Left Attacks Scott Atlas For Saying Same Things About COVID As The New York Times, Six Months Earlier

Power-hungry elites seek to destroy Scott Atlas because he and the scientific coalition he represents makes it clear that these public health emperors may have plenty of masks, but no clothes.

The evidence continues to accrue that the dominant policies sold to mitigate the COVID-19 outbreak were catastrophically wrong, yet those who pointed this out early on continue to be reputationally crucified by media and Democrat elites. A premiere case in point is White House Coronavirus Task Force member Dr. Scott Atlas, who has been making science-based arguments against locking down healthy people since the earliest months of the pandemic.

Because he has courageously presented evidence that gums up the media’s goal of ending Trump’s presidency by using coronavirus to punish Americans, the knives have been out for the views Atlas represents since the beginning.

Atlas is not at all alone in professional skepticism about the value of extended lockdowns, cloth masks, and obsessing about case counts as opposed to hospitalizations and deaths. So far, more than 12,000 medical and public health scientists and more than 35,000 medical professionals from around the world have signed the Great Barrington Declaration that summarizes this advocacy of “focused protection.”

Atlas is just a prominent face for this view that the power-hungry elites need to crush to avoid responsibility for their horrifically bad leadership during the COVID outbreak, as well as to get Trump. So they seek to destroy him because he and the scientific coalition he represents makes it clear that these public health emperors may have plenty of masks, but no clothes.

Thus YouTube, Twitter, and Facebook have repeatedly banned or slapped warnings on Atlas’s statements and all scientific evidence that might support the Great Barrington view. This week a former Obama official called for Atlas’s medical license to be revoked for the crime of practicing science.

Things like this are not only anti-science, they are anti-public health. Yanking Atlas’s license because he participated in the scientific process by challenging interpretations of evidence with more evidence will not only end scientific advancement, it will legitimize the growing anti-vaccine movement by providing a legitimate martyr to rally around instead of a fake one.

Anyone who cares about public health should not be giving people more reasons to distrust the people who stamp their foreheads with “public health expert.” That is what all this suppression of research and of discourse does. It is also what all the personal attacks on people like Atlas do. Refusing to engage with the evidence he cites and instead attacking his professional background — “he’s only a radiologist, not an epidemiologist”– or smearing him — “he’s a grandma killer” — makes the people doing this look like the real hacks.

The only way to legitimately destroy Atlas’s credibility would be to engage with him on the science, to point out where his arguments are wrong or weak or what they are missing. This is called the scientific process, and it is essential to the advancement of knowledge. Since very little of that has been forthcoming, the thinking public is left to assume his coalition’s stance is legitimate and the people who use dirty tactics are attempting to avoid facing that their policies have devastated the world while possibly causing additional deaths.

Evidence Mounts that Focused Protection Is Right

Indeed, the evidence continues to mount that those who advocate for focused protection have been right about their interpretation of the science for months. Like other public health experts including the World Health Organization and Dr. Anthony Fauci before he reversed himself, Atlas has long pointed out that the preponderance of better-quality evidence about masks shows mandates for the general public to wear them accomplish no significant public health value.

Just this week a large-scale Danish study was finally released. This randomized controlled trial, the highest-quality scientific study available, found that those who wore masks were not statistically less likely to contract COVID-19 than those who did not wear masks.

As The Spectator UK pointed out, “The results of the Danmask-19 trial mirror other reviews into influenza-like illnesses. Nine other trials looking at the efficacy of masks (two looking at healthcare workers and seven at community transmission) have found that masks make little or no difference to whether you get influenza or not.”

Those who say these results are because “my mask protects you, and your mask protects me” need to take a long and hard look at the fact that countries, states, and cities with near-universal mask-wearing have the same patterns of COVID spread. “No matter how strictly mask laws are enforced nor the level of mask compliance the population follows, cases all fall and rise around the same time,” notes a recent Federalist roundup of such examples. This is likely why Fauci, who criticizes Atlas’s statements publicly, doesn’t wear masks when the cameras aren’t on.

Atlas Was Right About Immune Response

Atlas has consistently stood against depictions of data that encouraged a hysterical response to COVID. In a widely publicized exchange in September, for example, Atlas pointed out that Dr. Robert Redfield, head of the Centers for Disease Control, exaggerated how many Americans were still threatened by the Wuhan virus.

Redfield said “more than 90 percent” of Americans were still susceptible. Atlas pointed out that much of the data underlying this claim was old, taken from early in the outbreak, and that “about 24 papers at least” had shown that people who haven’t contracted SARS-CoV-2 can have an immune response to it, presumably from having fought off other coronaviruses. This meant that many more Americans than the 9 percent Redfield claimed would have some level of protection against COVID if they chanced to encounter it.

At the time, the NBC reporter questioning Atlas was incredulous, and the exchange set off another round of media and bureaucrat attacks on Atlas, calling his promotion of herd immunity — a goal of any basic public health response to infectious diseases! — “unethical” and “unachievable.” Now that Joe Biden is presumed to soon be president, however, The New York Times saw fit to finally report on the research reinforcing Atlas’s explanation of T-cell, antibody, and other immune responses and protections against COVID.

“How long might immunity to the coronavirus last? Years, maybe even decades, according to a new study … Eight months after infection, most people who have recovered still have enough immune cells to fend off the virus and prevent illness, the new data show. A slow rate of decline in the short term suggests, happily, that these cells may persist in the body for a very, very long time to come,” the Nov. 17 Times article says.

It goes on to cite research on other coronaviruses showing similarly long-lasting protection for many people from the frightful hospital stays corporate media has hyped for eight months. It even cites the exact same study Atlas did on SARS, showing that the protective T-cell immune response lasted at least 17 years. He was attacked for it, and claims like this are flagged by “fact-checkers” for social media like Facebook. Not The New York Times, though, when it says exactly the same thing.

Yes, the Research Supports Keeping Schools Open

Leftist writers like Nicholas Kristof at The New York Times are also now trying to retcon the fact that it was Democrats and their media allies who demanded school shutdowns, due not only to their political need for coronavirus hysteria but also their ties to teachers unions. Biden’s own national school closures plan mimicked the New York City one with arbitrary targets based on conjecture.

Leftist media and politicians brutalized Atlas and others for pointing out early in the outbreak that children are the lowest-risk group for coronavirus contraction and complications. Yet highly influential dual-income parents in blue places like New York City are now in uproar about rolling blackouts and brownouts of their children’s education based on nonsensical metrics like a 3 percent infection rate (if the infection has mild consequences for nearly all children and most teachers, who are also comparatively young, why shut down schools even if there are infections?).

“Trump has been demanding for months that schools reopen, and on that he seems to have been largely right,” Kristof wrote on Nov. 18. “Schools, especially elementary schools, do not appear to have been major sources of coronavirus transmission, and remote learning is proving to be a catastrophe for many low-income children.”

Some of us pointed this out in April, back when much of this damage could have been prevented. We were throttled on Facebook and Twitter, and our children held hostage to these lies for nearly an entire school year now. Education Secretary Betsy DeVos was heckled and cast as a would-be child murderer on grounds a single child might get COVID if kids went back to school. American children’s safety and futures has been sacrificed because too many adults have been cowards more concerned with protecting their egos than acting courageously and prudently.

Herd Immunity Is Not Controversial to Scientists

Let’s all repeat the scientific facts: Most of us are going to get COVID, either through a natural infection or a stimulated immune response from a vaccine. There is no way to prevent that. There are only ways to mitigate it. Lockdowns are one way, but they have extremely high costs concentrated on the poor. Children and other young people — those under age 60 — are the most likely to not only survive a COVID infection, but also the most likely to experience a relatively mild case when they do get it. All this is scientifically indisputable.

The conclusion the Great Barrington types derive from these facts and others is that those under 60 and without comorbidities should thus live normally. Those who are least likely to be harmed by a COVID case should accrue herd immunity as quickly as prudently possible on behalf of the vulnerable.

In response to this charitable view based on scientific evidence and arguments, the left, often using Fauci, Deborah Birx, and Redfield, have crucified the characters and careers of those, like Atlas, who have dared to espouse it. As a consequence, hundreds of millions of Americans are being needlessly forced to suffer with no end in sight. We are caught in the crossfire of a giant ego war between people of cowardly, self-serving, intellectually narrow, and deceitful character.

Those who tell us the truth about all this are publicly shamed while those who lie to us are feted. Societies that punish the good and reward the evil sow the wind.

Even a Military-Enforced Quarantine Can’t Stop the Virus, Study Reveals:

Jeffrey A. Tucker American Institute for Economic Research

– November 13, 2020
AIER >> Daily Economy >> Regulation >> Authoritarianism
The New England Journal of Medicine has published a study that goes to the heart of the issue of lockdowns. The question has always been whether and to what extent a lockdown, however extreme, is capable of suppressing the virus. If so, you can make an argument that at least lockdowns, despite their astronomical social and economic costs, achieve something. If not, nations of the world have embarked on a catastrophic experiment that has destroyed billions of lives, and all expectation of human rights and liberties, with no payoff at all.

[The earliest version of this article misstated the conditions of the control group. They were equally locked down with those who participated in the study. The difference between the two concerned testing frequency and the isolation response. This does not affect this article’s conclusion; indeed it strengthens it: even under extreme measures, the virus spread, and more so with the extra measure intended to control the virus. Nearly all infections were without symptoms.]

AIER has long highlighted studies that show no gain in virus management from lockdowns. Even as early as April, a major data scientist said that this virus becomes endemic in 70 days after the first round of infection, regardless of policies. The largest global study of lockdowns compared with deaths as published in The Lancet found no association between coercive stringencies and deaths per million.

To test further might seem superfluous but, for whatever reason, governments all over the world, including in the US, still are under the impression that they can affect viral transmissions through a range of “nonpharmaceutical interventions” (NPIs) like mandatory masks, forced human separation, stay-at-home orders, bans of gatherings, business and school closures, and extreme travel restrictions. Nothing like this has been tried on this scale in the whole of human history, so one might suppose that policy makers have some basis for their confidence that these measures accomplish something.

A study conducted by Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in cooperation with the Naval Medical Research Center sought to test lockdownsm along with testing and isolation. In May, 3,143 new recruits to the Marines were given the option to participate in a study of frequent testing under extreme quarantine. The study was called CHARM, which stands for COVID-19 Health Action Response for Marines. Of the recruits asked, a total of 1,848 young people agreed to be guinea pigs in this experiment which involved “which included weekly qPCR testing and blood sampling for IgG antibody assessment.” In addition, the CHARM study volunteers who did test positively “on the day of enrollment (day 0) or on day 7 or day 14 were separated from their roommates and were placed in isolation.”

What did the recruits have to do? The study explains, and, as you will see, they faced an even more strict regime that has existed in civilian life in most places. All recruits, even those not in the CHARM group, did the following.

All recruits wore double-layered cloth masks at all times indoors and outdoors, except when sleeping or eating; practiced social distancing of at least 6 feet; were not allowed to leave campus; did not have access to personal electronics and other items that might contribute to surface transmission; and routinely washed their hands. They slept in double-occupancy rooms with sinks, ate in shared dining facilities, and used shared bathrooms. All recruits cleaned their rooms daily, sanitized bathrooms after each use with bleach wipes, and ate preplated meals in a dining hall that was cleaned with bleach after each platoon had eaten.

Most instruction and exercises were conducted outdoors. All movement of recruits was supervised, and unidirectional flow was implemented, with designated building entry and exit points to minimize contact among persons. All recruits, regardless of participation in the study, underwent daily temperature and symptom screening. Six instructors who were assigned to each platoon worked in 8-hour shifts and enforced the quarantine measures. If recruits reported any signs or symptoms consistent with Covid-19, they reported to sick call, underwent rapid qPCR testing for SARS-CoV-2, and were placed in isolation pending the results of testing.

Instructors were also restricted to campus, were required to wear masks, were provided with preplated meals, and underwent daily temperature checks and symptom screening. Instructors who were assigned to a platoon in which a positive case was diagnosed underwent rapid qPCR testing for SARS-CoV-2, and, if the result was positive, the instructor was removed from duty. Recruits and instructors were prohibited from interacting with campus support staff, such as janitorial and food-service personnel. After each class completed quarantine, a deep bleach cleaning of surfaces was performed in the bathrooms, showers, bedrooms, and hallways in the dormitories, and the dormitory remained unoccupied for at least 72 hours before reoccupancy.

The reputation of Marine basic training is that it is tough going but this really does take it to another level. Also, this is an environment where those in charge do not mess around. There was surely close to 100% compliance, as compared with, for example, a typical college campus.

What were the results? The virus still spread, though 90% of those who tested positive were without symptoms. Incredibly, 2% of the CHARM recruits still contracted the virus, even if all but one remained asymptomatic. “Our study showed that in a group of predominantly young male military recruits, approximately 2% became positive for SARS-CoV-2, as determined by qPCR assay, during a 2-week, strictly enforced quarantine.”

And how does this compare to the control group that was not tested and not isolated in the case of a positive case? Have a look at this chart from the study:

New England Journal of Medicine

https://www.aier.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/Screen-Shot-2020-11-13-at-10.16.32-AM-1200x691.png

Which is to say that the nonparticipants actually contracted the virus at a slightly lower rate than those who were under an extreme regime. Conversely, extreme enforcement of NPIs plus more frequent testing and isolation was associated with a greater degree of infection.

I’m grateful to Don Wolt for drawing my attention to this study, which, so far as I know, has received very little attention from any media source at all, despite having been published in the New England Journal of Medicine on November 11.

Here are four actual media headlines about the study that miss the point entirely:

CNN: “Many military Covid-19 cases are asymptomatic, studies show”
SciTech Daily: “Asymptomatic COVID-19 Transmission Revealed Through Study of 2,000 Marine Recruits”
ABC: “Broad study of Marine recruits shows limits of COVID-19 symptom screening”
US Navy: “Navy/Marine Corps COVID-19 Study Findings Published in New England Journal of Medicine”
No national news story that I have found highlighted the most important finding of all: extreme quarantine plus frequent testing and isolation among military recruits did nothing to stop the virus.

But with this Marine study, you have a near homogeneous group based on age, health, and densities of living. And even here, you see confirmed what so many other studies have shown: lockdowns are pointlessly destructive.

They do not manage the disease. They crush human liberty and produce astonishing costs, such as 5.53 million years of lost life from the closing of schools alone.

The lockdowners keep telling us to pay attention to the science. That’s what we are doing. When the results contradict their pro-compulsion narrative, they pretend that the studies do not exist and barrel ahead with their scary plans to disable all social functioning in the presence of a virus. Lockdowns are not science. They never have been. They are an experiment in social/political top-down management that is without precedent in cost to life and liberty.

https://www.aier.org/article/even-a-military-enforced-quarantine-cant-stop-the-virus-study-reveals/

New England Journal of Medicine

New England Journal of Medicine
Which is to say that the nonparticipants actually contracted the virus at a slightly lower rate than those who were under an extreme regime. Conversely, extreme enforcement of NPIs plus more frequent testing and isolation was associated with a greater degree of infection.

Here are four actual media headlines about the study that miss the point entirely:

The study is important because of the social structure of control here. It’s one thing to observe no effects from national lockdowns. There are countless variables here that could be invoked as cautionary notes: demographics, population density, preexisting immunities, degree of compliance, and so on. But with this Marine study, you have a near homogeneous group based on age, health, and densities of living. And even here, you see confirmed what so many other studies have shown: lockdowns are pointlessly destructive. They do not manage the disease. They crush human liberty and produce astonishing costs, such as 5.53 million years of lost life from the closing of schools alone.

https://www.aier.org/article/even-a-military-enforced-quarantine-cant-stop-the-virus-study-reveals/

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