He’s not Atlas holding up the world. But Dr. Scott Atlas is holding up the Coronavirus Task Force — to scrutiny — and what the physician, formerly part of said force, reveals is not pretty.
To some people Dr. Anthony Fauci, and to a lesser degree ex-White House Coronavirus Response Coordinator Deborah Birx and former CDC director Robert Redfield, are heroes; to others they’re zeros. To some they epitomize benevolence, to others malevolence. But Atlas, who spent time at COVID-19 meetings with them, reports that they’re something else:
Incompetent.
Atlas said that the three “experts” at the China virus response’s nucleus lacked knowledge, didn’t know the data, didn’t care to, and exhibited a total lack of critical-thinking skills.
The doctor exposes this all in a new book, A Plague Upon Our House, and sat down this week on Fox News’ Tucker Carlson Today to discuss the matter.
Relating what transpired at an August, 2020 gathering during which he presented data, Atlas told host Tucker Carlson, “I was the only one who had scientific papers in the task force meeting.” The physician stated that he would always present such, but the data fell on deaf ears.
Atlas presented a striking example of this in his book. As Fox reported last Friday, the doctor
says he presented data and studies showing that schools should be reopened and that children are not significant spreaders of the coronavirus but was virtually ignored by Fauci and others on the team.
“As I finished, there was silence,” Atlas wrote. “No one offered any contrary data. No one spoke of scientific studies. No one even mentioned the discredited Korea study. Zero comments from Dr. Birx. Nothing from Dr. Fauci. And as always, not a single mention by Birx or Fauci about the serious harms of school closures. In my mind, this was bizarre. Why was I the only one in the room with detailed knowledge of the literature? Why was I the only one considering the data on such an important topic with a critical eye? Were the others simply accepting bottom lines and conclusions, without any analytical evaluation? Weren’t they supposed to be expert medical scientists, too? I waited.”
Atlas said that Birx told him his opinion was “out of the mainstream” and said he was part of a “fringe” group of people who believed schools should be opened.
“Meanwhile she insisted that all experts agreed with her,” Atlas wrote. “I shook my head, thinking of some of the world-class epidemiologists who agreed with me — John Ioannidis and Jay Bhattacharya of Stanford, Martin Kulldorff of Harvard, Carl Heneghan and Sunetra Gupta of Oxford—and wondered if she or Fauci had ever read a single publication by them.”
Not only was Birx incorrect about her claimed universal agreement, but she was guilty of the logical fallacy known as argumentum ad verecundiam, or “appeal to authority.” Note that this is precisely what’s done when promoting the man-caused global-warming thesis, when proponents say “97 percent of scientists agree…” (that’s not true, either).
But while citing a “consensus of experts” can be convincing, historically, “the claim of consensus has been the first refuge of scoundrels; it is a way to avoid debate by claiming that the matter is already settled,” wrote the late novelist Michael Crichton in a 2003 speech tantalizingly titled “Aliens Cause Global Warming.” He later explained:
Let’s be clear: the work of science has nothing whatever to do with consensus. Consensus is the business of politics. Science, on the contrary, requires only one investigator who happens to be right, which means that he … has results that are verifiable by reference to the real world. In science consensus is irrelevant. What is relevant is reproducible results. The greatest scientists in history are great precisely because they broke with the consensus.
Galileo is an obvious example, but Crichton provided many others. Yet what helps explain the scientific obscurantism of Fauci, Birx, and Redfield — the “troika,” as Atlas dubs them — is Crichton’s line “Consensus is the business of politics.”
Well, politics is essentially the business the troika was in.
(Fauci has been in government, at the National Institute of Allergies and Infectious Diseases, since 1968.)
Thus did the “Follow the Science!™” crew ignore science. Atlas went on to explain that he proved during the discussion on kids and COVID, using numbers, that Sweden kept schools open and registered no child deaths. He also presented data from the world over to buttress his case, and demonstrated that there was no risk of viral spread from children to adults.
The troika didn’t care. They had their story and were sticking to it.
Atlas can be seen discussing his experiences in the video below, which is part of his Tucker Carlson Today appearance.
Yet is any of this really surprising? And it’s not just that the best scientists tend to work in the private sector, actually inventing and innovating. (In contrast, Fauci has one degree, in internal medicine, and we don’t know that he actually ever treated a patient.) It’s also that as famed Nobel Laureate economist Milton Friedman once pointed out, political self-interest is no more noble than economic self-interest.
People deeply ensconced in the political realm — and federal bureaucrats qualify — are so generally because they care about their power and position; thus, too often will they do whatever is necessary to preserve that power and position. Sometimes this means embracing bad policy.
And it’s clear that the troika’s stewardship was tantamount to having the post office control COVID management. But, hey, that’s government for you: It’s the only entity in which you can fail your way to the top.
For those interested, Atlas’s full Tucker Carlson Today interview is below.
