Scott Atlas: Ordeal and Triumph

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Hello, and welcome to the Victor Davis Hansen Show.

Victor is an author, scholar, columnist, essayist, political and cultural critic, and as I like to have him, our favorite provocateur of the left.

He is also the Martin and Ely Anderson Senior Fellow in Military History and Classics at the Hoover Institution and the Wayne and Marcia Busky Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College.

He has currently started a series of interviews directed at modern culture.

And this week we have Scott Atlas, who is the Robert Wesson Senior Fellow in Healthcare Policy at the Hoover Institution and a senior advisor in healthcare to three presidential campaigns and the special advisor to the president in the Trump administration.

He has written the standard reference book on magnetic resonance imaging of the brain and spine.

And we welcome you, Scott.

Thanks for watching.

Thank you for having me.

Happy to be here.

We have a few messages to listen to, and then we'll come right back.

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Welcome back.

I'm in awe, Scott, of all that you've stood for and endured in the time of COVID.

I think that we all remember you for that.

And no one knows the story better beside yourself, of course, than Victor Davis Hansen.

And so I'm going to turn this over to Victor at this point.

Hi, Scott.

Hey, Victor.

So happy to have you.

Before we start about

your recent book and your policies

that were so influential and the controversies that arose, just tell us a little bit.

You went to the University of Chicago Medical School and the University of Illinois's undergraduate.

Where were you?

Where did you grow up?

Where did you live?

Yeah.

Well, I was born in the Chicago, in Chicago itself.

And yes, to

a very,

what would call a

lower income working class family.

My grandparents were born, all four grandparents were born outside the U.S.

and were immigrants.

My father was someone who held multiple jobs after enlisting in the Marines right after Pearl Harbor.

And he did not go to college.

I was the first generation in my family to attend college.

My father

and mother worked very hard to raise us and have instilled values that education was very important.

And of course,

I still believe that.

We moved around quite a bit in the Midwest.

My father was a traveling salesman, a taxi driver, operated a barber, did many different things.

And I attended the University of Illinois in Champaign, Urbana, as did my brother.

And I actually met my wife in college.

And I attended University of Chicago Medical School and

did my residency, which is your main medical training.

at Northwestern University, where I was chief resident, went to do my sub-specialty training, my fellowship in neuroradiology at the University of Pennsylvania,

and have been in academic medicine

for the first 25 years of my career,

and 14 years

of which was as the professor in chief of neuroradiology at Stanford University Medical School.

And as you know,

About a decade ago, I took a full-time endowed chair position at Hoover Institution, which is the public policy institute that you and I both work at.

And I've worked full-time for more than a decade on healthcare policy because people that understand the delivery of medical care, the value of medical technology,

the actual inner workings of how medicine

works.

not just by surveys, but by actual data on outcomes, on accuracy of diagnosis, on availability and access to care, must be evaluated on the basis of the data and not just on assertion.

And I thought this was extremely important when I came to Stanford back in 1998-99.

And so I started then.

But then, as I mentioned, for a decade, I've been working full-time on that.

I think, correct me if I'm wrong, you had an association, though, even earlier with Hoover, didn't you?

A courtesy in 2003 or four?

I did.

Yes, I was working on the effect of managed care on the availability and quality of medical care in the United States.

from the beginning when I came to Stanford in 1998, 99.

And then I was actually running on a treadmill and became in the gym and became friends with Michael Spence,

who was about to win and then did win the Nobel Prize in Economics.

And so he and I sat down and we spoke about his work

and how it might have an inter

sort of an interplay with what I was working on on healthcare, access and quality.

And

he ended up introducing me to Hoover Institution.

I gave an invited talk there and then had a position, sort of a courtesy appointment, part-time appointment, like you mentioned in 2003, 2004.

And then in 2012, began working full-time.

I think I had met you.

That was the year I arrived in 2002, 2003.

But the reason

I think our listeners need to listen to all of this is because when you came into the Trump White House, you had had

more or less three decades of experience in public health policy, and you were

in some capacity related to the Hoover Institution, both formally and part-time, and then full-time with people who were economists, sociologists, public policy analysts.

And, you know, Hoover is very data-driven.

I'm saying all this just simply because what struck me was that when you started to advise the Trump administration, the people who were in that COVID working group started to leak to the press that you were a neural radiologist because that was your formal training.

And that really resonated with me because I was a classical scholar, a professor for 20 years of Greek and Latin classical languages, and yet a military historian and a columnist.

And people had said, well, you can't weigh in on public policy because you're a classicist.

But what I'm getting at is what a person is trained to formally in graduate school and starts out in a person's professional career so often expands to other areas.

And so while you were both a specialist, indeed, you wrote the standard work and edited the standard work in neuroradiology, you'd been doing this for three decades.

And so I was, were you shocked that all of a sudden people were saying, well, I'm an immunologist by training or I'm an infectious disease specialist, but Dr.

Atlas is a neuroradiologist, therefore his,

that was a very strange argument to be made, wasn't it?

Yes, it was.

It was shocking.

I mean, first of all,

I'm not the kind of person that

boasts about my professional accomplishments, number one.

And I was not used to even being in the position.

I mean, I'm very confident of my CV.

You know, I

you know, I've been working in academic medicine and medical science, clinical medicine,

research, and teaching other doctors for 30 plus years

all over the world.

I had been a visiting professor at every one of the top medical centers in the United States from coast to coast.

I've written more than 100 peer-reviewed papers in scientific journals.

I've had more than 600 invited lectures.

at the top medical centers and academic societies in the United States and all over the world in my career.

I've had 30,

more than 30 funded research grants from the NIH and elsewhere on medical science.

I've written almost 200 papers on public policy in healthcare in my career.

And this was all pre-COVID.

And so it was sort of stunning to hear that somehow I'm not qualified.

First of all, So that's one side of it.

The other side of it is, frankly, this stuff is really not that complicated.

You know, it's not about really

your specific credential.

This is critical thinking.

The only ingredient that's necessary to understand COVID is critical thinking, logic, and common sense.

You know, as many people have said, hey, I may not be a scientist, but I know how to read a graph.

in their own defense.

I mean,

this stuff was really not that complicated.

As you mentioned, anyone who's a critical thinker can look at this, but to even insinuate that I am not the right person, this is health policy.

What was shocking to me when I arrived in the White House was that there was no one on the task force in health policy.

The importance of someone who's a scholar in health policy like myself is that it's most important to consider not just eradication of a single virus, but the impact on health of the virus, but also the impact of the policy on the totality of health.

And those impacts are on lives lost.

So you, when you came in,

you were the isolation

from the economic impact, et cetera.

You were the first, as I recall, you were the first official voice.

There were people who agreed with you, the great, what later became the great Barrington Declaration doctors and others.

But you were were the first to say COVID is a very, can be very dangerous for select people.

However, what we are doing by closing down the schools, locking down, is

going to be in a more long term, but maybe not even long term, we're going to see very serious consequences from things as varied as spousal abuse, family abuse, missed cancer screenings, miscardiac, mental health issues, drugs, all of that

were public policy issues, public health policy issues.

But how did that, what I'm getting at is how did that, the one thing that you did say, which echoed or was synonymous with the Great Barrington Declaration was that there is something called herd immunity and it will kick in to a certain degree.

But how did your opponents say,

go out and get, how did they misinterpret that or deliberately confuse that by by suggesting that you said, everybody go out and get it because kids can't get it and we want you to get COVID naturally?

That's not what you said.

But what was the

landscape about that?

Yeah, here's the landscape.

In March of 2020, after looking at the data for a very short period of time, in March of 2020, there were three people

that came out for something called targeted protection, which is increasing the protection of the people with a a significant risk to die and ending or avoiding lockdowns, which are super harmful and known to be harmful to

particularly children,

low-income families, the working class.

And I said that.

Johnny Aniti said it in March 2020.

David Katz, in a paper called Stat News, David Katz wrote it in the New York Times in March 2020.

And I wrote it in March 2020 in the Washington Times.

Seven months later, the Great Barrington Declaration codified it, which was important because it gave people something that was written

by credible people at Harvard, Stanford, and Oxford, and they could agree with.

But for seven months, this was already voiced by Ian Edes, Katz, and myself.

And what they did, they, the opponents, the advocates of the lockdowns, they convinced the public with two

very important lies.

Number one, they demonized everyone who was against the lockdowns by lying and saying that people who chose to open were choosing the economy over lives, which of course was the opposite of decades of economics literature, which said that severe economic downturns killed people.

And their second lie, as you mentioned just now, was that if you're against the lockdowns, you're for allowing the infection to spread without any mitigation, the so-called herd immunity strategy, which is, of course, not what I said.

It's not what anyone said.

In fact, I never even heard anyone say that.

I never advised it in the White House.

I never heard it even being discussed in the White House.

There was never any discussion of letting the infection spread without mitigation.

What I said and wrote dozens of times in pieces before, during, and after my time in the White House was that we should increase the protection.

They weren't doing enough to protecting the people known to be at risk.

And their strategy was a gross failure.

You know, anywhere from 40 to 80% of deaths in various states were inside nursing homes.

These were the known high-risk people.

And that, what I advocated for, was increasing protection, was increasing testing inside nursing homes, was increasing in testing.

They were testing once per week nursing home workers.

I said that has to be done three days a week, five days a week when there's high activity.

I wanted increasing

tests sent to senior centers

that non-residential seniors frequented.

I wanted more tests sent to historically Black colleges and universities so that we could protect their high-risk faculty.

You know, I tried to get increased liaisons with nursing homes to hospitals for infectious disease control,

because the nursing homes aren't used to doing that.

So we

all advocated for we, meaning Ianedes, Katz, and myself, since March 2020.

And then months later, more people came on board with this, that we needed to increase the protection of the high-risk people because it wasn't working the current strategy.

And instead, they were destroying younger people.

And in fact, there's very good data on this: that the lockdowns themselves didn't, they failed to stop the spread of the infection.

They failed to stop the death.

But in fact, some papers show that the lockdowns themselves increased the deaths by confining people indoors where they cannot isolate from high-risk family members, by keeping them away from outside where the infection does not spread.

And of course, the serious damages, as you alluded to, to children and young people, particularly from isolation itself.

These are healthy kids who don't have a high risk from the old.

Was there ever so, and then part of the argument, as I understood it, was multi-layered, but part of it was that here are the resources available and they're increasing.

But when we target and lock down schools or we put these burdens on young people who have a very, very small risk comparatively of dying from this disease, we are shorting people who have a very great risk of dying from this disease.

So it was a strategy of

where you not to have a shotgun approach, which would short people and get them killed because they wouldn't have enough resources, but to focus resources on those communities, elderly or other particular people with morbidities.

And

we were not doing that.

Is that right?

That's a big part of it is that, you know,

it makes no sense because to just do this, what you say is shotgun approach.

I mean, first of all, by February, March, millions of people in the United States already had the infection.

So it was ludicrous to think that an infection that spreads by breathing would be stopped.

But also, the resources you had, you needed to increase the protection of people who were dying rather than increasing the protection of people who had minuscule risk of illness and thereby sacrificing the old people.

But I want to say something in addition, Victor, which is that the standard pandemic management was not lockdowns.

For about 15 years,

the key paper that is the reference for how to manage a pandemic was written by

the people who were credited with getting rid of smallpox.

They wrote it in 2006, and in their paper, which is the standard for pandemic management, they explicitly said, advise people who are sick to stay home, but everyone else should work.

They explicitly said

closing schools is not recommended, restricting large groups is not effective, blocking travel is not effective.

And it's extremely harmful.

So this was a break in standard.

The reckless, the non-standard policy were the lockdowns.

The safe alternative, the safe policy and the standard policy was targeted protection.

And this was known for 15 years or more.

Almost as if you could almost say it was the traditional or conservative approach and what we enacted was the untried and radical approach.

That's exactly what I'm saying is that what was enacted was reckless and frankly unethical.

Yeah.

So you think that in this long tortured debate, the fact that we,

after the Delta had passed, then there was a pause, and I remember Joe Biden had said by July 4th, it'll be over with.

But

do you think that the Omicron variants and the fact that this disease did, in fact,

as you and others had predicted, infect a lot more people than they had imagined and

did not

seriously

make a lot of children

ill or even much less fatally ill.

And then

the nuance on the vaccination and boosters, that while they do suppress perhaps the severity of symptomology and the transmission, perhaps,

they were not quite as billed as before.

What I'm getting at is as this virus mutated and became more infectious, it became less severe and more people got it.

And it sort of ended up like people at the Great Barrington Declaration and you had predicted.

Isn't that true in some ways?

Okay, so there's a couple of key points.

Number one, as a pandemic evolves, the virus mutates, like you say, and it becomes

or remains or becomes even more infectious, contagious, but its lethality diminishes significantly.

That is expected behavior.

That is what happened here.

And that was not a shock.

And it should have been known.

It was known by people who were actually rational

and knowledgeable.

And that did happen.

The first part about the vaccines is this, that the data shows that the vaccines

data from all over the world has shown that the vaccines are effective at reducing death and serious illness in people who have a high risk to die, but the vaccines are not effective in reducing getting infected per se.

The vaccines, not after

30 to 90 days, and the vaccines are not effective at reducing transmission.

And this is particularly true in the Omicron and subsequent variants, where the protection against infection was essentially zero after 30 to 60 days.

Zero after 30 to 60 days.

And therefore, the protection against spreading it was also zero after 30 to 60 days.

And so the point here is this.

The vaccine's benefit is a personal benefit to people who have a significant risk to die.

But it is not a public benefit.

The vaccine does not protect others if you get vaccinated.

The vaccine, therefore, to be mandated as a public benefit is irrational.

It doesn't make sense.

It's contrary to the data.

There is no science behind saying that if you're vaccinated, you're protecting others.

That is simply false, contrary to the data.

And that's data all over the world, including in the United States.

We're going to take a short break.

And when we get back, I want to ask Scott on two important topics.

And one of them,

because I was a fellow of the Stanford community, just we'll talk about the reaction where we were at Stanford, but particularly Scott.

And second,

this controversial case of Sweden, but we'll be right back.

And we're back again.

First of all,

Sweden, Sweden, Sweden, they had more or less an open society during this and during the Delta manifestation of the virus.

virus, everybody was saying, Don't do what Sweden does.

They have higher lethality rates or infection.

That was the narrative.

And now, all of a sudden, in retrospect, as we look back at things like economic GDP or schools or unemployment or mental health issues, how do you assess what Sweden did in comparison to the average EU or the United States?

So, Sweden is a fascinating story that's been

distorted by the media.

And again, this is one of these denial of fact.

The fact is

that Sweden has the best outcome by excess deaths of any country in the OECD.

The best.

That's the OECD's own data.

OECD is the Organization of Economically Developed Countries, of which the United States is part of.

And if you look at the OECD data that was published in July this year, the percent increase in excess deaths, which means the number of deaths, the percent of deaths in your country over and above what you would have in a non-pandemic year, is the smallest in Sweden than any other country.

Let me ask, let me just stop you there.

Why, just

why, what are factors that are known or speculated that would support that explain that phenomenon?

Was it because mental health issues or that their immune systems remain robust by being out and exposed to people?

Or what do you think as a medical practitioner would explain that?

It's really

controversial, but it's true because I've seen that.

And by the way,

yeah, I'll answer it in a second, but I want to answer this: say this first.

The people that say, oh, Sweden didn't do as well as Finland, what's going on?

Actually, they did better, but Finland did well too.

And Finland, actually, after the first 30 days of the pandemic, by June of 2020, Finland had a less strict policy than Sweden.

Finland doing well is another endorsement of non-lockdown strategy, but people

don't know that.

So the answer to why a country that would open would do better

is that number one, Lockdowns kill people.

That's numbers one through nine.

Lockdowns kill people.

Why?

Because they have severe economic downturn.

As you mentioned, suicides go way up.

Drug overdoses go way up.

You're confining people.

The spread of the infection is actually higher.

You can't isolate because you're telling people to stay indoors.

And so you have a lot of death from the lockdown.

The second part is it's true that, and we're seeing it today.

When you isolate people, if you put everybody in a plastic bag and wore an oxygen tank, the extreme isolation, you would prevent any kind of immune responses of your body from occurring.

You would be isolated.

And if you were able to isolate someone that sufficiently,

you are hurting them.

We see that today.

When we see right now,

in our United States, that children, there's an explosion of RSV, respiratory sincytial virus, and influenza in children.

Why is that?

Well, that's one of the consequences of preventing kids from mingling in schools.

Kids get viruses in schools and that is a healthy part of building their own immune system.

And that is backed up in

this pandemic, because as we know, the data shows the following.

People who recovered from COVID have a better protection against serious illness, against death, against any infection from COVID.

They have a better protection than people who were vaccinated and never had COVID.

And so there is such a biological phenomenon

as recovery-related immunity.

This has been known, as my friend Martin Koldorf likes to say, since ancient Greece, 2,500 years ago.

But of course, it's in every biology textbook.

This is not something that should ever have been denied, that there is excellent protection in a biological biological basis of reinfection with a serious consequence once you've had recovery from the infection.

Yeah, I would just point out that in the second book of Thucydides' history, when he describes the great plague at Athens, he makes a stunning observation.

He says, not only was it discovered that people who had the plague never got it again,

but they were so immune that they falsely thought they would never get any illness again because their immunity was such from the plague.

And he says they were protected from the plague, but they did get other illnesses.

But

you're right.

It was 2,500 years of.

And, you know, that's actually relevant to today's policies.

The idea that hospital employees, nurses, for instance, should be fired if they don't get the vaccine, regardless of whether they had COVID in the past or not, is really the opposite of what was shown in

the Athenian plague.

Because when people like nurses have recovered from COVID, they are the perfect people to take care of patients with COVID because they, the nurses, are protected.

Let me ask you, I think because it was, it's a little bit more esoteric, but so

we at the Hoover Institution were

watching this unfold and we were reading the things that you were writing as early that got public attention in early spring 2020.

And we watched this evolution.

But what was dumb, what I was dumbfounded was, to the degree that at the Hoover Institution, I was aware of public policy other than you, your work, and others at the Hoover.

But

I had come across John Yannidi's name, especially in connection with the Theranos.

meltdown, where he had suggested that this Elizabeth Holmes blood testing device was not going to work.

He was very prescient.

There were others who came in, Michael Levette, the Nobel Prize winner, Jay Bacharia.

So, what I'm getting at, Scott, is that as a naive observer, I was under the impression that Stanford Medical School and the Hoover Institution

were very proud of this specialty that this university had developed in public health policy and particularly

in data-driven things, because we had a Nobel Prize winner and the two luminaries that were still full-time at the medical school, and yourself.

And yet, when you all seem to agree

from different aspects and different levels of exposure,

probably because you were point man that you were on television and you were working with Trump, it was controversial.

But nonetheless, how did it happen that Stanford,

rather than claiming all of you guys and saying, you know what, our immunologists, our public health people are virologist they're at the cutting edge of this debate why all of a sudden did they turn on those guys in general but and you in particular you think it didn't make any sense to me because i wasn't

go ahead yes i i mean basically you know the the problem was

these people have been exposed victor as you know

And how have they been exposed?

They, meaning the university, science, and public health community at Stanford, but also elsewhere.

They've been exposed

as being,

you know, non-expert, politicized, and frankly unethical.

Why do I say that?

Well,

as you know, the first thing to happen was that the Stanford Medical School, a group of professors where I used to be a colleague, got together and wrote a letter and posted posted on the medical school website, which pretended to be official,

which was basically

an ad hominem attack on me.

This is in September.

And of course,

that's strange because I said the exact same things

about who's at risk, about the extremely low risk to children, about how schools should open, about how lockdowns were harmful and erroneous, about recovered people having had protection from serious illness, the exact same thing as both Johnny Anites and Jay Bhattachari, but only one of us got a letter of censure.

Only one of us in November got a Senate faculty censure officially voted on.

The only difference was that I had the, as one publication put it, the temerity to help our country under a president that they,

the Stanford faculty, overwhelmingly disapproved of, which is really a sort of a

completely unethical, frankly,

behavior on the part of Stanford University's faculty.

When they do something like that, when they, through their own politicized lens, attribute your willingness to step up and help your country when asked, that is a very, very harmful,

you know, chilling effect on others who want to help their country.

I went to Washington for one reason, Victor.

People were dying.

Grossly incompetent people were guiding policy, and they were wrong, and it was obvious.

And no matter who would have asked me, I don't care if it was President Obama, President Trump, or anyone in any part of the political spectrum would have asked me to help as a concerned American citizen and an expert in health policy.

My answer is absolutely yes.

Yet, Stanford

decided, Stanford faculty members, isolated, but a group of them, decided that this was unacceptable to them.

And they then commenced at issuing character

assassination slurs in written publications and social media, regular media,

in their friends,

in the journals where their friends were editors.

And this is extraordinarily harmful.

And it's really,

it's unethical, it's immoral.

uh and they really did something very harmful to the privileged position the privileged status that university professors are granted by our society remember university professors are the sources of expertise for the media are the sources of expertise for the public are the people appointed to be heads of government agencies are the science funding controllers they control the science but the most important thing that university professors do in their privileged position is they are supposed to teach our children critical thinking and act as role models.

And what they did was more than just personal attack.

What they did was they destroyed the trust in expertise and they really infected, no pun intended, the minds of our younger people, of college students, into thinking that the appropriate way to behave, instead of engaging in an evidence-based debate, that

they showed that what they thought was the way to behave was to nullify, to cancel, to assassinate the character of people who they disagree with.

I think that's a real sinful legacy and a disgrace to Stanford University and other universities.

So here we are

in November of 2022, and we have the evidence multifaceted that that we have Sweden.

We have the idea that now most, I think it's the vast majority of Americans have been exposed to the virus, either had an active case or they've tested positive.

More than 90%, Victor.

Yeah, 90%.

90%.

And we know now that we're into our third iteration of boosters.

And nobody had envisioned that when we were told, say, to take that Moderna was going to give you 96%.

I can remember getting vaccinated and the woman who vaccinated me assured me that this was not for the community, that I didn't have to worry whether anybody else got vaccinated.

It was for me.

She said to me, now you're protected for life.

And you don't, I mean, these are just individual public health

and not officials, but that was the general consensus.

Now we fast forward to where we are now.

And there's been a radical reassessment, such as,

say, Atlantic Magazine publishes, the Atlantic publishes a thing where an author says, let's just forget all this and just, can't we all get along and forget the acrimony?

And we kind of agree now that through,

you know, challenge and response and controversy and debate, we've got to now a consensus, which I think is pretty close to what you had advocated.

So what I'm getting at in this windy exegesis, Scott, is that have people

at Stanford that wrote things about you, and whether that includes Hoover, I'll let you decide, Have any of them publicly or privately come to you and said, privately, we were mistaken.

We got carried away.

There was sort of groupthink, mob, lynch mob mentality.

Has any of that happened at all?

The short answer is no.

I have had many people along the way write me personal emails saying, you're right, keep talking.

Of course, I had thousands of emails like that when I was in the White House.

And that was the reason why,

you know, you have a responsibility to say the truth.

We're supposed to be an ethical society.

And also, you know, there was a tremendous amount of damage because the lockdowns are proven to have failed to stop the spread of the infection and failed to stop the death.

But in terms of the people,

and I had personal people even living on my block saying, oh, Scott, you know, we all at the medical school, most of us agreed with you, we were afraid to step forward, afraid for our families, by the way, which is a very dangerous statement to even contemplate in the United States of America that you have a fear for physical danger.

In fact, I had many death threats.

I had to put in thousands of dollars worth of personal security equipment.

I had to get the FBI involved.

I had to have 24-7 police in my driveway for months and circulating on my block.

And this is in Palo Alto, California, because I believe, frankly, that Stanford University itself incited violence against me, the people who wrote these things.

Now,

there is no public apology that will be forthcoming.

I don't expect it because it takes a person of integrity to admit you're wrong.

And these people have no integrity, zero that did sign the letter.

Not a single one of them has any integrity or spine.

And you can't expect anything.

But that article that you are referring to that said, let bygones be bygones, let's move forward because they know they're wrong.

There are several reasons why we cannot let bygones be bygones, very important reasons.

First of all, their legacy is

their policy guidance caused avoidable death in the society's most vulnerable populations.

They caused massive destruction of low-income families selectively and shifted the burden of illness from the affluent to the low-income people.

There are ongoing enormous health damages to our children, and that severe loss of trust in public health and science is going to be something that harms our society for decades.

So why do we need them to admit they were wrong publicly?

Number one,

we live in an ethical society.

The American people have been through so much, they must know the truth about the facts.

That's number one, if we're going to move forward.

Number two,

they have damaged

the trust in science.

And the only way to recover some of that trust is to be public in admitting you're wrong.

I think we all know that in our personal lives.

When you admit you were wrong to someone who is close to you, that's the first step in regaining trust.

And we must have trust in these institutions or we really cannot function in society.

But the third reason why we must have a public demand for their admission of error is because these people in power will do it again if there's no public admission of error.

And if they won't publicly admit their error, then they must have public exposure that they were wrong via investigatory means or otherwise, because these people will absolutely do this again if there is not a public understanding that

their lockdown policies were grossly wrong and harmful.

And, Victor, we know there will be another pandemic.

There will be another health crisis.

There will be potentially lockdowns called for things like climate change on the basis of health.

Lockdowns are wrong, destructive, and they kill people.

And that must be publicly acknowledged or these people will do it again.

Do you have some confidence?

I'm not sure that I do, but I want to raise the possibility that with the change and control of the House

and promises of investigations, that at least in the case of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, and perhaps Dr.

Fauci

or the CDC or the NAI, there are going to be people called before Congress and they're going to have to explain everything from the efforts to suppress open, because

your general principle that there was not a tolerance for open debate also extends, as you know, to early, early, very

logical, analytical, data-driven explanations that this virus probably started at the Wuhan lab.

But

that was taboo, just as if

questioning the lockdowns were.

But all of these questions that were suppressed, debate was suppressed about the origins, the maturity, the reaction to COVID.

I think a lot of these are going to come out, don't you think so, in investigations?

And I don't think that Dr.

Fauci and those like him who we know, and he wasn't the, I don't want to single him out, but they're that medical establishment, the federal government hierarchy deliberately tried to, as we know, suppress open and free debate.

I think that's going to be more transparent in January.

Yes,

I think that there will be investigations that, and I think they're necessary.

I absolutely think they're necessary for the reasons I just cited.

The problem is this: that,

first of all,

any investigation done by politicians will either be overtly politicized, no matter who does it, or it will be at least perceived as being overtly politicized.

And when you have an investigation that's perceived as being politicized,

it doesn't have as much public meaning and impact.

The second thing I want to point out, by the way, which is sort of a cynical but true observation, is that, you know, when you look at the data,

the states with the worst, most stringent lockdown

policies, their governors,

of those states with the most stringent lockdown policies, they did the worst on outcomes, according to a study, a very detailed study on death, economic, and educational destruction by Kirpin and Casey Mulligan, University of Chicago.

The states with the most stringent lockdowns did the worst on managing the pandemic.

Yet,

every one of the governors of those states who ran for office, almost everyone except one was re-elected.

And so when you look at that, you have to wonder, do the American people really prioritize freedom?

Do the American people really prioritize

I mean, they re-elected these people in these states re-elected governors who overtly destroyed their children.

Okay.

And so you just have to wonder what's going on there.

I understand a lot of people moved to the states where governors did a great job, like Florida's governor Ron DeSantis.

A lot of people relocated from New York, for instance, but that's not enough in number to explain the election.

And so you have to sort of, I'm a little bit,

I'm very concerned, more than a little bit, that there's been a change in the American public.

Because who are are we

to say that someone should be punished, for instance, when the voters re-elected those people?

I mean, you know, this is

a very sort of

fascinating and horrifying thought.

Yeah, I agree with you.

I would say that

not that we can rely post facto on the accuracy of the polls, but when people were asked, unfortunately, to rate the issues by which they predicated their votes, I thought that COVID would be a lot higher than it was.

And they said, I think the conservatives were a little bit fooled because they were assured that it was in the order of inflation, fuel prices, crime, border, when in fact it was inflation, abortion, and then

worry about insurrection or something, semi-fascism, or all of the stuff that the Biden speeches.

So I don't think that for both parties did not privilege that or give it the attention that it should.

But

you have to just wonder.

I mean, it's true.

You can't draw a conclusion about any single issue from an election.

I think we all know that.

But I was just looking at the data.

There were nine governors,

including the mayor of Washington, D.C.,

that ran for re-election among the 11 worst performing states on COVID.

Nine ran for re-election.

Only one

was not re-elected, and that was in Nevada.

Yeah.

So it's sort of frightening.

But when we look at, if we look back at all of this

and

we look at everything that's happened,

and I want to remind our listeners that I kind of had a front row seat because I was at the Hoover Institution and I was watching this unfold.

And it was one of the most eerie things I've seen because all of a sudden,

Scott and others who in the medical field that supported the idea of an open society rather than this strict lockdown, there was this, it was really, Scott is not exaggerating.

If anything, he's understating the climate of fear that took place because

it extended to a lot of other issues.

And

what I'm getting at is that

it was sort of, I don't know, connected with, I think the lockdowns, you know, the George Floyd death and the rioting of 120, the lockdowns did things looking back at it, that I don't think would have happened otherwise.

It created a climate of fear, of suspicion, of isolation, of paranoia.

And the irony was that the very policies that they had created enhanced the criticism of dissent.

And so I don't think when we're listening to Scott explain this,

I don't think any of us can imagine what the climate was, let's say, throughout most of 2021

on the campus where we work, but in American life in general.

I had never seen anything like it because when I had written about medical issues as a layperson, as an op-ed, or as an opinion journalist or historian, and I supported what you were doing.

I didn't realize that people were going to come after me, and they and they did.

And I didn't realize that anybody who had an open mind,

whether they knew you or not, just an open mind, it was, I can't quite approximate or describe, but it was, it was something like McCarthyism, but it was, it was even worse.

And yes,

I think you're right.

Your point, Victor, I mean, I do want to point out that there there were very few people as courageous as you who were willing to say

the truth.

And that's so important,

not for necessarily in an individual basis as much as when people like you and I spoke out.

We give regular people

a little bit more courage in saying, yes, I agree with that.

And so there's a very important important role of people who are sort of the people to speak out that I think society needs.

And of course, we take these things with a much higher degree of seriousness now that we see how dangerous the other side is.

But I think you're pointing out something, the effectiveness.

of this cancel culture or this censorship.

You have to realize that

your audience, I mean, you know this, that this kind of vilification, demonization of people who are speaking against the lockdowns was a very complex interplay between university experts, so-called, the public health pseudo-experts that were deemed expert, and the media.

And the media is really, this was the first pandemic or crisis really during social media.

That was amplifying the fear tremendously, but they were all in it together.

And there was, for the first time in my adult life that I was aware of, overt censorship.

YouTube and Facebook, YouTube was bragging in the Washington Post in November of 2020 that they had taken down something like 7 million posts.

And this was not just

accepted.

It was assumed to be good that they were censoring.

actual stopping the information.

I personally, as advisor to the president, was blocked and censored on Twitter.

You would would think the American people should know what the advisor to the president was saying during the pandemic crisis, yet somehow Twitter on their own decided this was harmful, even though what I wrote was actually direct quotes from the CDC, from the University of Oxford, et cetera.

Apparently, they thought that it was, you were more dangerous than, let's say, the Taliban and the Iranian theocrats that had open access to Twitter all during the time that they were blocking you.

Let's stop for a second and we're going to come right back with a final observation from Scott in a minute.

Thank you for coming back and listening.

Scott, final observation.

What's the future now?

What's the future for Scott Atlas?

I hope you're going to stay involved in public policy or

absolutely.

You know, I think that

what I look at now is that

we are, our country,

we've been exposed.

Okay.

There's been, it's not the pandemic itself at this point.

It's what was exposed, the serious problems in our society,

in all free societies, but particularly in the United States.

We're in crisis.

Science policy, public health policy is in crisis.

We have a denial of fact.

We have a censorship of the free exchange of ideas that is essential to any free society in determining truth.

We have broken the social contract with our children by harming them directly and failing as role models.

Okay, so we need to first and foremost focus on how do we restore trust

in these institutions and reinstate ethics, ethical principles in the public health.

We need to demand accountability, like I mentioned.

We need to do things like defining what a public health emergency really is and the time limits of a public health emergency.

We need to reset the role of health agencies to be advisory, not to set rules.

And we need to do things like increasing transparency requirements and accountability.

We realize that There are more than a dozen universities in the United States that get more than a half a billion dollars a year in NIH funding alone.

Okay, we need accountability for that money.

We are paying that money.

We need to have them make sure that they're allowing the free exchange of debate to get the correct.

And that was behind a lot of the opportunistic criticism of yourself that people felt that if you had crossed certain people with institutional clout, that they may be retaliated against in their grants, don't you think, or their last?

Yeah, absolutely.

I mean, science is controlled.

The research itself is funded by mainly the NIH.

You cannot get your own career moving if you don't get an NIH grant.

The massive amount of money these universities get from the NIH, the same people that control the NIH grant funding that are required, the grants are required to get a promotion from assistant to associate to full professor, your career.

But also, those same people judging the grants are the people that are running the scientific journals.

And so there's this cartel of control of science research.

We need to decentralize that.

We need to break it up.

We need to expose it.

You can imagine, Victor, that there was probably very few, if any, assistant professors at the beginning of their career in a university that were willing to criticize the NIH because they can't.

And so this is really very dangerous.

It's harmful to the public good.

We need to fix these things.

And we need to do this, in my view, from outside universities.

The institutions, the policy institutes have failed.

Otherwise, we wouldn't be in the position we're in.

We need to have truly independent voices, truly independent views.

And yes, I intend to be involved.

I'm still at Hoover.

I'm going to do the best I can to work through Hoover Institution, but I'm also

a co-founder of an Institute for an Academy for Science and Freedom with Merton Koldorf and Jay Bhattacharya through Hillsdale College, where we're trying to fix science.

Science itself is broken and has become politicized.

And I'm also the founder of a new institute called the Global Liberty Institute, because we need to focus as an international community on restoring liberty and the free exchange of ideas.

And the U.S.

is not going to do it alone.

Switzerland as the European sort of voice of independence, but I think all free societies need to work together to counter the harmful international organizations like the the World Economic Forum, for instance.

Yeah, absolutely.

That are working against national sovereignty and against the best interest of individuals.

I advise everybody to look at the recent edited Michael Walsh Against the Great Reset, and it's a series of essays about the danger that opposes.

Final observation, Scott Atlas, you've been involved as an advisor in three campaigns.

You were presidential.

If we're now entering a cycle again, if a candidate asked you as advisor, would you rejoin

that advisory role in a political context or not, given what you've been through?

You know, honestly, Victor,

I'm for helping anybody who would want me to advise.

And I think it's very important.

And I think

it's difficult.

I'm not sure I want to be on the stage

again, but I definitely think

it's not just an opportunity, it's a responsibility to rise up.

And that means speak up,

stand up for what's right when you're asked.

Most of us, most people

really frankly don't get an opportunity to help their country in such an impactful way.

A lot of people try and a lot of people do it.

But when your time comes that you're actually asked to help your country, the answer must be yes, or this country is finished.

Thank you very much, Scott Atlas.

And that will conclude our broadcast today.

And I urge all of you to follow Scott's career because he's very active.

He's more active than ever.

If his critics thought they were going to silence him, it has had the opposite effect.

Thank you very much, Scott.

Thanks for having me, Victor.

Good chatting with you.