The Facts about the Pandemic

>> Scott Atlas: Okay, thanks, Josh, for that intro. The title that I'm using here, as opposed to what's next in health policy, is Restoring Trust in America's Institutions, because actually, that is the task at hand, that's what's next. And to do that, we have to be very clear about a few things, one is the most impactful issue in the world, really, is the SARS-2 pandemic.

And as you've heard many times for every speaker that's been up here, it is the sort of initiator of the discussion for how public policy is designed in every facet of public policy. I said in my opening remarks at the welcome dinner that the way public policy works is that you're supposed to know the facts, critically think about the evidence, then formulate your opinion and your policy, that's the order.

And so issue number 1 is knowing the facts. So first, I'm gonna go through the facts, I'm gonna go through the data. What we knew, what was found out, and then we're gonna evaluate the policies that were used, because, as Milton Friedman said and I quoted on Sunday, we should be judging policy based on the results, not the intent.

And then I'll talk about what's next and how to restore trust in America's institutions, which is severely damaged. I'll start with this Huxley quote, facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored. First off, American leadership is in serious crisis. The government and what I call the credentialed class leading all of our essential institutions, that means public health agencies, universities, the medical establishment, scientists, schools, the media have been exposed by the pandemic.

The pandemic exposed things that existed before the pandemic. So the point of this whole talk, it's not just about COVID, it's about what we know, what we should have perhaps known at the beginning of all this and what was exposed. There is worse than a suppression of freedom of speech here.

There is an unprecedented denial of fact in science, in public health policy, and that's very dangerous. As a society, we broke the social contract we have with our most precious resource, our children. And finally, the free exchange of ideas that is essential to finding truth, that is fundamental to solving every future crisis.

And that is the whole linchpin of democracy is under threat in the United States. What happened? These are the first words I said to my wife, and I got off the plane, November 16, coming back from Washington, and I sort of meant, yeah, what happened here? Because it was really a shock to me, but that was just about Washington.

What happened nationally and, frankly, internationally was the World Health Organization started the ball rolling with a complete misstatement of the fatality risk from the virus. That you knew if you took five minutes to read what they said and understood how medical science works, because it was a fraction and the denominator that they used were the people that were sick enough to seek medical attention, as opposed to the way it's really calculated, which is everyone who's infected.

The computer modelers took hold of this and became front-page news because it was amplified by the public health leaders. And then, given this pandemic as the first in an era of social media, social media and the political climate in the election year of the United States all amplified this.

What was claimed was that the SARS2 coronavirus had a far higher fatality rate than influenza by several orders of magnitude, that everyone had a significant risk to die, that no one could have immunity because the virus was novel, new. That everyone was dangerous and spreads the infection, that asymptomatic people are major drivers of the infection spread.

That locking down will stop and eliminate the virus, that masks protect everyone and stop the spread, and that immune protection is only from a vaccine. All of these things were false, they were not just proven false, they were false by spring of 2020. This was not new information, this was known.

Step number 2 in assessing what happened was to understand that the US enacted lockdowns. They enacted this country, enacted almost every state in the country, what I call the Birx-Fauci lockdowns, why do I call them the Birx-Fauci lockdowns? Because the leaders of the federal policy were two people, Deborah Birx, who was the official White House task force coordinator, she was the head of the medical advice coming from the White House.

She wrote every official White House guideline statement to every governor in the state. She visited all the governors, often with the vice president on his plane. I visited one state when I was in Washington for the three and a half months I visited Florida. Anthony Fauci was the sort of co-leader of the White House policy, the federal policy, because he was the most visible public face of the task force.

And in fact, when President Biden took over, he was formally named chief medical advisor to the president. The policy guidance of them was quote Flatten the Curve, and that was rational because that intuitively meant we wanna stop hospitals from being overwhelmed. We need to treat people who are sick, and so what can we do to slow the spread of the infection?

Then it became very rapidly, stop all cases of COVID, I don't know when that happened, it's very difficult to pinpoint that timing, but it did. And their policy of doing that was locked down, and that is school closures, business shutdowns, limits on COVID and non-COVID really medical care, a host of restrictions, mandates, and quarantines.

And that policy under two administrations has been implemented with rare exception, and the impact from the virus alone, more than a million American deaths have been attributed to the virus. And from the lockdowns direct causation of massive death and severe harm, millions of families and children, particularly almost exclusively to the working class, low-income families, and the poor.

This is the policy result, two administrations demarcated there by the January 20, 2021, takeover of the federal government by the Biden administration. We can see compared to other countries, COVID deaths per million, this is it highlighted amongst all our peer nations. You'll notice it's almost a straight line.

This is not a political difference here, there's no administrative difference here, the difference is the. Vaccines were present to the right of the January 20th line, but other than that, there's no change in the slope of that line, really. This is the conclusion of this. Lockdowners own the outcome, they got what they wanted, their policies were implemented.

They cannot be allowed to claim that they didn't get what they wanted. So if you like the results, then you should congratulate Deborah Birx, Anthony Fauci, and both administrations. If you think there's a problem with the outcome, then they have to be held accountable. There was an alternative, it was known, it was written about by March of 2020.

And that alternative I called and others called Targeted Protection. In March of 2020, three papers were written in mainstream media, John Ioannidis of Stanford, David Katz, who was formerly at Yale, and myself. In March, all wrote about the appropriate strategy, which was the same as the strategy that was known in health policy for all previous pandemics.

Increased the protection of the high-risk group open society, because locking down destroys people and literally kills them. And Martin Kaldorf tried to write a paper in the United States media. He's an epidemiologist at the time at Harvard Medical School. He couldn't get it published in American media, so he wrote it in CNN en Español.

Several others later in the spring and summer and fall of 2020, published similar pieces.

>> Scott Atlas: Months later, October 4, 2020, Something called the great Barrington Declaration was written by Jay Bhattacharya of Stanford, Martin Kulldorff of Harvard, Sunetra Gupta of Oxford. And they called for what they called focus protection, which is essentially the same thing.

Now, it's very important to first take a step back here, because the data, even the data I cited on how many people died from COVID is wrong. How do I know it's wrong? Well, first of all, PCR testing which was used to diagnose people, falsely diagnosed people with COVID.

How do I know that this is one paper among many? And by the way, I distributed this information at the task force, no one commented, no one rebutted the information. They didn't know the information, I thought. Because at a cycle threshold of 35, which is how many times you have to average the test to detect virus, 97% of the tests are false positive for live virus, 97%.

That means that you're calling people contagious on a test, and 97% of the time, they're not contagious. So what does that mean? That means they don't have to be quarantined, that means you don't have to test the people who were exposed to them. The cycle thruster of the 35, it turns out, was used all over the world.

That's a very high number of averages. The UK NHS 40 to 45, the United States 35 to 40, FDA recommended 40, Israel cycle the threshold of 37. I said I thought they didn't know because no one said anything to me at the task force when I showed them all the data and distributed it.

It turned out, though, before I got to Washington, I got there beginning of August. My first task force meeting was August 14. In July, someone named Anthony Fauci said, at a cycle threshold of 35 or more, the chances of it being contagious are minuscule, you got to say, it's just dead nucleotides.

>> Scott Atlas: Hospitalization from COVID, this is a very misleading number, it turns out. This is the medical literature, this is a study from Stanford Pediatric Hospital. In May of 2021, where they did a retrospective review of the charts of people who were pediatric patients called COVID hospitalizations. It turned out that half of them could not have had COVID, they had no symptoms of COVID.

They were categorized as COVID because every patient admitted was required to have a SARS virus test. And once they were tested positive, they had no COVID, COVID is an illness. They were hospitalized for something significant or they wouldn't have been hospitalized, meaning they were hospitalized for a broken leg, appendectomy, head trauma.

Many of these people were called COVID hospitalizations. This was another study in a larger hospital system in California, 86% of pediatric hospitalizations for COVID were not COVID. So you have to realize that on the data here, these are peer reviewed journal publications. The CDC on deaths from COVID, because you have the same problem, of course.

Said they looked at charts in retrospect, 35.2% of deaths under 18 from COVID could not plausibly be categorized as having COVID on the CDC's own chart review. So the risk from COVID to children is grossly overstated. That's a fact, I'm just giving you the data. What's the risk from COVID and for whom?

Well, as opposed to the original WHO estimate of 3.4%. It turns out several studies have shown that it's 0.05, which is on the order of magnitude of influenza for everyone under 70. Age is the most important risk factor. 80% of deaths are in people over 65, they still die, I'm not minimizing the deaths from COVID.

There's a several thousand fold,

>> Scott Atlas: Difference in risk of death for young people versus old people. That's been validated all over the world, it was known in March of 2020 actually. This is something from perspective here, the median age of death from COVID is equal to or older than the median age of life expectancy in most countries.

It turns out two thirds of people who died from COVID in the United States had greater than or equal to six comorbidities. Not one, not two, not treated hypertension, which, by the way, is not a risk factor. No matter how many people say, there's so many people with treated hypertension walking around, they're high risk.

Which is what I heard in the White House, even though I distributed the papers that showed that each risk factor is not the same. There's no higher risk for people to have a problem with COVID if you have high blood pressure alone, none. What about the risk to children?

It was known to be low, the risk to healthy children is extraordinarily low from COVID. This is data from California, 0% of deaths are in peoples under 18 in California, 0% of deaths in Florida are in people under 30. In fact, this is the case fatality rate. These are just taking the people who actually had symptoms enough to seek medical attention, 0%.

The risk from children is known to be low, it was known in the spring of 2020. That's not arguable, it's not news that was learned in 2021 or 202 In fact, there were dozens of studies from all over the world that showed that the risk to healthy children was extremely low, that there was no significant spread from kids, that there was no spread to the community when schools were open.

And that teachers did not have a higher risk than any other profession. And the reality is, since the median age of a K-12 teacher in the United States is 41 and more than 90% are under 60, teachers have a very low risk profile to begin with. So closing schools or doing anything to children because you're worried about the teachers is simply false.

I presented the case for opening schools at my first thing that I was involved with in the White House because I thought, okay, this is low hanging fruit. Everybody knows this data. And the kids were gonna destroy kids for no reason. Healthy children do not have a high risk.

Harms of closing schools are enormous. And we knew that then the United States, the data was known when all the schools almost in the United States were closed for in person by September 2020. I presented this, this was an event in the White House in August. And I said there was nothing more important to a civilized society than educating its children.

I mean, that's my own judgment, but I don't know many other things that are as important. Online learning was a documented failure from the spring 2020 closures alone, massive reading and math losses, an explosion of f grades. Most kids in some neighborhoods did not even sign on to online education.

>> Scott Atlas: Stanford Institute for Education on campus here said their first sentence of their conclusion. Quote, findings on learning losses are chilling, unquote, from online learning. And by the way, it's not because people don't have broadband. This is not something you throw money at. The Netherlands is the country with the highest percentage of penetrance of broadband in homes.

They had a massive loss of learning with highly equipped homes with broadband. All these losses are far greater for minorities and the poor. I can tell you that the neighborhood I live in here, we have plenty of people hiring PhD students and having these little micro schools. Those kids did not suffer.

They're not the average home. The affluent circumvented the problems here. And this is a recurring theme about the lockdowns. Every parent and everyone with a brain understands that what you learn in school goes far beyond what you can learn on a computer anyway, right? It's socialization, it's conflict resolution, working in teams and in some socioeconomic groups, that's your best nutritional meal of the day.

That's very important. That's where we discover hearing problems, visual problems in school. America closed schools almost unique to our peer nations, almost all of western Europe, opened their schools for fall of 2020. Only 18% of American kids had in person schools in the fall semester of 2020, 18%.

What did we see when schools were closed? Well, the first thing to notice, of course, this is 2020, is that there was a massive drop in file in medical claims filed in teenagers for every month. And that's because people were afraid to go to see a doctor. And because hospitals were closed, that was expected.

That's medical claims. But the impact of closing schools, look what happened to the mental illness claims. This is not a survey, by the way. This is the actual filing of medical claims to insurance. These are doctors visits and medical claims for mental illness in teenagers due to the lockdown, not the virus, the lockdown.

Self-harm visits to doctors and teenagers double to triple over the previous year. These are teenagers putting out cigarettes on their skin and cutting their wrists from the isolation. Psychiatric illness in college age Americans. Anxiety disorder, depressive disorder. Every month exploded. This is year to year 2019, no lockdown.

2020, lockdown. Drug abuse and substance use disorders. Overdoses in teenagers exploded during the lockdown. More than 300,000 cases of us child abuse during the spring of 2020 closures alone went unreported, why? Because schools are the number one agency where child abuse is noticed. 35% increase in severe child abuse visits to the.

I've been a doctor called in the middle of the night to the emergency room deciding if the baby should go home because it's a shaken baby, questionably with brain hemorrhages, with the police standing there. Okay, these are very serious. When you bring your kid in, who you've abused to the emergency room, you think you've killed your kid.

So when there's a 35% increase in Visits for severe child abuse, that's the tip of the iceberg. More than one in four college age students thought of killing himself in June of 2020. This was CDC data. Yet I was the only one in the task force room who talked about anything other than stopping the number of COVID cases.

This is a massive ethical lapse in public health leadership.