When Scott Atlas was tapped on the shoulder by the Trump Administration to serve as a covid-19 policy advisor, he couldn’t have imagined what he was about to face.

Atlas, a physician and health policy expert, says he was shocked and dismayed by the gross incompetence of top White House officials who displayed little understanding of pandemic policy.

Thrust into the chaos of the White House in August 2020, Atlas said his singular focus was to save lives, but found himself navigating raging egos, politically motivated lies, and cynical media manipulation.

Atlas is the author of over 100 peer‐reviewed scientific publications, 200 policy pieces, and numerous books, including the best-selling book, A Plague Upon Our House: My Fight at the Trump White House to Stop COVID from Destroying America.

In PART 2 of this interview (also see PART 1), I spoke with Atlas about his brief but tumultuous time at the White House.

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DEMASI: Dr Atlas, you’ve been very critical of the Coronavirus White House Task Force, but you were part of that Task Force – can you explain?

ATLAS: Well, I began in early August 2020, and sat in as an advisor to President Trump, so yes, I was an advisor to the White House for three and a half months. But it was Fauci and Birx who were at the head of the Task Force for five or six months before I even walked in the door.

DEMASI: What was your impression of how they were handling the pandemic?

ATLAS: In the short time that I was there, I thought there was a complete lack of critical thinking from the people in charge – Fauci, Birx and Robert Redfield who was head of the CDC at the time. They were not really scientists, per se. They were bureaucrats. I suppose at one point they were trained in science but people like Fauci – well, he’d been a bureaucrat in the NIH for 38 years where he’d spent his time running the organisation, rather than actually doing research.

DEMASI: They lacked expertise?

ATLAS: In the meetings I attended, I was shocked at the lack of knowledge, the lack of attention to detail, the lack of discussion about studies published in the literature. I came in to every Task Force meeting prepared with a dozen or two dozen scientific papers and piles of data that were evolving every day. And when I was asked my opinion, I recited the data in a critical way. I was met with no refutation whatsoever with data. Neither Fauci or Birx had a single scientific publication at hand. All I ever heard was silence….or comments like “Scott, you’re an outlier.”

DEMASI: What do you think was driving the policy decisions if it wasn’t the data?

ATLAS: There was a lot of desire to have power and authority and visibility in the media. They would call journalists by their first name – a couple of times, they would say, I’m going to call Sanjay tomorrow – they were talking about Sanjay Gupta from CNN. Well, I didn’t know any journalists, I wasn’t in that world. My whole career has been in some of the country’s best medical centres, running research programs and medical educational programs for doctors and scientists. While serving on the White House Coronavirus Task Force, I could not remember a time when I was in a room with people with such a low level of expertise. Particularly Deborah Birx – she didn’t have a very sophisticated understanding of what was going on.

Birx would come in with her charts of the covid cases and the hospitalisations each day, with arbitrary colour-coded categorisations – you know, something that could be done by someone in junior high, or middle school. There was no clinical basis for any of it, they were just looking at numbers and making these rash statements in a very non-scientific and non-transparent way.

DEMASI: For instance?

ATLAS: For instance, the Task Force would say that people had to wear masks – and then they would also see cases go down and attribute it to mask wearing.  But it was wrong – just because cases went down, doesn’t mean it was because of community masking – they were just time correlated. It was clear they did not understand basic cause-and-effect.

DEMASI: Some were also critical of you. I recall someone saying you’re ‘just a radiologist’ so what would you know about epidemiology and respiratory viruses…

ATLAS: I’m not “just a radiologist”, okay. I’m a health policy expert. I’ve been a health policy researcher and formulator for 20 years, full-time since 2012, adding to 25 years as a medical scientist and physician at some of the world’s top medical schools. My scope of knowledge was far broader than those I was dealing with at the White House. My knowledge about health policy includes taking into account how many people you are going to kill with severe economic downturns. Lockdowns and the subsequent economic downturn were public health issues, and it was something that Fauci and others did not consider. They were not health policy experts – and this was a health policy question.

DEMASI: How could they all be so off-base with their advice?

ATLAS: The problem was that Fauci, Birx and Redfield, the former CDC director, first and foremost were bureaucrats. Second, they all came from the era when their careers were based on AIDS. With the AIDS model, they used contact tracing, because you can trace sexual partners, and you use a barrier to block HIV transmission. But with covid, it was a respiratory infection spread by breathing. This was a completely different model to stopping HIV transmission.  And they were completely off-base in how they were handling it.

DEMASI: Yeah, I’ve worked as a political advisor for the Australian government, I’ve seen a lot of bureaucratic incompetence….

ATLAS: They didn’t want to have a scientific discussion and figure out the truth. They wanted to do what they wanted, and they were threatened when I came in – particularly Birx, she was always threatened and visibly nervous every time I brought up the data.

DEMASI: Recently, some of your emails came to light via FOIAs. They show Birx was upset with you because you weren’t following the narrative….

ATLAS: Yes, at one point we were in the Oval office and Trump asked Birx if she agreed with me about an issue to do with testing…she said “yes,” but then Trump turned to me and asked if she really agreed with me….and I said, “no” – I mean, I’m not going to lie to the President. I explained why Birx had disagreed with my view and when we left the Oval office she screamed at me and said “don’t ever do that in the Oval office again”…she was embarrassed about how she looked in front of the President.

DEMASI: Right, so Birx was concerned about her image…

ATLAS: I wasn’t concerned with my image. I didn’t need the job and I didn’t care. I told Jared Kushner, who called me to commence the job, that I was going to tell him the truth and that I would not change my opinion just because he or the President told me to change my opinion. And he said, “great, that’s why we want you for the job.”

Birx also tried to scuttle a meeting I organised to have top medical scientists from Harvard, Stanford, UCLA, and Tufts – who were actually doing the pandemic research – come into the Oval Office to answer the President’s questions on August 26, 2020. I arranged it specifically to allow Birx to come. She pulled out at the last minute – apparently, she was afraid she couldn’t hold her own about the data and debate health policies with experts. Again, that’s not the behaviour of an expert scientist, that’s the behaviour of someone out of their league.

DEMASI: Sounds like a small group at the top were making all the decisions without consultation…

ATLAS: I explain in my book that Birx, Fauci and Redfield had a pact among themselves – Birx also revealed this later – that if one of them were fired by Trump, they’d all quit.  So, they were covering each other’s careers. That’s the behaviour of entrenched bureaucrats, not public health experts trying to stop people from dying. The three of them had a lot of power, and unprecedented fame in the media. I left in mid-November 2020.

DEMASI: So you left? You weren’t fired?  Some people got the impression that you were fired….

ATLAS: It’s not true that I was fired. It was not true that I quit suddenly, either. I had a 130-day temporary appointment, it’s called a ‘special government employee.’ That time ran out and I left at the end of that period. I wrote a letter of resignation which is on the public record.

DEMASI: Dr Atlas, thanks for your time

ATLAS: Thank you

In PART 1 of this interview, Scott Atlas calls on Fauci to come clean on his pandemic failures