Completely aligned with the President’s policy and everything that I have been advising him on.
As readers of SBM know, Dr. Scott Atlas was one of the pioneers and leading advocates of the We Want Them Infected movement. Though he now claims he only cared about children’s education, Dr. Atlas spent much of 2020 advocating for herd immunity through the mass infection of unvaccinated youth.
As readers of SBM also know, this failed plan was formalized in the Great Barrington Declaration, which was published in October 2020. Dr. Atlas was in routine communication with its authors and was powerful enough to arrange a “secret meeting” for them President Trump in August 2020. The day after the Great Barrington Declaration was published, Dr. Atlas arranged for its authors to meet with Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar. According to an article titled Trump Advisers Consult Scientists Pushing Disputed Herd Immunity Strategy:
The Trump administration’s health chief met Monday with a trio of scientists who back the controversial theory that the United States can quickly and safely achieve widespread immunity to the coronavirus by allowing it to spread unfettered among healthy people.
The meeting with Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar, which also included Trump adviser Scott Atlas, is the latest example of administration officials — including the president himself — seeking out scientists whose contrarian views justify the government’s handling of a pandemic that has killed 210,000 people and infected nearly 7.5 million so far in the U.S.
“We heard strong reinforcement of the Trump Administration’s strategy of aggressively protecting the vulnerable while opening schools and the workplace,” Azar tweeted after his meeting with Harvard medical professor Martin Kulldorff, Stanford medical professor Jay Bhattacharya and Oxford epidemiologist Sunetra Gupta.
Mainstream medical and public health experts say that seeking widespread, or herd, immunity in the manner the scientists prescribe could result in the deaths of hundreds of thousands or even millions more U.S. residents.
The trio, who Azar described as “three distinguished infectious disease experts,” favors moving aggressively to reopen the economy while sidelining broad testing and other fundamental public health measures. “Three months, maybe six is sufficient time for enough immunity to accumulate … that the vulnerable could resume normal lives,” Gupta said Monday night in appearance on Laura Ingraham’s Fox News show.
That aligns with the “herd-immunity” strategy endorsed by Atlas, who Bhattacharya said was their “point of contact” for the meeting. Atlas, a neuroradiologist and senior fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, has emerged as a favored adviser to the president despite his lack of expertise in public health, infectious disease or epidemiology…
As a reminder, none of these doctors actually treated COVID patients.
Doctors who didn’t treat COVID patients, set policy for doctors who did treat COVID patients
Unsurprisingly, Dr. Atlas specifically credited the Great Barrington Declaration with influencing his approach to the pandemic. He said this shortly after it was signed:
The prolonged lockdowns must end, and I just want to point out that now this is really meshing quite precisely with a growing body of some of the world’s top epidemiologists and scientists who this past week signed something called the Great Barrington Declaration. Scientists led by people from Harvard, Stanford, and Oxford University, would-renown infectious disease and epidemiology scientists, have completely aligned with the President’s policy and with everything that I have been advising him on, and this really refutes this sort of strange narrative that this is purely politically based, that somehow the President doesn’t listen to the science. This is the science, this is what he’s been advised by me and others.
Indeed, this was the message Dr. Atlas had been communicating to the President, who was clearly paying attention. In the video from September 2020 below, the President credits Dr. Atlas and Stanford doctors for their advice on “herd mentality”. Based on what he was told, the President believed the virus would go away “very quickly” with a vaccine and that we were “rounding the corner”.
1 million Americans have since died of COVID.
I’ve never really read through everything in the Great Barrington Declaration.
However, in January 2022, during his testimony to the House Select Committee On Coronavirus Crisis, Dr. Atlas spoke very differently about the Great Barrington Declaration. Once it became clear their vision of herd immunity in 3-6 months was just a fantasy, Dr. Atlas testified “he wasn’t familiar with it at all.” He had this exchange:
Q. Do you view the Great Barrington declaration to outline the same strategy as the targeted protection strategy that we have been discussing throughout today?
A. Well, the Great Barrington, I don’t speak for what Great Barrington Declaration represents. I didn’t write it. I didn’t sign it and it didn’t exist when I arranged this meeting. So I wasn’t familiar with it at all. I didn’t even, know there was going to be any kind of declaration written, when I arranged this meeting. So I’m familiar with the broad parts of it that I just stated.
Q. Sitting here today, do you believe that it’s outlining the same general strategy that you referred to as targeted protection?
A. I think it’s outlining the general strategy of increasing the protection of the high-risk people and ending the harms of the lockdowns. So in that sense, yes.
Q. Are there any differences between the two?
A. I’m not — I don’t really — you know, like I say, I didn’t sign the Great Barrington Declaration. I haven’t really — I don’t know what’s the details of it. I never read the full Great Barrington Declaration website and everything.
Q. Did you review or provide any input on the Great Barrington Declaration prior to its release?
A. No. Like I said, I wasn’t even aware it was being written.
Q. Did you have any conversations about it at a broad level prior to its release?
A. No. In fact, I was never — I’m not even sure there was a known intent to write something. I don’t know what they were doing. I wasn’t involved, they being the group of people who were writing the Great Barrington Declaration.
Q. Sitting her today, can you recall if there’s anything that you disagree with in the Great Barrington Declaration?
A. Well, like I say, I haven’t read the detail of it. I’m not intimately familiar with every single detail. I’ve never really read through everything in the Great Barrington Declaration, but the general thrust of Great Barrington Declaration that I said already of increasing the protection of the high-risk people and reducing and getting rid of the massive harms of the lockdowns, those two things, I absolutely agree with.
So what was Dr. Atlas’s relationship with the Great Barrington Declaration? Dr. Atlas wants you to believe:
And I just want to point out that now this is really meshing quite precisely… with something called the Great Barrington Declaration… completely aligned with the President’s policy and with everything that I have been advising him on.
He also wants you to believe:
I haven’t really — I don’t know what’s the details of it. I never read the full Great Barrington Declaration website and everything… Well, like I say, I haven’t read the detail of it. I’m not intimately familiar with every single detail. I’ve never really read through everything in the Great Barrington Declaration.
Dr. Atlas was a key government advisor in 2020. He greatly influenced our pandemic response. And he claims that his advice to the President of the United States was based on a document- a very brief document- he didn’t even bother to read.