It’s fantastic news that we have a lot of cases
During an interview with Tucker Carlson from June 2020, Dr. Scott Atlas expressed delight that large numbers of people were contracting COVID. He said:
We expected more cases with more social mingling… But the fact is the overwhelming majority of these cases are in younger healthier people. These people do not have a significant problem. They do not have the serious complications. They do not die. And so it’s fantastic news that we have a lot of cases, but we don’t see deaths going up, and what that means is A: we’re are doing a better job of protecting the vulnerable, B: We’re in good shape here.
We like the fact that there’s a lot of cases in low- risk populations, because that’s exactly how we’re going to get herd immunity, population immunity, when low-risk people, with no significant problem handling this virus, which is basically 99% of people get this, they become immunity and they block the pathway of connectivity of contagiousness for older sicker people.
This is straightforward enough. In 2020, before anyone was vaccinated, Dr. Atlas claimed the mass infection of unvaccinated youth would lead to herd immunity, protecting older, more vulnerable people. He formulated his policy of using sick young people as human shields in two essays from April 2020, back when the thought the pandemic was winding down and that it “would cause about 10,000 deaths.” Let’s recall what Dr. Atlas said about the virus back then.
In one essay titled The Data is in — Stop the Panic and End the Total Isolation he had very good news to share. He said:
The tragedy of the COVID-19 pandemic appears to be entering the containment phase…young adults and children in normal health have almost no risk of any serious illness from COVID-19….
Dr. Atlas saw a path out the pandemic. He thought we could rid ourselves of the virus by spreading the virus. As such, he objected to mitigation because not because he doubted their efficacy, but precisely because he was aware of their efficacy. He said:
We know from decades of medical science that infection itself allows people to generate an immune response — antibodies — so that the infection is controlled throughout the population by “herd immunity.” Indeed, that is the main purpose of widespread immunization in other viral diseases — to assist with population immunity. In this virus, we know that medical care is not even necessary for the vast majority of people who are infected. It is so mild that half of infected people are asymptomatic, shown in early data from the Diamond Princess ship, and then in Iceland and Italy. That has been falsely portrayed as a problem requiring mass isolation. In fact, infected people without severe illness are the immediately available vehicle for establishing widespread immunity. By transmitting the virus to others in the low-risk group who then generate antibodies, they block the network of pathways toward the most vulnerable people, ultimately ending the threat. Extending whole-population isolation would directly prevent that widespread immunity from developing.
In his other essay, Reentry After the Panic: Paying The Health Price of Extreme Isolation, he spoke of a “world-wide sense of relief” and said:
With a world-wide sense of relief, progress continues in containing the COVID-19 pandemic. Projections have been revised downward for virtually every major negative consequence of the disease. Few doubt that the unprecedented isolation policies and near-total economic lockdowns adopted by most countries had a significant impact on reducing deaths from the virus. And aside from New York, where almost half of the entire country’s deaths and cases have occurred, the vast majority of American hospitals were not overwhelmed beyond capacity. All of this is terrific news…
Doctors working in overwhelmed hospitals with overflowing morgues– an article about my hospital titled An Insane Situation’: Inside the Chaos at Bellevue Hospital was also published in April 2020- didn’t share his “world-wide sense of relief”. Though Dr. Atlas worried about missed health care for non-COVID conditions, he felt this was a secondary issue. The main problem, as he saw it, was that not enough people were getting infected, delaying the arrival of herd immunity. He said:
But a bigger price might now be paid from choosing extreme isolation. In the absence of immunization, society needs circulation of the virus, assuming high-risk people can be isolated. Infection itself allows people to generate an immune response — natural antibodies. Given the estimated contagiousness of COVID-19, about 60 percent of people in the community need to have antibodies to stop the spread by “herd immunity.” Remember, medical care is not necessary for the vast majority of people who are infected. We also infer from testing in Iceland and Vo, Italy, that half of infected people are asymptomatic. That has been misleadingly portrayed as a problem requiring mass isolation; those infected people are an important vehicle for establishing immunity by transmitting the virus to the low-risk group. Preliminary testing in Germany shows that perhaps 15 percent of people are immune; no doubt this varies greatly by region. It is very possible that whole-population isolation prevented natural herd immunity from developing.
Dr. Atlas spoke this way throughout the summer of 2020:
When you isolate everyone, including all the healthy people, you’re prolonging the problem because you’re preventing population immunity. Low-risk groups getting the infection is not a problem…
There’s a positive to having low-risk groups get infection. What’s the positive? This is how you develop population based immunity. When I said this months ago, as did others, if we isolate every human being from social interaction, we are prolonging the problem, we are preventing population immunity from developing…
It doesn’t matter if younger, healthier people get infected. I don’t know how often that has to be said. They have nearly zero risk of a problem from this. When younger, healthier people get infected, that’s a good thing because that’s exactly the way that population immunity develops.
There was nothing exceptional about any of this. I can provide many similar examples of doctors cheering infections in unvaccinated youth, saying this would lead to herd immunity in under 6-months. They professed great gratitude to those willing to get infected- thank you, thank you, thank you– and mocked those who disagreed this would lead to herd immunity. They didn’t just want children in school, they wanted them there unvaccinated and without any mitigation measures. The reason for this had nothing to do with their education. Indeed, many of these doctors teamed up with an unapologetic child-labor advocate to push their policy of mass infection. Like Dr. Atlas, they too claimed worst was behind us in spring 2020 and predicted that COVID would be much less impactful than the flu.
We all know happened next.
Learning loss for children, especially in poor families, is already showing up in reduced standardized-test scores.
Despite this, Dr. Atlas hasn’t slowed down a bit. As reality tragically obliterated his absurd predictions, he just soldiered bravely onward, seeking TV cameras and podcast microphones, always saying the worst was behind us and it was time to stop the “panic.” He’s never paused and publically reflected on how poorly his 2020 comments aged. Was there really a world-wide sense of relief in April 2020? What that really the “containment phase” of the pandemic? Was it really “fantastic news” when cases spiked in “low-risk” populations? Was that really the pathway to herd immunity?
Instead of having the integrity to ask these questions, doctors who massively underestimated the virus and claimed that spreading it would quickly eliminate it, amazingly now act as if their pronouncements from 2020 have been have been completely vindicated. Today, Dr. Atlas has the audacity to write articles titled Covid Lessons Learned, Four Years Later where he dramatically laments “learning loss for children, especially in poor families” and “lost faith in public-health institutions.” Other people made mistakes, according to Dr. Atlas.
But notice how much Dr. Atlas’ 2024 rhetoric differs from his April 2020 rhetoric. Dr. Atlas didn’t mention children from poor families in those April 2020 articles. He didn’t mention schools or education at all. Conversely, in 2024, he no longer says it’s “fantastic news that we have a lot of cases… because that’s exactly how we’re going to get herd immunity.”
Indeed, none of the doctors who now performatively bemoan “learning loss for children, especially in poor families” today, acknowledge they cheered the spread of the virus throughout 2020. None of them currently claim the only barrier to herd immunity is a few more infections in “low-risk” people, even though they said this throughout the first half of the pandemic. Their assured pronouncements that the mass infection of unvaccinated youth would rapidly end the pandemic just vanished- poof- never to be mentioned again. The fact that reinfections are trivially common has not made them publicly re-evaluate their prior declarations of herd immunity or their adoring homages to the “power” and “triumph” of natural immunity. In fact, they issue absurd denials, saying they only cared about “the importance of schools for the well being of children“, if you remind them of their prior pleas for “natural immunity” to hasten herd immunity. They act like they never said it at all.
We like the fact that there’s a lot of cases in low-risk populations, because that’s exactly how we’re going to get herd immunity.
But of course they said it many times. So today, when Dr. Atlas, a right-wing pandemic celebrity who never treated a COVID patient himself, writes self-serving, revisionist propaganda claiming he was a benevolent soul who only cared about “learning loss for children, especially in poor families”, it’s important to remember two things.
First, here’s what Dr. Atlas really believed in 2020. This is the policy he enacted during his time as President Trump’s COVID advisor:
With a world-wide sense of relief, progress continues in containing the COVID-19 pandemic…The tragedy of the COVID-19 pandemic appears to be entering the containment phase… It is very possible that whole-population isolation prevented natural herd immunity from developing… Young adults and children in normal health have almost no risk of any serious illness from COVID-19… They block the network of pathways toward the most vulnerable people, ultimately ending the threat…They become immune and they block the pathway of connectivity of contagiousness for older sicker people….It’s fantastic news that we have a lot of cases…We like the fact that there’s a lot of cases in low-risk populations, because that’s exactly how we’re going to get herd immunity.
Second, Dr. Atlas was wrong about well, basically everything. Over a million Americans died since he said “the COVID-19 pandemic appears to be entering the containment phase”. The virus was not harmless for young people. It killed around 45,000 young adults and children, many of them “in normal health.” In fact, COVID was the number 1 or 2 killer of young adults for six months in a row, from August 2021 to January 2022, though of course death is not COVID’s only harm. Hundreds of thousands of children lost a parent of caregiver to the virus. These grim numbers all would have been much higher had unvaccinated young people been infected en masse in April 2020 as Dr. Atlas hoped. Finally, though we have oodles of “natural immunity”- the virus has infected most Americans- we do not have herd immunity.
“It’s fantastic news that we have a lot of cases”
Though 2020 was both well-documented and not that long ago, the sheltered pro-infection doctors who molded our disastrous pandemic response are furiously scrambling to sanitize their history in it, absurdly casting themselves as selfless crusaders for poor children, rather than allies of the virus. And if we don’t remember what they actually said- We like the fact that there’s a lot of cases in low-risk populations, because that’s exactly how we’re going to get herd immunity– they certainly won’t remind us. The failed We Want Them Infected movement is trying to rebrand itself as the All We Really Wanted Was Poor Kids In School movement.