The Politicization of Science: A Tale of Failed Lockdowns and Flawed Policies

>> Scott Atlas: I'm gonna talk sort of with two parts to this, first, I'm gonna talk about COVID because COVID is really the most important health policy issue in a century. It directly affected you guys and everybody else, and I wanna inject a little cognitive dissonance in the crowd, and I'm gonna move on to do the same thing with single-payer healthcare, two totally different issues, oops.

This is the subtitle of the talk, everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts, that was said by Senator Moynihan, a Democrat from New York. We'll start with the pandemic, what was claimed the virus has a far higher fatality rate than the flu by several orders of magnitude, that everyone has a significant risk to die, that no one has immunity because it's a new virus.

That everyone is very dangerous and spreads the infection, that asymptomatic people are major drivers of the spread, that locking down will stop or eliminate the virus, that masks protect everyone and stop the spread of the infection. And that immune protection is only from a vaccine, and all of that is false, and worse, it was known to be false by spring of 2020.

What is less known is that lockdowns were never the way to manage pandemics, this was known for 15 years. This is an article that is the standard pandemic management article written by Henderson, the person who was credited with eliminating smallpox. And they said, what should be done, request all who are ill remain isolated at home or in the hospital, but encourage everyone else to continue to come to work.

They said closing schools for longer than ten or 14 days at the very beginning in hopes of mitigating the epidemic is not warranted. They said canceling or postponing large meetings would not have any significant effect. They said there's no basis for recommending quarantine, either of groups or individuals.

And they said screening passengers at borders or closing air or rail travel is not effective, that is not recommended. That was the standard pandemic management in 2006, well known to everyone in the scientific community. In March of 2020, the safer alternative of what I called targeted protection was written nationally by three people, Johnny Loannidis of Stanford, David Katz in the New York Times, and myself in the Washington Times.

Martin Kulldorff, a Harvard epidemiologist, tried to get that published, and it was refused to be published in any outlet in the United States, he finally put it up on his own LinkedIn in April. And what was targeted protection? That meant increase the protection of the high-risk group, but reopen society to the low-risk group and children and end the destruction of them.

In the spring of 2020, I was called by an economist at the University of Chicago who said, Scott, you're writing a lot about the pandemic and the harms of the lockdowns. We need to stop this narrative that an economic shutdown is only about the money because decades of literature showed that economic downturns kill people, particularly the poor people.

And so we wrote a paper and showed in May of 2020 that the lockdowns had already cost more life years than the virus, the lockdowns were killing people more than the virus. The narrative put forward by academics, the government, and the media were threefold. This is why Americans were convinced to go forward with things that made no sense, even in a sense of common sense, let alone in the science.

One, if you're against lockdowns, you're choosing the economy over lives, that was a false narrative, it was choosing lives over lives. Two, if you're against the lockdowns, you're calling for letting the infection to spread, let it rip, or what was called the herd immunity strategy. Okay, this was a lie, no one ever said let it rip, I personally never heard it even said in the White House, it was never discussed, that was just a way to vilify people who were against lockdowns.

And third, academics, the government, and the media colluded overtly or simply acted individually to use censorship, distortion, and character assassination to demonize people who were against the lockdowns. And falsely imply to the public a consensus that somehow lockdowns were universally thought of as the way to go. And that had a secondary impact, which was that while it doesn't stop people like me from talking, it certainly caused a lot of people to reconsider going public.

And I got hundreds of emails from scientists all over the country saying, keep talking, keep saying the truth. I'm afraid for my family and my job, I'm not gonna say anything, that's called self-cancellation, its very impactful. That's called propaganda, and it's not a coincidence that that word is written in New York Times font.

The US enacted the Birx-Fauci lockdowns, why do I call it the Birx-Fauci lockdowns? Well, unbeknownst to most people, Deborah Birx was in charge of the medical side of the White House task force, she was the White House task force coordinator. She wrote all the official guidance to every state, she visited every state she visited the local public health officials, with or without Vice President Pence.

And she disseminated during the entire year of 2020, before, during, and after I left all of the official policy from the federal side. Anthony Fauci wasn't in charge of anything, but he was the most visible and therefore most influential person on the White House task force. And when Biden was inaugurated, he appointed Fauci as chief medical advisor, and you may remember, the initial policy was 15 days to slow the spread.

And that made sense intuitively, because the idea was, we don't want the hospitals to be overwhelmed, and they anticipated that hospitals would be overwhelmed with COVID patients. And so they wanted to slow the spread, meaning not decrease the area under the curve, if you wanna use a mathematical description, not decrease the deaths, not decrease the cases.

It had nothing to do with 15 days of slow the spread, it was simply to stop the rapid increase so that hospitals could function and take care of COVID patients, but also everybody else. That almost immediately changed to a different strategy, stop all cases, no matter what cost.

And how did they propose to do that? What did they do? They called for lockdowns, lockdowns means school closures, business shutdowns, limits on non-COVID medical care, and a host of restrictions, mandates, and quarantines. That policy was implemented by two administrations, and that policy failed, there were over a million American deaths attributed to COVID, and that policy, in addition, caused death and destruction.

Particularly harming families at the low income level of society and children. Why do I say lockdowns failed? Because that's the data. This is Bjornskov, March 2021, 24 European countries the lockdown policies did not associate with lower mortality. This is Ben David and colleagues from Stanford, January 2021. The lockdowns did nothing have any significant benefit on the case growth, they did not stop the spread of the infection.

This is Agarwal, this is USC and Rand Institute, June 2021. Examining 43 countries in all the us states. The lockdowns not only failed, they led to an increase in excess deaths. Excess deaths are deaths above and beyond what you would have in a non-pandemic year. And in fact, in 43 countries and 50 US states, the excess deaths were falling before the lockdowns were instituted.

But once the lockdowns were instituted, their data showed the deaths began increasing. This is Herbie, Johns Hopkins, January 2022. Meta analysis the lockdowns have had little to no public health effects, meaning on mortality. But they impose enormous economic and social costs and are ill-founded and should be rejected as a pandemic policy instrument.

This is Kirpin and colleagues, including Casey Mulligan from University of Chicago, February 2023. And they quantified the impact of lockdowns on mortality, economic damage and educational damage. And they showed that the states that did the best included the states that opened early, including the states South Dakota and Florida, no matter what Governor Newsom says.

And the states that did the worst are the states with the more stringent policies of lockdowns, Illinois, California, New Mexico, New York, Washington, DC, and New Jersey. This is not political, has nothing to do with the president or the politics of the situation. This is a graph of COVID deaths per million from the beginning of the pandemic for two years plus under the Trump administration, under the Biden administration.

That's inauguration day of President Biden there on the graph. This is the graph, COVID deaths per day. That's a straight line, there's no change in the slope of the line. You don't have to know a lot of math to know that there's no difference even after vaccination began on December 16, 2020.

This is the bottom line, the lockdowners and the experts who recommended them own the outcomes, why? Because their policies were implemented. No matter what anyone else said, their policies were implemented, their policies failed, their policies killed and harmed millions of people. And by the way, there is no space between what happened under the Trump administration and what Doctor Fauci recommended.

If you say that doctor Fauci's policies, he was great, then you are literally saying that the Trump administration policy was great, that's what was implemented. If you wanna say that people died unnecessarily and the Trump administration was a disaster with COVID management, you are saying that the policies by Birx and Fauci were a disaster.

That's what was implemented. Just the basic, very important data to know what's the risk and for whom. The original World Health Organization said that the infection fatality rate, number of people who died divided by number of people who actually had the infection, was 3.4%. That's extraordinarily high and very frightening.

But after 15 minutes, anyone with medical science knowledge knew or should have known that the denominator has to include the people who were infected, but not sick enough to go see a doctor, or were entirely asymptomatic. Like almost every other viral respiratory infection. And the data came out very early, even in 2020 and 2021.

And multiple studies since, it shows the infection fatality rate was about 0.1%. And for people under 70, far less than that. And that is the order of magnitude of influenza. Age is the most important risk factor for COVID death, with the mean age of death being about 80, and you'll notice the severe age gradient.

This was like a godsend, that young people had almost no risk of death, that's fact, that's not an opinion. And old people, it was far more dangerous. For perspective, the median age of COVID death in most countries was greater than the life expectancy. It doesn't minimize people that died from COVID, people died from COVID.

Two-thirds of deaths in COVID patients occurred later than life expectancy, that's the data. When Ioannidis and colleagues reviewed the 2020 data recently, in 2023, when all the data was known, and it's far more accurate. So the 2020 data is the data without a vaccine, when the virus was the most lethal.

This is the risk. For people under 20, it's minuscule, almost 0 for death. And for people under 50, it's very, very low. It turns out that comorbidities are very important, not all people who are over 75 are equally at risk. Two-thirds of deaths in the United States were in people with greater than or equal to six comorbidities.

So we're talking about people who are old and frail, generally, there are exceptions, but that's generally who died from COVID. The case for opening schools, this is the biggest sort of most sinful part of the management of COVID. When I got to the White House, I put forward what I thought was low hanging fruit.

Got to open the schools, why? Because healthy children have a minuscule risk of serious illness or death. The harms of closing in-person schools were enormous and well documented, and nothing is more important to any civilized society than educating children. And we also already knew from the spring 2020 school closures that online learning was a failure.

And it had not that much to do with availability of Internet, even the Netherlands, with the world's highest penetrance of broadband, had significant learning losses with school shutdowns. And of course, anybody knows, you don't have to be a parent to understand that the most important thing you learn in school is socialization for poorer families.

Nutrition, that's the best meal the kids get. Conflict resolution, language development, physical activity, that's where we detect hearing and vision problems in young kids in school. And that's where child abuse is noted. In the spring of 2020 school closures alone, there were 300,000 cases of child abuse that went unreported because schools are the number one agency where child abuse is noticed.

All of the losses, not just learning, but all of the losses, including learning, are far greater for minorities and poor children. Like I said, the first thing I did in the White House was organize this event, actually. We had leaders in school policy, but also parents, special needs kids, teachers, etc, putting forward the data on opening schools.

This was met with A massive press backlash. The legacy of academia and public health experts is clearly what happened when we closed America's schools, despite the fact that children had minuscule risk. We've already heard from Rick Hanschek about the learning losses. I can go through that, but what I wanna focus on are the health issues from the lockdown, not from the virus.

Teenagers compared to 2019, the hospital these are medical claims, by the way. These are actual data of visits to doctors. This is not a survey, how do you feel? Kind of thing. And this is medical claims during 2020 in teenagers. And they all dropped compared to the pre pandemic year, why?

Because the hospitals and medical facilities were either closed or people were discouraged from seeking medical care. And so it makes sense, medical claims went down. Mental illness claims in teenagers skyrocketed during 2020. Self harm visits as soon as the lockdowns were instituted, self harm visits to doctors and teenagers doubled to tripled from the previous year.

Self harm is young kids putting out cigarettes on their skin or slashing their wrists. Psychiatric illness in college age, anxiety disorder, depression skyrocketed during the lockdowns from the previous year. Drug abuse in teenagers, substance use disorders dramatically increased from the previous year. There were long-term damages. People in your generation, a lot of people gained weight during the 2020 lockdowns.

Your generation, 52% of people had a weight gain unwanted of 28 pounds, that's obesity. The lockdowns especially harm low income and poor kids. This is the update review of what happened on the learning losses put forward by World Bank, UNESCO, UNICEF, the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation. And the lockdowns had the largest learning losses.

Where schools were closed the longest and disproportionately affected students from disadvantaged backgrounds and poor students. I always said the lockdowns were a luxury of the rich. This was the unconscionable, unethical shift of the burden of this illness to the poor families to save the affluent. This is some data from Chetty.

Effect of COVID on educational progress by income group notice that the lower the income quartile of the family, the more profound the drop in educational progress and the more protracted the delay. This is change in employment by wage quartile. The bigger the drop in unemployment occurred with low wage earners and it was a protracted drop, over the next 20 years, the unemployment shock alone.

Nothing else was being factored in here. There will be 1.2 million extra American deaths from the lockdowns and that disproportionately kills African Americans and women. I thought we were a society that cared about poor people and minorities. This is something you'll never see on CNN. Excess deaths over the entire pandemic.

This is the country that did the best. The legacy of America's experts in academia and public health guidance is the avoidable death in society's most vulnerable. Massive destruction of low income families, ongoing enormous health damages to children, and severe loss of trust in public health and science. Why do I say that?

Well, this is the survey from Gallup. Pre pandemic, what percent of Americans rates the CDC and the FDA, the public health agencies, as excellent or good? 60, 64%. Post pandemic, the largest drop of trust in any institution. And that includes institutions like the post office and the IRS.

Trust in science is also damaged in a political way, and this is the fault of the people that were in charge. In my view, science for 40 years, 50 years, was viewed the same no matter what political party you were in in the United States. This is what happened during the pandemic.