American Acquiescence: Why We Failed to Resist the Lockdowns

>> Audience 1: My name is Julia Rapaport, thank you for sharing these facts with us today. What was the motivation of these so called experts who propagated lies and fear mongering? And do you think that the pandemic was a prandemic?

>> Scott Atlas: Yeah, it's tough to talk about motivation, honestly, because it's sort of speculative.

Okay, I don't think that there's some grand conspiracy. First of all, you're giving these people too much credit, there's a lot of incredible incompetence. I won't echo the words on specific individuals like Condi did, but it is true, some of these people are stupid or incompetent. They don't know anything, they're not like what you think, they've been in bureaucratic power for 30, 40 years.

So, on one hand. to say that there's some kind of a grand plan, I think, is giving people a lot of credit. I actually view it as a confluence of motivations that had the same end result. There are people that are addicted to power, there are people that like to control other people, there's a lot of pharmaceutical money, corruption in people.

There are other people that want to impose their will because they think they know more than everybody else. It's very difficult to say the motivation, I didn't find one motivation. The only commonality I found is when you challenge people with facts and data, they have no data, they just attack you.

And the problem is these people were friends with the people in the media. And so, when you have a media that is sort of on one side or complicit, whatever word you wanna use, the check on authority is gone. So, I think that's sort of the problem here, but it's sort of difficult, I think in the beginning, it may have been political.

I think we all know in the beginning of the presidential campaign is when this happened. If Trump said x, it must be y to a lot of people. In fact, the first meeting I had with President Trump when I was called up at end of July to go in and would you talk to the president?

That question was asked, okay? To me, that's, of course, I'm an American, it's my country. There are literally people who are famous people who would not go talk to the president of the United States in this country. But I said, yes, and then one of the first things I said to him, you should have said, hydroxychloroquine does not work because then people would have said, hey, we better study hydroxychloroquine.

So, this is one of the problems, it was a very politicized atmosphere, but it became far more than political because it's all over the world, etc. So, I don't have a good answer after that long winded answer, who's got the mic stand up?

>> Audience 2: Hi, Doctor Atlas, thank you so much for your presentation.

I particularly appreciated the specific extensive data you brought in to back up your claims. Given the mass hysteria we witnessed during the pandemic among the general public, orchestrated in large part by the media, the government, and various other institutions. What do you think made people particularly susceptible to this propaganda that was led up by the government in these various institutions?

And what can we do to prevent these tactics from being utilized again in the future?

>> Scott Atlas: Well, I mean, this is really the key question is, how do we stop this from happening again? The reason that it worked, in my view, again, multifactorial, but fear is a big issue, okay?

When people are afraid, it leads to irrational behavior, and fear was used particularly in two ways. Number one, social media is new, it's an easy target to blame, but it's really true that it's very inflammatory. Everybody who has ever been on Twitter sees this, it sort of propagates fear and hyperbole.

But in addition, the United States mainstream media was an outlier in other venues. I give an hour talk on COVID, and one of the most interesting things to me that was surprising was during 2020, there's a study on National Bureau of Economic Research. They quantified in their terms, so to stake it at face value, negative versus positive stories about COVID.

And in non-English speaking, I mean, in English speaking media outside the US, 54% of COVID stories during 2020 were quantified as negative, 54%. In the US, 91% were quantified as negative, and this induces fear, and this is the same pandemic. So, even when the cases were coming down in the US, the number of American stories about cases going up outweighed number of stories about cases going down by five to one, even while cases were going down.

So, there was this really inflamed media and fear, and so people believe it. Secondly, we all have been brought up to respect authority. We see somebody with a lot of credentials, we see our university professors make X, Y and Z claims where the tendency is, okay, they must know what they're talking about.

I mean, Fauci, head of National Institute for Infectious Disease, must know what he's talking about. The problem is that, well, they didn't, but the problem is they don't necessarily. And so, that's sort of one of the main logical fallacies, is like, deference to authority as your argument basis.

But the second thing is, as a society, particularly in healthcare, I think that, and again, this is just my opinion, but people are generally intimidated by sort of sciences and PhDs and MDs, general regular people, and it's easier to delegate. And I saw it there, and when I was in the White House and people were saying, Doctor Atlas, and I'd say, no, these are people I saw every day.

And I said, no, you call me Scott, no, no, we call you Doctor Atlas. There's this deference, and I think that added to the sort of reason why whoever said it, okay, we're gonna do that. But I have to say, I was shocked, not just at the power of the government to shut down everything, I was more shocked by the acquiescence of the American people.

The country was founded on independent thinking, on individual freedom, unlimited role of government. And the protests about the lockdowns, particularly in 2020, were almost nonexistent in the United States. They were happening in France, Spain, Italy, Germany, UK, to a far greater extent than they were here. I think that was very surprising and actually very frightening to me.

>> Audience 3: Thank you, Doctor Atlas, for your talk today. So, my question primarily regards your latter half of your speech, which focused primarily on a comparison of the US's healthcare system as compared to a lot of other countries. And two of the points that you brought up were that the US is much better at treating hypertension and is significantly better at dealing with cancer than a lot of other countries.

I just wanted to ask you that given that about half of American adults experience hypertension, it's a two part question. So, given that almost half of American adults experience hypertension, do you not think that just a greater incidence would create a greater demand and helps incentivize more development and research by pharmaceutical companies?

Second part of my question is related to the cancer statistics survivals. As an international student, I came here and was frankly astounded by the number of discussions of lawsuits and just the propensity of the American public to resort to legal action. So do you think that that could have had an impact on how much emphasis there is on screening for cancer in a lot of cases as compared to the rest of the world?

Thank you.

>> Scott Atlas: Yeah, so the litigiousness of the American society is very harmful to the cost of healthcare, that's a sort of a separate topic. We are an outlier in how often we sue in the threat of lawsuit, there's a lot of what's called defensive medicine, and that's actually pretty enormous.

The amount of money spent on redundant tests and things that are not medically indicated, that's not why the cancer care is better. The first question, and the incidence of hypertension and diabetes, which are the two biggest chronic disease problems in the country. The answer to why is really lifestyle which causes, again, a huge cost to the system.

And I have a whole set of slides on obesity, but if you look at the graphs, it's fascinating. The life expectancies by country, are almost inversely, exactly the curves of percent obesity in countries. And so we have a lifestyle here that is a setup for more diseases, and that's one of the main reasons why we spend a lot of money on healthcare.

It's hard to change lifestyles, I mean, you see the craze about the obesity drugs that are very expensive and have no known side effects on long term usage, and are now being recommended insanely for young children. And they'll have to take these basically for the rest of their lives, because that's what the data shows, that the impact of those drugs goes away for 60% of people in one year after discontinuing them.

But the problem about these diseases, and this is one of the amazing things, is that the results of medical care here are so good despite the fact that we harbor actually the most risk factors of any developed country for being sick, because of two reasons. The massive increase in elevated number of people with obesity, which is a risk factor for a lot of things besides hypertension and diabetes, including a lot of cancers, Alzheimer's, etc.

But also, we have the world's largest burden of pack years of cigarette smoking, even though people have quit, okay? Because it takes 15 to 20 years to get the problems of cigarette smoking. So, even if you quit ten years ago, you're still a setup. So, we actually harbored the world's biggest set of risk factors.

So, that's sort of an indication, a shocking fact, that we have such better healthcare results because of our population has lifestyle imposed risk factors. I'm getting a signal from Josh Earsaw, okay? Thank you.