Dr. Scott W. Atlas, a Stanford University professor and expert on health policy, became famous (or infamous, depending on your politics) during the middle days of the COVID pandemic in 2020. From his research he developed policy views contrary to the widely espoused policies of Dr. Anthony Fauci, Dr. Deborah Birx, and Dr. Robert Redfield, the experts who shaped most of the federal government response to the health emergency. Because his suggested policies aligned with the views of people who opposed widespread lock-downs and other ‘hysterical’ reactions in the country at large, he was a frequent guest on Fox News and other conservative-leaning media and was eventually asked to become an advisor to the President, arriving in Washington in August 2020.
In his book A Plague upon Our House: My Fight at the Trump White House to Stop COVID from Destroying America, Dr. Atlas stresses repeatedly that he—and he alone—was doing ongoing research into the trends and developments of the disease. He came to every meeting in Washington with his briefcase packed full of the latest peer-reviewed papers from scientists across the world. His conclusions from all this research were that the lock-downs of schools, universities, and businesses were disastrous for Americans, with little to no effect; that widespread testing of everyone yielded a false picture of the disease’s spread, since so many people who tested positive were asymptomatic and never got sick, let alone being hospitalized; and that the correct course was to move quickly to protect the most vulnerable—mostly seniors—and reopen society at large to allow people in low-risk groups to get back to work, to school, and to their normal lives.
These positions were vilified by many experts, by his own colleagues at Stanford, and especially in the press, where they were caricatured as pressing recklessly for herd immunity; a position which Dr. Atlas repeatedly insists he never championed. Reading A Plague Upon our House, one gets the sense of opportunities tragically lost. Whether Dr. Atlas was 100% correct in his policy prescriptions is a conclusion best left to experts. But one does get the strong idea that he had some promising ideas that were ignored in a craven yielding to the politics of the moment.
Before analyzing this, I would make a few points about flaws in the book itself. Any decent non-fiction book, and especially one whose author speaks so much about the research, the science, the published views of immunologists and epidemiologists from across the world, should make some of that research available for the interested reader. This book included no citations, no footnotes, not even the most cursory bibliography. It does not even have an index. Is this a minor quibble? I read in the book that because of lock-downs of K-12 schools, more than 200,000 cases of child abuse went unreported because school is where most such cases are first observed and reported. This is a troubling statistic, and I would like to see how this number was arrived at: but there is no source cited, so I just must leave it as something Dr. Atlas claims.
Further, Dr. Atlas makes some of the same mistakes he accuses others of making. He says that people who opposed him often set up straw men to knock down. But he does the same, as when he repeatedly asserts that Dr. Birx wanted to eradicate every case of COVID-19, an obviously unattainable goal. I do not think this is at all what Drs. Birx and Fauci were trying; they only wanted to mitigate the spread of the disease across all demographics, not just among Dr. Atlas’s suggested senior population. But he uses the silliness of reaching complete elimination of cases to make his opponents look naive and unrealistic. Dr. Atlas also complains bitterly about supposed medical experts who cannot elucidate or understand the difference between correlation and causation when interpreting statistics about the spread of COVID. And yet he makes the startling claim that ‘unemployment caused . . . drug abuse, child abuse, and even loss of lives.’ (P. 111, author’s emphasis) No, Dr. Atlas, unemployment is correlated with those things.
Though he seriously derides the ethics and reliability of anonymous sources, his book is full to bursting with references to mostly unnamed people who sent him supportive emails, of White House staffers and academic colleagues who encouraged him to ‘keep telling the truth.’
But the most glaring problem with Dr. Atlas’s book is that he claims repeatedly to be unpolitical and to despise politics, all while playing right on key every political note in the current GOP playbook.
One of these is his condemnation of the media, whom he sees as blinded by their hatred of Donald Trump. He calls the press ‘the most despicable group of unprincipled liars one could ever imagine . . .’ (P. 123) But he narrates many instances where the press printed things that had been leaked to them by members of the White House staff or the COVID Task Force. If it is lying for newspapers to print what they are told by White House sources, then I do not think Dr. Atlas and I have the same definition of the word. He also writes that throughout the summer and fall of 2020, Donald Trump was speaking of policy directions while his medical advisors, in the highly visible persons of Dr. Fauci and Dr. Birx, were expressing contrary directions. Given this, was it so reprehensible for reporters to seek any source that might clarify things?
As things deteriorate and it becomes clear that none of his advice is going to be heeded, he casts about for someone to blame, and lands, of course, on Vice President Mike Pence, who is fair games in the post-2020 election environment. Pence oversaw the White House COVID Task Force. It was he who led all those meetings where Dr. Birx recited what Dr. Atlas calls inaccurate findings and unreliable reports on the effectiveness of loc-kdowns and mask mandates, and did nothing. It was Pence who spoke pallid support for Dr. Atlas’s work but never moved to create new policies from it. Atlas writes, ‘The closest advisors to the president, including the VP, seemed more concerned with politics, even though the Task Force was putting out the wrong advice, contrary to the President’s desire . . .’ (P. 256)
And this gets at the biggest political game Dr. Atlas plays, the deifying of Donald Trump. In his book, the President is engaged, conversant with the facts, full of pointed questions for the experts around him. When he contracts COVID, Dr. Atlas does not worry because he knows what a vigorous man Donald Trump is. When a press conference is interrupted by the threat of a man with a gun outside the White House, the president takes it bravely in stride and quickly resumes the press conference, though the reporters, Dr. Atlas impishly notes, were ‘scared silly.’ But if Donald Trump had only the good of the country at heart and wanted policies that would lead to that, why didn’t he do those things? He has ongoing, very public disputes with Dr. Anthony Fauci, but never moves to replace him, or Dr. Birx, or any of the medical experts whose advice runs counter to his own ideas. Trump, like Pence and everyone else at the White House, yields to political expediency rather than what will help the country. As Atlas finally notes in the book’s final pages, this was a massive error of judgment, and one unexpected from a chief executive whose very persona bespoke the ability to fire people who displeased him.
What is completely missing in Atlas’s telling is the fact that this intelligent, concerned President was out on the campaign trail repeatedly and loudly insisting that COVID was a hoax, a made-up plot to make him look bad and steal the upcoming election. It was a message heard by, and heeded by, many millions. Instead, Dr. Atlas writes of Donald Trump’s gut instinct about how best to deal with the pandemic, and his differing views on policies. He will not bring himself to admit that the worst damage was done not by bad medical advice, or by Vice President Pence and other White House staff focusing on the politics of the moment, but by an idolized President who could not separate his own personal grievance from the need to protect Americans. And some of the best things that the Trump Administration did, such as hastening the creation of safe and effective vaccines, were undermined by the lingering effects of his own rhetoric, leaving the incoming Biden Administration an uphill (and likely insurmountable) battle to get people to take those vaccines.
When America eventually puts the whole pandemic into the rear-view mirror, there will be a need for honest, objective histories of what was done right and what was done wrong during this dark time. Sadly, this book will not be one of them.
Webster Groves Public Library 