Donald Trump introduces Scott Atlas in August last year. Picture: AFP
Scott Atlas, who was a top health adviser to former president Donald Trump, has warned that “destructive and ineffective” Covid-19 restrictions could loom over economies for “years” because of an “unscientific obsession” with stopping cases.
Dr Atlas, a former medical doctor and now Senior Fellow in health care policy at Stanford’s Hoover Institution, said Australia had illustrated the folly of lockdowns and the “shocking power of governments to shut down everything – schools, businesses, personal movement and even the right to see your own family”.
“Australia had an explosion of cases with some of the most draconian policies imaginable,” he said, speaking to The Australian about his new book, A Plague Upon Our House, which is highly critical of the US Covid-19 response and two of Mr Trump’s other health advisers, Anthony Fauci and Deborah Birx.
“As an American, and I think it applies to Australia, I think it’s shocking how people acquiesce to this sort of thing.”
Dr Atlas, who was a full-time health policy adviser to Mr Trump for four months until last December, spoke a day after the US imposed travel restrictions on African nations to throttle the spread of the Omicron variant, which has been found in Australia, Israel, and multiple countries across Europe.
“Unfortunately, it is unlikely the recurring hysteria and mismanagement by those in power will end quickly,” he said. His book argues testing healthy people for Covid-19 has been wasteful and fuelled hysteria. “There remains an almost bizarre lack of understanding that the virus will not simply disappear.”
Alongside fears about Omicron, the number of Covid-19 cases has been rising in the US as winter approaches, from around 12,000 a day in summer to almost 90,000 a day, prompting the governor of New York to declare a state of emergency and some politicians to signal new restrictions.
“We see flu seasons come and go, we have roughly 50,000 deaths every flu season in the US – will we accept that without a blink from Covid? I don’t think so because we are off the rails still psychologically,” Dr Atlas told The Australian.
He said the evidence for mandating masks, lockdowns and shutting schools and businesses was either absent or overwhelmingly against such actions. “It’s frightening the sheer ignorance of people in power; we should be very concerned,” he said.
“The burden is on lockdowners to show they saved lives because they have inflicted enormous collateral damage,” he added, stressing the particular damage to shutting schools for children who he said were at negligible risk from Covid-19.
US deaths from or with Covid-19 are on track to exceed 800,000 by the end of the year, creating a potential political problem for Joe Biden and the Democrats, who blamed the former president for the 400,000 or so deaths that occurred under the Trump presidency.
Mr Trump never wanted to close schools or businesses, Dr Atlas argued, but felt politically unable to sack Dr Fauci and Dr Birx, popular figures in the media, because of the approaching presidential election, which Mr Trump ended up losing to Mr Biden.
“He understood at a gut level the disastrous harms of lockdowns and school closures,” he wrote. “Public health official keep using wildly incorrect projections that instil fear and alarm in the public, and when they are wrong fail to acknowledge the fact.”
Dr Atlas suggested that society could “absolutely” still be dealing with Covid-19 restrictions two years from now.
Globally, Covid-19 deaths exceed 5.2 million, 22 months since the start of the pandemic. In October last year, the World Health Organisation estimated 760 million people had been infected.
