Speaker 1: And New Yorker, Texic. I'm around.
Speaker 2: This is the seventy seven WABC Mini cast.
Speaker 3: Our. Next guest is Scott Atlas, who is a longtime friend.
Speaker 3: He's one of the smartest guys I know on health policy.
Speaker 3: He was an amazing help to Donald Trump during COVID.
Speaker 3: He was brought in to take on the faucis of
Speaker 3: the world and give the American people the truth about
Speaker 3: what was really happening with COVID.
Speaker 1: I think you were a.
Speaker 3: Special advisor to the President on the COVID task for Scott.
Speaker 2: That's right, Steve. Nice to be here.
Speaker 3: So what time when did you start, because all the
Speaker 3: craziness started in jan you know, February and March and
Speaker 3: April of twenty twenty.
Speaker 1: When did you start?
Speaker 2: Yeah, I was. I was asked to come in right
Speaker 2: at the end of July twenty twenty, first of August
Speaker 2: twenty twenty as an advisor to the President and they
Speaker 2: asked me to be as part of the task force
Speaker 2: as well.
Speaker 3: So, as you know and all our listeners know, Anthony
Speaker 3: Fauci has now revealed himself as a great scoundrel and
Speaker 3: someone who lied to the American people. And Scott, you
Speaker 3: were a national treasurer because you were taking on Fauci.
Speaker 3: First of all, let's just get to the very start
Speaker 3: of this. You know, I was against. I was one
Speaker 3: of the more vocal people against lockdowns from the very start.
Speaker 3: And by the way, I would have been against lockdowns
Speaker 3: even if they had worked, because I'm a pretty libertarian guy.
Speaker 1: But they didn't work, did they No.
Speaker 2: They didn't. And the data was in, and this was
Speaker 2: something that I emphasized for months before I was in
Speaker 2: the White House. From March onward, a few of us
Speaker 2: were writing about this in the national media, that the
Speaker 2: data was in, that the infection fatality rate a number
Speaker 2: of people who died divided by the number of people
Speaker 2: infected was maybe one fiftieth to one one hundreds of
Speaker 2: what the WHO and others were saying because they weren't
Speaker 2: counting all the asymptomatic people. The second part was that
Speaker 2: this was really highly.
Speaker 1: What does that mean?
Speaker 3: What does that mean to be Let's keep this very simple,
Speaker 3: what does that mean to be asymptomatic?
Speaker 2: Sure, so, like most viral respiratory infections, particularly this one
Speaker 2: and things like the flu, at least half the people
Speaker 2: have no symptoms. They don't even know they're insane.
Speaker 1: They didn't even know they had mild, right.
Speaker 2: It's very, very mild. And then there's another group that
Speaker 2: has no symptoms. They have minimal symptoms, but not enough
Speaker 2: to go into the doctor. So they have a coffer,
Speaker 2: they have a fever, they they feel lousy like we
Speaker 2: all do with the flu. And so those people weren't counted.
Speaker 2: The WHO and people on networks, et cetera were amplifying
Speaker 2: that the infection fatality rate, the percent of people who
Speaker 2: actually died of those who were infected, they were only
Speaker 2: counting on the bottom of that fraction that people who
Speaker 2: were sick enough to go see a doctor. But they
Speaker 2: were ignoring all the others.
Speaker 3: So here's the thing that annoys me and angers me,
Speaker 3: and I think our listeners as well, that it's almost
Speaker 3: as if Scott and you know, talking to Scott Alis,
Speaker 3: who was one of the top health officials in our country,
Speaker 3: it's almost like they were trying to scare the hell
Speaker 3: out of us.
Speaker 2: Well, I mean, this was a that's a question they
Speaker 2: have to think about because we know it was true.
Speaker 2: I saw that in the task Force. I relate this
Speaker 2: in my book A Plague upon our House actually had
Speaker 2: one episode in the Task Force. This is in August
Speaker 2: twenty twenty, where Fauci at the table in the room
Speaker 2: said the problem is people aren't afraid enough. And I
Speaker 2: leaned over because I thought, oh wow, I'm I mean,
Speaker 2: I can't believe these I said, can you repeat that?
Speaker 2: And he said, yes, the problem is people are not
Speaker 2: afraid enough, so they're not listening. And you know, in
Speaker 2: my view, as I and I said it to myself,
Speaker 2: that's a sort of unethical way to use public health
Speaker 2: leadership to make people afraid so they listened to you.
Speaker 2: Of course, but.
Speaker 3: Isn't that sort of the opposite of what you should do?
Speaker 3: In other words, you want it seems to me you
Speaker 3: would want to calm people down. You want people to
Speaker 3: be protected, you want them to take it seriously. But
Speaker 3: I thought the protocol was not to scare the hell
Speaker 3: out of people.
Speaker 2: That's right, and and and that kind of fear makes
Speaker 2: people behave irrationally, and that's probably another reason why some
Speaker 2: of the irrational things were said on TV and in
Speaker 2: the media. I mean, you have to question if early
Speaker 2: on when they wanted to shut the economy down FORLIC,
Speaker 2: I think there was probably political overtones. As you remember
Speaker 2: it was an election season, but that quickly changed into
Speaker 2: people being re irrational in what they were saying. And
Speaker 2: we knew fifteen years earlier the pandemic management literature very
Speaker 2: clearly said lockdowns do not work to contain the spread
Speaker 2: in a viral respiratory infection, and they're enormously destructive. They're
Speaker 2: very harmful. And that's what unfolded.
Speaker 3: So if you go back, you know through history, we
Speaker 3: had pandemics, we had the very famous what flu epidemic?
Speaker 1: What was that in nineteen seventeen.
Speaker 3: I think it was where a lot of people died
Speaker 3: from that, and so were we I'm trying to figure
Speaker 3: out why it is that the medical establishment went so
Speaker 3: haywire crazy about keeping In other words, why couldn't they
Speaker 3: just tell people the truth and say, look, you know
Speaker 3: you're if you're old, you know, over the age of
Speaker 3: sixty five or seventy, you want to be very careful.
Speaker 3: If you have respiratory issues, you probably got to be
Speaker 3: very careful. If you have heart issues, be careful. But children,
Speaker 3: I mean, why the hell did we shut down the schools?
Speaker 2: Well, this is really one of the really complicated answers
Speaker 2: to come up with, because you know, thank God, frankly,
Speaker 2: this respiratory illness spared children, spared healthy young people. This
Speaker 2: was a blessing. And therefore that kind of information was
Speaker 2: critical to understand that all you were doing by locking
Speaker 2: down and isolating children and young people, you were harming them.
Speaker 2: You were hurting them instead and also wasting resources by
Speaker 2: the way, instead of focusing the protection on the high
Speaker 2: risk people. And I just want to be clear with
Speaker 2: the listeners here it wasn't learned in later October, in
Speaker 2: later twenty twenty or twenty twenty one or twenty twenty two,
Speaker 2: in retrospect, no, we knew the data in the spring
Speaker 2: of twenty twenty the children. Isolating these kids and closing
Speaker 2: schools was enormously harmful, destructive, not just learning losses. But
Speaker 2: by then spring of twenty twenty, the schools were closed
Speaker 2: by that information we knew in the CDC even published
Speaker 2: the enormous arms including these young people. One in four
Speaker 2: college aged kids were contemplating suicide from the isolation, not
Speaker 2: the virus from the isolation.
Speaker 3: So you know, I'm not a health expert, you are,
Speaker 3: but one of the things that seem crazy to me,
Speaker 3: Like we lived across the street literally across the street
Speaker 3: from a national park, and they shut the National park dout,
Speaker 3: which seemed to be like the two things that are
Speaker 3: really important to your health is fresh heir and exercise,
Speaker 3: and you know we and yeah, so they literally the
Speaker 3: entire park, you know, which is you know, miles Long
Speaker 3: was shut down.
Speaker 2: Why Steve, You may remember they were locking the playgrounds
Speaker 2: in Manhattan, preventing kids from being outside. They were literally
Speaker 2: telling you to stay indoors. That was the prescription by
Speaker 2: Fauci and Deborah Berks, who was the head of the
Speaker 2: medical side of the task force, telling all the local
Speaker 2: health officials what to do. And so when you got
Speaker 2: telling people stay inside and which is where the which
Speaker 2: is by the way, not just isolating people, but that's
Speaker 2: where the infection spreads.
Speaker 1: You know.
Speaker 3: What they did in our area, it just infuriated me
Speaker 3: was that they would, for example, the skateboards parks, they
Speaker 3: spread the skateboards parks with sand. So these kids were,
Speaker 3: you know, to keep them from playing. Well, they didn't stop,
Speaker 3: it's just they got injured because the dumb government was
Speaker 3: telling them. It was basically trying to discourage them from Also,
Speaker 3: I mean, we used to go out and play tennis,
Speaker 3: you know, because we love to play tennis. We wanted
Speaker 3: to get outside, and they kept taking the nuts down,
Speaker 3: and then we'd find another core, you know, and then.
Speaker 1: They take those nuts down, and they would do everything.
Speaker 2: They really really irrational. You may remember the famous story
Speaker 2: of the the coast Guard being told to go out
Speaker 2: and with and arrest a guy on a sail boat
Speaker 2: close to San Diego, miles from shore. They put him
Speaker 2: under arrest for being out there.
Speaker 3: Oh my god, So I'm telling you to Scott Outlass, Scott,
Speaker 3: can I hold you over for another segment because there's
Speaker 3: a bunch more I'd like to ask you about. Okay, folks,
Speaker 3: were gonna take a quick break. This is the More
Speaker 3: Money Show, and we're talking about the seriousness of what happened,
Speaker 3: the mistakes that were made, so it can never happen again,
Speaker 3: never ever happen again, that the government shuts down our
Speaker 3: great economy. And by the way, Donald Trump did not
Speaker 3: want to shut down the economy. He wanted to get
Speaker 3: it open, but the medical establishment basically told him that
Speaker 3: he should do just the opposite. So we'll be right back, folks,
Speaker 3: with Scott Atlas.
Speaker 2: It's more money.
Speaker 1: We're leading economist Steve Moore. Now here's your host, Steve Moore.
Speaker 1: Welcome back, folks. This is the More Money Show.
Speaker 3: I am continuing my conversation Scott Alice, which I normally
Speaker 3: don't do two segments, but this has been fascinating. And
Speaker 3: Scott Alice, as you all know, was one of the heroes,
Speaker 3: one of the few heroes of the COVID catastrophe and
Speaker 3: the way our government lied to the American people. So
Speaker 3: I just wrote a column Scott about lessons learned, and
Speaker 3: I wanted to just go over some of these and
Speaker 3: tell me if you agree or disagree. One lesson I
Speaker 3: said we should learn is beware when they taught us
Speaker 3: follow the science because they don't oftentimes have the right science.
Speaker 2: Well one hundred percent. And you know the reality of
Speaker 2: that statement was to stop people from making the debate,
Speaker 2: the challenge, the questions to what was being said. And
Speaker 2: this is never neither a productive nor acceptable in a
Speaker 2: free society.
Speaker 3: The second I agree, so I'll go out of the
Speaker 3: second one. The media was complicit in this whole experience.
Speaker 2: They were really poisonous in sort of timidation, in propaganda.
Speaker 2: It was an effective use of propaganda. By the way,
Speaker 2: but also it was a mode of censorship to demonize
Speaker 2: and vilify any dissenting voice that was done by the media.
Speaker 2: It wasn't just propping up in this bizarre Kofka esque
Speaker 2: logic Fauci, who was saying things and those prescriptions were
Speaker 2: harming people. They were somehow he's a hero. But secondly,
Speaker 2: they were demonizing any descent. And when you demonize descent,
Speaker 2: you're delegitimizing any opposing view and pretending to the public.
Speaker 2: You're lying to the public. Therefore saying, oh, there's a
Speaker 2: consensus that all the experts say this, because they were
Speaker 2: shutting down the opposite, right, How could.
Speaker 3: There not be a consensus when you weren't allowed to
Speaker 3: dispute it.
Speaker 1: Great point.
Speaker 3: The third point I make is that I believe there
Speaker 3: are other people besides Fauci who should be brought in
Speaker 3: front of Rampaul's committee.
Speaker 1: One of them is Doris Burks.
Speaker 2: Deborah Burks, exactly Burk. You know, people don't realize Fauci
Speaker 2: really wasn't in charge of anything, although he was no
Speaker 2: question the most influential face of the pandemic management because
Speaker 2: he was on the media so often and because he
Speaker 2: was propped up by the media. But Deborah Burks was
Speaker 2: on the task force as the head of the medical
Speaker 2: side of the task force. So the way it worked
Speaker 2: was that we would come in tense was the person
Speaker 2: running the task force meeting, and then the first person
Speaker 2: to speak was Deborah Burkes, who gave the rundown to
Speaker 2: everybody else. But Deborah Burks wrote all of the federal
Speaker 2: policy guidelines to all the governors, to all the state officials,
Speaker 2: to all the public health officials. Her hands are the
Speaker 2: ones that pushed the schools, the lockdowns, the stay at
Speaker 2: home orders, everything that was done, and the inane pseudo
Speaker 2: analysis of the data which she really didn't understand whatsoever.
Speaker 1: And yet I've seen very very few people in the media.
Speaker 1: Steven A.
Speaker 3: Smith, who was with ESPN you may have seen he
Speaker 3: apologized for being wrong on us.
Speaker 1: He has criticized people, you know, for.
Speaker 3: Their actions during COVID, and he manned up and he said, look,
Speaker 3: I was wrong. But I haven't seen any almost anyone
Speaker 3: else in the media say we were wrong.
Speaker 2: Well, they won't. And you know, I believe it's sort
Speaker 2: of a very haunting example of what's called cognitive dissonance,
Speaker 2: which is you cannot handle you as a person cannot
Speaker 2: handle saying something that you bought into so strongly, so
Speaker 2: that it's a self protective mode. That these people were
Speaker 2: so complicit, they were so hostile, they were so vicious
Speaker 2: about people who disagreed and not proven wrong. I don't
Speaker 2: expect I do not expect, frankly, these people to admit
Speaker 2: they were wrong. So we as thinking people, and there
Speaker 2: are millions of America who had the courage to stand
Speaker 2: up to this, to try to protect their kids and
Speaker 2: their own families, even though they were at risk for
Speaker 2: losing and they did lose their jobs and their sort
Speaker 2: of societal acceptance. We have to realize that that's a
Speaker 2: critical part of this, that this is some validation to
Speaker 2: these people that they weren't doing this for nothing.
Speaker 3: So last question at our last couple of minutes, Scott Alison,
Speaker 3: thanks so much for joining. We've learned a lot from
Speaker 3: you today. The vaccine I was, I believe and you
Speaker 3: know way more about this are so I'll tell you
Speaker 3: what I believe and tell me if I'm right or
Speaker 3: wrong on this.
Speaker 1: I do think that the vaccine.
Speaker 3: Operation warp speed did save lives, especially for people who
Speaker 3: are vulnerable to you know, uh uh, you know, having
Speaker 3: a fatal issue with respect to COVID. But I was
Speaker 3: always against mandating and requiring people to get the vaccine.
Speaker 3: So what is your overall takeaway from from the from
Speaker 3: that whole operation Warp speed was the vaccine of active?
Speaker 3: Should we have done it the way we did it?
Speaker 3: Because now people are suspicious of vaccines?
Speaker 2: Well, and actually you know rightfully so because when you
Speaker 2: just they they the people in power, destroyed the trust
Speaker 2: in all of these things themselves, and that's because they
Speaker 2: there were a couple of things. Okay, the Operation Work
Speaker 2: Food was very successful in several ways, one of which
Speaker 2: was developing very rapidly drugs that actually worked. And here
Speaker 2: I'm talking about the the immuno globulens, the gamma globulins
Speaker 2: that were injected and early on when it was very
Speaker 2: dangerous for older people. Secondly, the vaccines and the everything
Speaker 2: that was done to get to make everything ready to
Speaker 2: go and to eliminate the typical many year delay in this. Yes,
Speaker 2: but what the vaccines didn't do, and this is not
Speaker 2: something that anyone other than the scientists there would have understood.
Speaker 2: They didn't test for things that they claimed the vaccines
Speaker 2: did they ever did any testing to see if it
Speaker 2: limited spread or if the people who got injected were
Speaker 2: not carriers of the virus, et cetera, even though they
Speaker 2: claimed it stopped the spread of the virus, which it didn't.
Speaker 2: So what it did though in the very early stages,
Speaker 2: I remember the virus itself changed over time, it mutated
Speaker 2: to something less virulent, less leaf. But in the beginning, yes,
Speaker 2: in the nursing home data in the early months of
Speaker 2: this vaccine availability showed that the nursing home residents as
Speaker 2: the highest risk group that you could be. There were
Speaker 2: a dramatic drop in the death rate once the vaccine came,
Speaker 2: So you know, there are lessons to be learned about
Speaker 2: the whole thing. But one of the problems that caused
Speaker 2: the loss of trust was the lack of transparency and
Speaker 2: the exaggeration or even overt lies about what the data
Speaker 2: showed about the vaccine. And this is again something we
Speaker 2: can't forget. Did Its Burks and Deborah Berks and Anthony
Speaker 2: Fauci who presided over what is frankly the biggest failure
Speaker 2: in public health history, and their guidance was implemented and
Speaker 2: it failed. And what we're left with here beyond the damage,
Speaker 2: beyond everything else, is a destruction of trust in public health.
Speaker 1: Well, you know, Scott.
Speaker 3: What really annoys me about this is there were people
Speaker 3: like you know you and other health professionals who got
Speaker 3: it right. I was vilified by the way, even from
Speaker 3: conservative friends at the beginning when I said don't lock down,
Speaker 3: don't lock down. Even some of the groups like CATO
Speaker 3: and Student Heritage said lockdown, lockdown because they panic.
Speaker 1: But here's the thing.
Speaker 3: I think that we need to be able to learn
Speaker 3: these lessons of what happened.
Speaker 1: And do you think we will?
Speaker 2: Well, I'm hoping that the point of what rand Paul's
Speaker 2: investigation is sort of what the answer is, which is
Speaker 2: number one, this is an example of transparency we usually
Speaker 2: don't have in government. This is fantastic, very valuable to
Speaker 2: educate the public about what was done and what the
Speaker 2: motivations were to do it. And the second part is
Speaker 2: this is some public accountability because, frankly, Steve, the only
Speaker 2: deterrent to this happening again is public accountability, and we're
Speaker 2: finally getting some. Is it enough? A lot of people
Speaker 2: think no, but it's a start.
Speaker 3: I want to ask you one other question. If I
Speaker 3: May and we'll just go over a little bit on
Speaker 3: the segment. But I think that, you know, I was
Speaker 3: struck by the fact that conservatives, free market people like
Speaker 3: you and me, we were we wanted to go, you know,
Speaker 3: on with our lives.
Speaker 1: You know, we were willing to take some of the
Speaker 1: risks and so on.
Speaker 3: And as it was struck by the fact that my
Speaker 3: liberal friends were terrified, you know, and I wonder if
Speaker 3: there's something in the DNA of liberals that they're just afraid.
Speaker 1: And they don't want to take risks or something.
Speaker 3: I mean, maybe I'm jumping the conclusions here, but it
Speaker 3: just struck me that look at the red states all
Speaker 3: opened up, the blue state state closed down.
Speaker 2: It's striking. And you know, maybe there's a correlation with
Speaker 2: people who believe that some third party like the government
Speaker 2: is going to take care of you, and other people
Speaker 2: who are generally more conservative are more libertarian and say, no,
Speaker 2: we're independent, we are going to take care of ourselves.
Speaker 2: By the way, that's what Sweden did. Sweden trusted the
Speaker 2: people in their country. They did not lock down, they
Speaker 2: did not close schools, but they did say listen, you know,
Speaker 2: use your common sense. If you're old and sickly. You
Speaker 2: probably should avoid crowds, but they didn't lock you up.
Speaker 2: We have to remember something you said earlier, Steve, which
Speaker 2: is that this violated all of our so called guaranteed freedoms.
Speaker 2: This is a country, there's a free country. We can
Speaker 2: never let this happen again. There's no such thing as
Speaker 2: a guaranteed freedom. If it can be removed because somebody says, oh,
Speaker 2: there's an emergency, we're going to remove the freedoms, then
Speaker 2: it's not.
Speaker 1: Scott, thank you for everything you did.
Speaker 3: You were an amazing force for good in this and
Speaker 3: you've been totally vindicated. So thank you, my friend, for
Speaker 3: standing up for our rights and our freedoms. And we
Speaker 3: are all grateful for what you and only a handful
Speaker 3: of others did in speaking out against Fauci and Burks.
Speaker 1: Folks, this is the more money show, and we will
Speaker 1: be right back