, “because I couldn’t believe my ears. Yet Fauci still wasn’t satisfied, as Atlas discovered when Fauci complained during one meeting that Americans didn’t take the virus seriously. Surveys showed that most Americans, especially young people, vastly overestimated their risk of serious disease. The troika stoked more needless fears during the Covid pandemic, continually emphasizing worst-case scenarios-the computer models, for example, that wrongly forecast millions of American deaths in the summer of 2020. Redfield, with some help from Fauci, was the chief prophet of a “heterosexual breakout,” a threat that terrified Americans for more than a decade but never materialized. Their long and costly quest to develop an AIDS vaccine ultimately failed, but they did manage to persuade the public that AIDS would spread widely beyond gay men and intravenous drug users. (Reporting later revealed that they had made a pact to resign in unison if any of them was fired.) These veterans of the federal bureaucracy had worked closely together during the AIDS epidemic, and their track record was hardly reassuring. Instead, he found that the Task Force included “zero public health policy experts and no experts with medical knowledge who also analyzed economic, social, and other broad public health impacts other than the infection itself.” Vice President Mike Pence chaired the Task Force, but Atlas says that Pence and the other members were regularly cowed into submission by three doctors who dominated from the start: Deborah Birx, the Task Force’s coordinator, along with Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, and Robert Redfield, director of the Centers for Disease Control.Ītlas calls them “the troika” because of their strategy for presenting a united front, never disagreeing with one another during the meetings in the White House Situation Room. A veteran medical researcher and health-policy analyst at the Hoover Institution, Atlas, a radiologist, joined the Task Force six months into the pandemic, after he had published estimates that lockdowns could ultimately prove more deadly than Covid.Ītlas expected to spend his time at the White House discussing scientific data and debating the best strategies for protecting public health. Atlas provides an answer: because the nation’s governance was hijacked by three bureaucrats with scant interest in scientific research or debate-and no concern for the calamitous effects of their edicts.Ītlas’s book, A Plague Upon Our House, is an astonishing read, even for those who have been closely following this disaster. How could public officials vowing to “follow the science” on Covid-19 persist in promoting ineffective strategies with terrible consequences? In a memoir of his time on the White House Coronavirus Task Force, Scott W. A Plague Upon Our House: My Fight at the Trump White House to Stop COVID from Destroying America, by Scott W.
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