Dr. Scott Atlas, the author of the newly published book, “Plague Upon our House: My Fight at the Trump White House to Stop COVID From Destroying America”, gave a talk at the Teen Center on Arch Street in Greenwich, Sunday night. It was a standing room only crowd with at least 20-30 having no seats. Total attendance for listening to Dr. Scott Atlas was around 150-200. Moderated by State Rep. Kimberly Fiorello, it was a night of insights, revelations, and discussion around the covid pandemic.
The event was organized by the Federated Republican Women of Southern Connecticut. Their mission is to provide timely and principled presentations on key issues affecting everyone in the community. They plan on doing similar events in the future.
The audience was very positive and receptive to Dr. Atlas. State Rep. Fiorello started out by asking about his background and to go through some points in the book. It is composed of some 20 chapters covering over 300 pages. The one downside is that they apparently did not have time to put in an index.
Nonetheless, perhaps the single most telling and puzzling part of his story about being in the White House was his interactions with Drs. Fauci, Birx and Redland. He presented in a meeting in the Oval Office a series of papers by which he believed the guidance for setting a proper health care policy was very clear. However, after he finished, there was dead silence until Dr. Redland said “Well, the jury is still out.” It was at that point Dr. Atlas realized he was not in an environment driven by facts and logic. Instead, he had entered the Wonderland world of political machinations.
Dr. Atlas made clear in the talk that he is not a politician, so he was not ready for the type of reality with which he was now confronted. His technical background was primarily in what might be termed neuro-radiology; i.e., a specialty focused on diagnosis of spinal and brain disorders with MRI, CATSCANs and conventional X-ray imaging.
This eventually took him to his current post as a health policy expert at the Hoover Institution. He is also known for his capabilities with statistical analysis.
“First, I declared, I want to make sure you know what you are getting with me. I will never say anything that isn’t correct and true. I will never agree with someone else’s comments if that is not correct, no matter who tells me to. And I will never sign on to a group statement that I do not agree with.”
Despite that candor, as noted above, he quickly found out it was not universally appreciated with the task force. To cite a term Dr. Atlas used throughout the night, he became an “outlier”. Their political reality versus his factual reality were not going to get along.
Inscrutable Bureaucrats
As part of that political reality, he made clear that the people he was dealing with were, first and last, bureaucrats in the worst sense of the word. Though having medical degrees after their names, none of them had seen or treated a patient in decades. However, they had been part of clinical trials that they mismanaged and were faulted by the government for their misconduct.
An unspoken point was that the conduct of these people: Fauci, Birx and Redland, were increasingly not in the interests of the people of the United States. That said, there were still many unanswered questions as to their motivations. As one questioner later noted, cynically, “For you to NOT be a conspiracy theorist, there has to be something wrong with you.” That comment earned some laughter and scattered applause from the audience. Dr. Atlas smiled at the comment. But he clearly did not want to go there.
Regardless, a discussion with anyone who follows the stories and events around the CDC, the FDA and the NIH cannot help but observe that many aspects of their decisions and reasoning do not make sense.
Some audience members later commented they were confused by some of Dr. Atlas’s more positive comments about the mRNA vaccines. On reflection, it was clear that Dr. Atlas’s commentary seemed to follow a timeline where the nature of his comments changed with the changes in the type of information that was developing about the mRNA vaccines effect on the vaccinated. He did talk about breakthrough infections. However he did not go into the other areas relating the types of illnesses contracted by those who have already been vaccinated.
With the questions, the event was over 3 hours, and even that was not enough for all the issues on people’s minds. There is considerable research developing quickly in a number of areas around spike proteins. Yankee Tea News will be presenting them soon.