![]() What his claims left out, they said, were that the 81 million people with underlying conditions also needed protection, and that if the virus was spreading at high levels, it would certainly find its way into nursing homes in those communities, too.įauci noted that when he raised the risks faced by vulnerable people with underlying health conditions to Atlas, the Stanford physician was dismissive. In their correspondence, Fauci and Birx discussed Atlas’s repeated claims that the only people who needed to be isolated were the nation’s 1.3 million elderly nursing home residents. And he repeatedly questioned the effectiveness of masks, social distancing, stay-at-home policies, and other public health measures to help slow the virus’ spread.Ītlas and Fauci did not return requests for comment for this story. Midwest and now the Sunbelt,” she wrote.Ītlas has denied that he was pushing a “ herd immunity” strategy to the virus, but he consistently championed the approach in public, even if he didn’t always use the exact term. “He is convince that we have reach herd immunity in the NE. In her emails at the time, Birx expressed frustration over Atlas’s unscientific stances. ![]() In August, the US death toll was climbing past 170,000, and it was unclear when any of the vaccines under development would prove effective. He promoted a steady stream of unscientific views about how the virus spread, who it harmed, and how to control it - views that were widely condemned by the scientific community, including by dozens of his faculty peers at Stanford. “Tony and I did not brief the President nor speak to the President between 22 April and the end of July beyond one vaccine briefing in July.”Ītlas joined the White House team with no background in infectious diseases or public health. “I don’t see the President so I don’t have a counter balance opportunity to this Atlas Dogma,” Birx wrote. But the idea held sway with the president: Weeks after Atlas started on the job, Trump proclaimed on TV that the virus would “go away” once people developed “ a herd mentality.”įauci and Birx, meanwhile, were almost entirely shut out of the Oval Office, according to their correspondence at the time. Infectious disease experts at the time argued that this strategy would be incredibly dangerous, inevitably leading to large numbers of unnecessary hospitalizations and deaths. He infamously advocated for a controversial approach to the deadly virus: letting it spread unchecked among non-elderly people in the absence of a vaccine so that the population at large could develop immunity. The emails - obtained by Charles Seife, a New York University journalism professor - show how alarmed Fauci and Birx were about Atlas, who became one of Trump’s most influential advisers and one of the loudest sources of COVID-19 misinformation in the US. She accused Atlas of “providing information not based on data or knowledge of pandemics - nor pandemic responses on the ground but by personal opinion formed by cherry picking data from nonpeer reviewed COVID publications.” 21, 2020, email - 11 days after Trump had announced that Atlas, a neuroradiologist, would be his newest adviser. Atlas’ views on the pandemic,” Birx, the White House’s coronavirus response coordinator at the time, wrote to Fauci and other top health officials in an Aug. “I am more convinced than ever the dangers of Dr. ![]() Yet the pair quickly realized that Atlas - a senior fellow at Stanford University’s conservative Hoover Institution who routinely downplayed the pandemic on Fox News - was about to make their fight against the virus even harder, according to emails obtained through a public records request and shared with BuzzFeed News. ![]() It only took a few days for Scott Atlas to alarm top US health officials after he became a White House COVID-19 adviser in mid-August of last year.Īnthony Fauci and Deborah Birx had already been sidelined and were struggling to combat falsehood after falsehood spread by former president Donald Trump. ![]()
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