The Pandemic, the Media, and Restoring Trust in Science

>> Scott Atlas: Why did the public believe the locked honors? Because I said that this was known 2006. All the articles said this. Well, we have a culture of trust in the United States. We trust credentials. There is a lot of fear in the population. Not just fear from COVID but fear from cancellation.

How do I know? Well, I had hundreds of emails from medical scientists all over the country saying to me, Scott, keep talking, keep saying the truth. We are afraid for ourselves and our families to say it. This is a dangerous situation when the truth cannot be spoken. There was a successful demonization of opposing youths views by the media and in politicians.

We trusted our public health leaders because they had titles. These are people that were government bureaucrats for 35, 40 years. They were not scientists and physicians. They had no knowledge of the data. I brought in the papers into this task force meetings. I was the only one that spoke from papers, from scientific publications, from the data.

No one ever refuted a word I said in those meetings because they had no knowledge of the facts. This continued into the second administration. This is the head of the CDC saying right now I'm scared in an interview. She said it about cases going up when that red dotted line occurred.

That's what happened afterwards, and by the way, it's completely unacceptable to use fear on a population as the leader of public health. The public believe two lies. If you're against the lockdowns, you're choosing the economy over lives. And if you're against the lockdowns, you're allowing the infection to spread without mitigation.

The so called herd immunity strategy. That was all lies. The American media amplified those lies partly because they were just negative. This is an NBER study quantifying negativity in the news, US media and non us English speaking media. And you can see that over 90% of the stories about COVID during the same time frame were negative, yet only about half were negative outside the US, it's the same pandemic, same thing with the schools.

In fact, in 2020, the US media stories of increasing cases outnumbered the stories of decreasing cases by a factor of 5.5 even when the cases were going down. There was a tremendous amount of censorship of information. This is the tip of the iceberg, but I just wanna speak from experience here.

On September 11, YouTube pulled down my Hoover interview. The interview was given four months earlier. They pulled it down once it became public, I was in Washington. On October 18, Twitter deleted my post. And you would think the person who's the advisor to the president of the United States on Covid would be of public interest to hear what he had to say.

They deleted my post when I was quoting verbatim, the CDC statements, the WHO statements, and the University of Oxford on masks. They pulled it down and banned me from Twitter for a short period of time. And March 19, 2021, months after I left, YouTube deleted a panel discussion that we had with the press in Florida, run by Governor Ron DeSantis.

With me, Martin Kulldorff of Harvard, Jay Bhattacharya of Stanford, and Sunetra Gupta of Oxford on the pandemic management. We recorded it, we had live press. YouTube pulled it down and said, it's misinformation. By November of 2020, Facebook bragged that they had taken down 7 million posts on the pandemic alone.

They told the Washington Post this with pride. What was the reaction? Well, the federalist Jonathan Tobin wrote, YouTube's arbitrary censorship of doctor Atlas ought to be the straw that breaks the camel's back concerning its ability to shut down speech about COVID. The Wall Street Journal editorial board wrote, the Atlas interview was posted in June, yet YouTube only removed it in September.

The public can be forgiven for wondering if doctor Atlas's appointment as a White House coronavirus advisor last month has made him a political target. A group of Stanford faculty published an open letter sliming their former colleague last week, and the video came down two weeks later. There is a legacy of this media coverage that has nothing to do with individuals.

It's a societal harm. This is the fear injected into young people, people your age. The blue is the fear of death from COVID the green, which you can barely see in your group, is tiny, the real risk. Whereas people who are older have a reasonably accurate risk, that's fear.

People 18 to 24, 50% of them said they felt nervous about all social interaction, that's your age group. Everyone gained weight during the lockdown, or at least a lot of people did. People your age, 52%, gained an average of 28 pounds, that's obesity. That's a public health danger.

Happens to be the number one risk factor for Covid, by the way. I wanna briefly mention censorship on campus because there were three medical scientists at Stanford, John Loannidis, myself, and Jay Bhattacharya.

>> We said the exact same thing about who's at risk, the risk to children, the protective immunity from infection, the lack of efficacy of masks, that schools should open, that lockdown should not be imposed.

>> Scott Atlas: And that we were pushing for targeted protection of the population at risk.

>> Scott Atlas: Only one received a censure from Stanford faculty. I did, why? Well, you may wanna say that it's due to the bias of Stanford faculty, since 95% of Stanford faculty living in this zip code voted for Joe Biden.

And 3.5% voted for Trump, whereas most of California doesn't have that kind of slant. But we could say that science is politicized. Ever since late 2019, there's been an explosion of difference in what party has trust. A great deal of confidence, quote, unquote, in the scientific community, this is a terrible situation.

We can't have this where we don't trust the institutions that are necessary and important. And they, those institutions, by their behavior, have created that issue. How to restore trust. First, leaders must stand up against intimidation. It's very difficult. I understand that. But we can't have people in leadership positions who are not leaders.

Okay, that's a broad statement. In fact, when the Stanford medical School letter came out, There was only one person who wrote into the Stanford daily. And defended what I said and said, I would be delighted to debate this with any of the 98 signatories. That was Martin Kulldorff of Harvard Medical School.

Not one Stanford faculty member wrote this letter, even though many of them, including some who live on my block, came up to me and said, most of the people in the medical school agree with you, were just afraid. Were afraid this is what's happening here on campuses. How do you restore trust?

You bring in experts from outside government that are non political, like myself, and what I did to answer the president's questions, because I thought my job's to provide information, I brought in people from Stanford and Harvard and Tufts and UCLA to answer his questions. Believe me, that was a huge achievement.

People even in the White House didn't want me to do that for some reason. Okay, it's not politically volatile to bring in people who know and are doing the research to talk to the president of the United States, I don't understand that. We are re outlining the ethical principles, or should I say restating some of these derived from the Nuremberg trials.

They've been lost. Number 1, all public health advice should consider the impact on total health, including the benefits and the harms. 2, public health is about everyone but first and foremost, we must protect society's most vulnerable, children, low income families, people with disabilities, and the elderly. We can never shift the burden of a disease from the affluent to the less affluent.

3, public health advice must be adapted to the contextual needs of each population. 4, public health should focus on high-risk disease in high-risk populations. 5, health risks and harms cannot be eliminated. Public health is about comparative risk evaluation and risk reduction. Public health number 6, requires public trust.

Public health recommendations should present facts as the basis for guidance and never employ fear to sway the public. Medical intervention should not be forced or coerced, but should be voluntary, based on informed consent. Health authorities must be honest and transparent with what is known and what isn't known.

Scientists must avoid conflicts of interest. There are massive conflicts of interest. They're not all financial. They have to do with power. They have to do with protecting their own positions. They have to do with very complex interweaving of the funding of scientific research. The NIH, for example, gives 500 million to over a billion dollars every year to more than a dozen universities in this country.

Every single assistant and associate professor needs NIH grants to get promoted. It's no wonder that most of them cannot speak out against the policies of the people who control the funding, their careers are over. And I think I just wanna finish with the last two. In public health, open civilized debate is profoundly important.

It is unacceptable for public health professionals to censor, silence, or intimidate members of the public or other public health scientists or practitioners. And finally, it is critical for public health scientists and practitioners to listen to the public because they are living the public health consequences of public health decisions.

And those advisements must adapt appropriately. Thank you very much. Any questions? When you ask your question, could you please stand up and ask it so that I can see it and so we can put it on the video. Yes.

>> Speaker 1: Thank you so much for the lecture, super important topic.

I'm curious to hear your thoughts specifically on the damages of long term mask wearing for young children, in terms of young children for whom it's still really important to see the facial expressions of the adults around them. Have we seen any stunted development there and are we going to bounce back or has the damage already been done?

>> Scott Atlas: Yeah, this is a very important question because there's so much that isn't known that is yet to be seen about the damage that was done. It's not all sort of a numerical calculation at this point. It's true, and has been documented that you need to have facial expression to learn speech and language.

I mean, that's not news but that has been a drop off in ability to learn speech and language. I don't know the studies off the top of my head, but there are studies that already show that. I think that there's a bigger issue with the masking of children.

And again, this is just sort of common sense and opinion. I don't have the data because we don't know it yet. We have created a generation of young kids who think that everyone's a danger to them, and they are a danger to everyone, including to their parents. I've had a lot of anecdotal statements made to me from parents who say their children are frantic if they see them without a mask.

And I think we don't know what's gonna happen. I mean, as a parent, I know kids are pretty resilient, and the hope is that things come back. We know that statistic that I showed on the percent of seven of ten year olds who don't understand a simple phrase.

That data is from UNICEF, I think, and the World bank. And they show that over the past decade, there's been a tremendous decrease in the percent of children that cannot understand these things. In other words, we were improving worldwide significantly, and now it's a dramatic uptick in the people who cannot understand simple phrases.

Part of that may be due to the lack of facial expressions in young children, I don't know.

>> Speaker 2: Thank you very much, doctor Atlas for a very sobering lecture. I spent the pandemic teaching first grade over Zoom, so a lot of it was unsurprising, but chilling nonetheless. I wanted to talk a little bit about these public health crises that you mentioned, like the obesity epidemic and opioid and alcohol use and things like that after the pandemic.

How we can target these issues, because not only are they a massive strain on the healthcare industry, but also in the economy. I'm sure you know that only, I think, 43% of American households pay income tax and our labor force participation rate has been declining. So I was wondering if you would advocate for a more paternalistic policy approach to targeting these crises, and if not, what other solutions we may have?

>> Scott Atlas: Okay, so I'm not 100% sure what you mean by paternalistic, but I will say that we have dug a huge hole in the mental health field now, as I only partly illustrated. In fact, there's data coming out of the NHS, which is obviously single payer system that we don't have that same issue with.

But it's gonna take them ten to 15 years they have published to make up the backlog of radiation therapy and chemotherapy for existing cancer patients. So in the next 10 to 15 years, the cancer doesn't wait for the available radiation treatment. So that's not the psychological damage. But yeah, I think there's a lot of countries right now figuring out how to increase mental health resources.

I think counseling for young people particularly, is going to be a massive drain, and I think we need to kick up the resources for that. There's a bigger issue on how to do these things, which is, a, what's the point of even knowing these? The truth is critical, but also we can't let this happen again.

This going to be another pandemic, there's going to be other crises. And we need to understand what the costs are of what we're trying to do. I personally have no doubt that everything that was done is with good intention. That isn't the point, the point is we can't let that happen again.

The isolation was severely damaging. We didn't even protect the older people who also died from the isolation, I didn't get into those details. So we need to really increase the resources and also the outreach to young people. We need to have airing of facts. I really think people, they're desperate to hear facts, okay?

I speak all over the country and often outside the US on this stuff. And people want to know the data. And why do I bring that up in this context? Because it's very, sort of to me, it's reassuring to know the data even, if it's a surprise the data or you disagree or whatever you wanna say.

When people get up there and talk about facts, I think this adds some sort of reassurance to, okay, we know what's going on. In fact, when I went to the White House, okay, I didn't get there till July 31, beginning of August and one of my tasks, I said, okay.

I don't know if you remember this, but during the before that, the president had stopped the COVID press briefings. And I said, okay, this is very harmful to the American people. Okay, I'm an American people, I'm in the population, I wanna know the president knows what's going on, and I wanna get the data.

So my suggestion was he personally gives the press briefing and he gives the data, not some, non-data driven statements. Of course, the president had a tendency to go off topic a little bit, I would say, but I tried to provide the data. I was one of many people who was in on the preparing of the remarks, actually.

And of course he would start by reading them and then he would sort of, okay, ad lib time comes in, so it didn't last long. But I do think, not joking, that it's very important that people hear facts and the data. I think it's far more reassuring than hearing sort of proclamations and no fact that can be looked up or whatever.

Generally, I put up as many of the references as possible and people can look them up. And I think the more discussion occurs, the more reassuring everything is, the more healthy people will be. We have to get a handle on what happened. And that people that are sort of talking about facts rather than ad hominem stuff, that's the domination of the discussion.

The facts, when we're to that, I think they'll restore some health. And by the way, I think it's very damaging to mental health when you can't trust the institutions you relied on your whole life. We were all raised to rely on authority figures. Doctors, before the pandemic had one of the highest rates of trust.

We never had trust in the government and the media. That kind of stuff is expected, but it was not expected to say, wow, the doctors, we don't even know what they're saying. They don't know the data. They don't talk about anything except the bottom line of what the government tells them to say.

They're afraid to speak up because when they say something different, their license is at risk, their medical license. This is what's going on here. So we need to restore trust because the trust we then can put into the organizations is going to allay our fears. Fear comes from uncertainty, and fear causes irrational behavior and discussion, which we saw.

All right, one more, sorry.

>> Speaker 3: Doctor Atlas, thank you for your time. First, I guess I just wanna make sure I'm characterizing your position accurately. You're essentially saying that we're not like trying to minimize COVID or the COVID risks, but more that the consequences of the lockdowns and other interventions sort of outweigh the risks for most people, right?

>> Scott Atlas: Well, what I'm saying was that the lockdowns failed to accomplish their goal and they killed and destroyed people, they were the wrong policy.

>> Speaker 3: Okay.

>> Scott Atlas: That's what I'm saying.

>> Speaker 3: Okay, I think in that light, I was just curious if you could shed your thoughts more on all this discussion of long COVID and the unknowns around that.

When I cover congressional hearings, it seems like Doctor Fauci kind of falls back on that, so I was just wondering if you could comment on that.

>> Scott Atlas: Yeah, I'll briefly talk about that, I'm sorry, cuz I could talk for a half hour on every question, but. Okay, so long COVID.

I didn't put the slides in. Okay, number one, what is long COVID? Long COVID is a set of vague symptoms like fatigue, headache, loss of sleep, generally. There's other symptoms including loss of taste and smell. Long symptoms like that are difficult to objectively assess, but they exist. I have no doubt there are people with long COVID, that's statement number one.

Why do I say that? That's because people have the same symptoms long after other viral infections. This is normal, this is the perspective of a doctor who knows what actually is normal among other viruses. Influenza, there are people with the same exact symptoms post influenza. Now, what is the incidence of long COVID?

Again, it's hard to assess because it's symptoms. It's not signs, signs are something like an abnormal EKG, abnormal chest x ray, symptoms are what a patient describes. But when we look at the data, and this has been done in a large study in the UK, in studies in Germany and in Switzerland.

And I can get the references for you if you'd like. The incidence of long COVID is slightly higher, but not that much higher than long influenza. Something like 34, in one study with big study, 34% to 30% of people who had the infection. Okay, so it exists, it's not unexpected other viruses have it.

Number two, in Switzerland, in people under 18, they found the same percentage of people had long COVID symptoms with post COVID that had the same symptoms and never had COVID, okay? And how do I know they never had COVID? They did serial testing of antibodies throughout the entire before the study and after.

It's a very well done study. So the symptoms existed in the same fraction of the population of those who've had COVID and who didn't have COVID. Hence, I use the term long lockdown, okay? Because there's a tremendous amount of fear and psychological change from the pandemic existence. So it's very difficult to quantify.

And that's sort of so long COVID exists, as it does in other viruses, I'm sure of it. It's very difficult to sort out what's due to the virus itself because the symptoms are sort of vague. I came back from Washington, I didn't have long COVID, but I was exhausted, okay?

I had headaches. I didn't lose my sense of taste, though. So these symptoms occur, and it's a complex story that will possibly never be known again because about 80% of children, roughly have had COVID in the United States, so it's hard to sort out. Okay, thank you very much