Eric Thompson
Most of America knows the faces of former President Donald Trump’s Coronavirus Task Force. Dr. Athonth Fauci and Dr. Deborah Birx spent a considerable amount of time in front of the microphone, with Dr. Birx eventually leaving the group.
Dr. Scott Atlas was also a member of the task force and in his new book, “A Plague Upon Our House: My Fight at the Trump White House to Stop COVID from Destroying America,” he reveals previously unknown information on how and why things went terribly wrong in the task force, in their fight to combat COVID-19.
“The American people need to know the level of incompetence, the lack of rigor, the lack of critical thinking. I was stunned at what I saw,” Atlas says of his time at the White House. “We had bureaucrats in charge of the policy and that policy was the restrictions and lockdowns. And it failed.”
He joined Rob Bluey on the “The Daily Signal Podcast” to talk about his time on Trump’s task force and President Biden’s failures in managing COVID.
Atlas blames three public health officials: Dr. Deborah Birx, White House coronavirus response coordinator; Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases; and Dr. Robert Redfield, former director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Following are a few sections of the transcript.
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Bluey: I have to ask you about Dr. Fauci, who is now serving as President Biden’s chief medical adviser. He recently attacked his critics by saying, “I represent science.” You served alongside him on the task force when you were in the White House. What do you make of his statement in this pushback that he seems so offended by?
Atlas: I think every person with any common sense brain really has the same reaction to that kind of delusional statement that I would. So I won’t go into my personal reaction to that statement, but I will say it this way: That’s not what I saw when I was in the White House.
What I saw when I was in the task force meetings were three doctors on the task force that controlled the medical policy really, which were Dr. Fauci, who was the most visible face of the policy to the country, but not in charge of the task force. Dr. Deborah Birx, who was in charge of the medical side of the task force, she was the official task force coordinator with capital letters.
These people were bureaucrats, Drs. Fauci and Birx were 40-year bureaucrats. I was very different. I had more than a decade of health policy expertise practicing. I had 25-plus years of medical science clinical research and education. I brought in dozens of papers, the world’s literature.
I wrote this in my book, “A Plague Upon Our House,” because the American people need to know the level of incompetence, the lack of rigor, the lack of critical thinking. I was stunned at what I saw. We had bureaucrats in charge of the policy and that policy was the restrictions in lockdown. And it failed. It failed by the data to stop the spread of the infection. It failed to protect the elderly and stop them from dying. And it destroyed millions and millions of families, including the children who were sacrificed, and I’m talking about particularly low-income families.
This was an egregious immoral application of public health because when you’re a public health leader, you are not supposed to say I’m going to stop this one infection at all costs, without regard for all of public health. These people, the advice that was done was directed solely at stopping these cases.
Are the public health bureaucrats, these three doctors you cite, so powerful that President Trump felt he had no choice but to go along with their guidance?
So when you speak about this, the president understood and said it multiple times before I got there and while I was there, that we need to open up and increase the protection of the elderly, the targeted protection, so-called focus protection, meaning increase the protection.
The president understood this. The problem was while he was saying that, the task force said something very different. The task force was on its own.
The task force was speaking forward to the states and to the American people, 24/7, really, a totally different message. So they were on their own and they were, they, the task force doctors, Dr. Birx, and to the people, Dr. Fauci were espousing a completely different policy not consistent with what the president wanted, but more importantly, the wrong policy.
Written By: Eric Thompson, host of the Eric Thompson Show. Follow me on his website ETTALKSHOW, MAGABOOK, Twellit & Twitter.