Dr. Scott Atlas was interviewed by Marissa Streit of PragerU and he revealed the perverse character of the meetings of the U.S. Coronavirus Task Force.
In this caption from the interview, Dr. Atlas mentions how there were 99,997 survivors for every 100,000 COVID infections in those under age 20 — a statistic which makes COVID less lethal for those under age 20 than influenza.
At minute-mark 8:25 in the interview, Dr. Atlas had this to say:
And the sad part was they had no data. There were these sophomoric charts tabulated by Deborah Birx that a middle school student could put together ... they were just arbitrary, the cutoffs for cases, for whatever the criteria was. There was no real science, or scientific debate, except when I was asked a question, I was prepared with a dozen, two dozen scientific papers, all the data I had gone through with the skepticism about the study designs that you're supposed to have as a medical scientist.
And at minute-mark 9:15:
And there was never a single meeting, and this is sort of shocking to even keep reliving, not a single time where Debora Birx or Anthony Fauci or Robert Redfield brought scientific papers into the meeting. Not a single time was anything I said ever refuted by criticism of the data or alternative numbers or other data.
And at minute-mark 9:55:
Not a single time did I ever hear Redfield, Birx or Fauci ever criticize a study design. And, even worse, not a single time did they disagree with each other, which is, of course, unheard of -- implying that there was a "group-think" going on, not critical thinking.
And at minute-mark 11:05:
They were bureaucrats. Fauci was in his position for 38 years. Deborah Birx was a government employee for 40 years. These were bureaucrats. They didn't act like scientists. They didn't think like scientists. They didn't know the data.
Later on in the interview, he contrasted his motivation against the motivation of the bureaucrats:
My motivation is very simple: People were dying, it's my country, I'm going to help.
In The Oxford Companion to Politics of the World, there is an entry which describes what Dr. Atlas was up against: Bureaucratic Authoritarianism. Here are 6 excerpts (mostly regarding late 20th century Latin America) which mirror the public health response to COVID:
This bureaucratic, technocratic orientation was generally accompanied by intense repression, …
The appearance in these countries of an authoritarianism of unprecedented harshness …
… is built on a political coalition and a policy orientation that entails strong ties to international economic actors.
An initial hypothesis suggested that military and economic elites established bureaucratic authoritarianism …
… severe economic problems, experienced throughout the region as part of the international debt crisis, helped discredit authoritarianism.
… domestic and international protest against human rights abuses … further debilitated authoritarian rule.
Using a play on words from a Cambridge University Press book about markets and China, you can say that the response to COVID in the USA was “public health, with Chinese characteristics.”
Another gem from minute-mark 1:22:00 from Dr. Atlas:
We now know that the responsibility is on us as individuals in a free society to know what we are talking about, to go and investigate the source and the data because the era of trusting people … solely on the basis of their credentials is over. These people have disqualified themselves. They’re not critical thinkers. They’re inept, they’re incompetent, but also they’re not to be trusted.
The interview with Dr. Atlas reveals the perverse character of those in charge of public health policy in the USA and presumably elsewhere. God bless Dr. Atlas for bringing all of this to light.