Former WH COVID Adviser Shatters Pro-Lockdown Narrative with One Simple Question
This is the kind of doctor’s diagnosis Democrats dread.
Ten months into a coronavirus crisis Nancy Pelosi’s party and their mainstream media allies have whipped into a weapon aimed at destroying Donald Trump’s presidency, Dr. Scott Atlas, a former White House adviser on the pandemic, is laying out some badly needed truths for the American people.
And raising some painfully basic questions liberals who love locking down the economy simply can’t answer.
In a column published in The Wall Street Journal on Monday, Atlas, who served as a Trump special adviser on the coronavirus until November, outlined the basic symptoms of the political posturing that has plagued the country since the COVID-19 havoc began in earnest in March.
Panicked governments at the state and local level have destroyed their constituents’ livelihoods with lockdowns with no equivalent payoff in public safety; a hyperpoliticized, painfully dishonest mainstream media has served the public lies at a disgraceful level; and both of those factors spell disaster for the future.
The Atlas column is behind a paywall, which means most Americans are unlikely to see it in full (though Fox News did publish a summary story Tuesday). But Americans don’t really need to read a commentary column to see what’s in front of their eyes.
“America has been paralyzed by death and fear for nearly a year, and the politicization of the pandemic has made things worse by adding misinformation and vitriol to the mix. With vaccines finally being administered, we should be entering a joyous phase. Instead we endure still more inflammatory rhetoric and media distortion,” Atlas wrote in his opening sentence, statements not even a liberal who’s been awake in 2020 would question.
Where Atlas goes from there, however, is where no lockdown-addicted liberal is going to want to follow.
As any trip to a grocery store, gas station or airport on any given day will show, an overwhelming majority of Americans are at least acclimated to the idea of wearing masks to contain the coronavirus. (A Gallup poll published Dec. 14 showed almost 90 percent of respondents said they wore masks in public, though far fewer do so at private gatherings.)
But as the same mainstream media that exhorts mask-wearing keeps reporting, coronavirus cases and deaths keep surging. (The New York Times reported Wednesday that the national death toll attributed to COVID-19 has passed 323,000).
Meanwhile, Democrat-governed states like California, New York and New Jersey are imposing economy-killing lockdowns on their populations with questionable benefits and demonstrably harmful effects.
“Lockdown policies had baleful effects on local economies, families and children, and the virus spread anyway,” Atlas wrote. “If one advocates more lockdowns because of bad outcomes so far, why don’t the results of those lockdowns matter?”
It’s a simple question, but the answer is the key to pretty much the whole treatment of the coronavirus crisis in the United States and in the mainstream media. It’s simply that the response to the coronavirus in the U.S. has been driven more by politics than what Democrats worshipfully refer to as “science.”
The reality coming into 2020 was that, despite being hampered by a cancerous special counsel investigation of a hoax based on a lie, despite foes that openly branded themselves as a #Resistance force rather than an honorable, loyal opposition, and ginned up impeachment proceedings that were not even close to serious, and despite a relentless media that functioned as the communications wing of that same dishonorable #Resistance, the achievements of the Trump presidency had made the 45th president a shoo-in for re-election.
The pre-coronavirus economy was humming, bringing benefits particularly to the minority groups Democrats claim to care about. In foreign policy, the country’s most virulent enemies in the form of the Islamic State group were destroyed. Rivals like China and Russia was well as allies in Europe knew the American presidency was demanding relationships that benefitted America first.
So for Democrats and the mainstream media, the coronavirus was a political gift. What was deadly for too many Americans was priceless as a tool to attack Trump when the best candidate Democrats could muster was Joe Biden, a doddering, almost certainly corrupt relic of the Obama era, with a running mate in Sen. Kamala Harris who is so unacceptable she couldn’t even get Democrats to support her in the primary season.
And with the main political objective of hurting Trump established, the actual effectiveness of any supposedly anti-coronavirus measures sank to near irrelevancy. Clearly, that hasn’t changed.
The very real harm of lockdowns is all but ignored by liberals and media figures who advocate them.
As Atlas wrote:
“In this season when respiratory virus illnesses become more common and people move indoors to keep warm, many states are turning to more severe restrictions on businesses and outdoor activities. Yet empirical data from the U.S., Europe and Japan show that lockdowns don’t eliminate the virus and don’t stop the virus from spreading. They do, however, create extremely harmful health and social problems beyond a dramatic drop in learning, including a tripling of reported depression, skyrocketing suicidal ideation, unreported child abuse, skipped visits for cancer and other medical care.”
And all of this is at least passively abetted by a mainstream media thoroughly in the tank for the Democratic Party:
“The media has done its best to misinform the public with political attacks about who is to blame for this pain and misery even as it diminishes the great achievement of the new vaccines. The decline of objectivity in journalism has been evident for years. Now we see that even respected scientific journals, which are supposed to vet and publish the best objective research, have been contaminated by politics. Social media has become the arbiter of allowable discussion, while universities intimidate and suppress the free exchange of ideas necessary to uncover scientific truths.”
None of that bodes well for the health of the country in the future – physically or politically.
“It is not at all clear that American society with its cherished freedoms will survive, regardless of our success in defeating the pandemic threat,” Atlas concluded.
The main point of the Atlas piece was defending the Trump administration’s response to the coronavirus pandemic – a defense that’s sorely needed thanks to the very political and media conditions he outlines.
But it’s more of an attack than a defense – an attack on the political and professional dishonesty of American Democrats and their pet journalists whose calling is supposed to be portraying reality to their countrymen so they can make the informed decisions necessary for a self-governing people.
And the piece raises serious questions.
Without taking a position on whether masks actually help or are yet another governmental overreach to infringe on individual freedom, it’s not irrational to ask why, if constant masking really was the answer, does the coronavirus keep spreading?
Being told one too many times that the problem would be that much worse if masks were not used isn’t satisfactory. The same line of reasoning can “prove” that not breaking the mirror has avoided untold years of bad luck in seven-year increments. It also doesn’t address why the official line on masks has been far from consistent, and why mask advocates aren’t above being deliberately misleading about how effective they actually are.
It’s also not irrational to ask, if economically devastating state-imposed lockdowns were the answer, why has the pandemic not abated where those lockdowns are in place? And why are some states severely locked down, like California, while others, like Florida, impose minimal or no restrictions with less-than-amazing differences between the two?
Florida has a population of about 22 million, about half California’s. As of this week, it had about 1.2 million coronavirus cases, according to WTVJ-TV, while California had just under 2 million cases as of Tuesday, KTLA-TV reported. So, Florida’s case number is higher relative to the populations, but given the differences in the severity of their responses, California should be Shangri-La when it comes to the coronavirus. Florida should be a basket case.
(Meanwhile, in a Wednesday coronavirus update, The New York Times had both states in the category of “where new cases are higher and staying high.” So, really, what gives?)
As a professional physician, Atlas summed up the symptoms the country is experiencing now, and the diagnosis isn’t good – not for Democrats, their allies in the news business or the nation as a whole.
For the country, the truth could be the cure. For Democrats and the mainstream media, though, it should be deadly.
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