Dr. Scott Atlas probably doesn’t want you to know who he is.
He’s the physician (neuroradiologist, to be precise) who’s been doing a lot of the behind-the-scenes, um, shaping of CDC and administration guidelines and policies related to the coronavirus.
According to a recent Financial Times profile,
Unlike some others on the [White House pandemic] task force, Dr Atlas does not have a background in epidemiology, but he is known in rightwing circles as a former healthcare adviser to both Rudy Giuliani and Mitt Romney during their failed presidential bids. [President] Trump appointed him to the task force after a string of appearances on Fox News during which he [Atlas] argued combatively against lockdowns.
The main thrust of the article is that Dr. Atlas has become quite the vocal advocate for the idea of herd immunity — “aggressively protecting” the most vulnerable while letting the virus burn its way through the rest of the population.
But as the epidemiologists of Kings College London showed early on, even a smallish percentage of deaths in a large population works out to be an awful lot of dead people. If you assume 1 percent mortality on 100 percent infection, you’d see 3.3 million deaths in the United States alone; even if you drop those numbers to achieve “only,” say, 2 million deaths, that’s still outrageous — ten times as many as we’ve seen yet. And, as KCL recently showed, immunity isn’t forever, so herd immunity is effectively never.
So we need to be clear about a few things: first, “herd immunity” is a euphemism for hundreds of thousands of deaths. Second, that’s the official line of the administration — both from the White House and from the task force.
Third, even if such a shrugging response to mass death might be expected from someone whose qualifications for his current role prominently feature advising Rudy Giuliani and a string of Fox News appearances, it’s completely and sickly incompatible with the battle royale unfolding before the Senate Judiciary Committee.
The thing about Amy Coney Barrett is that she’s pro-life. And the thing about Scott Atlas is he’s pushing policies that are undeniably pro-death.
There are miracles, and there is medicine. (For that matter, there is jurisprudence, and there is religion.) But the haphazard conflation cynically peddled by the current administration is, frankly, sickening.
Colin Steele 