Dr. Scott Atlas Resigns as Director of Pandemic Misinformation
“You wouldn’t go to a podiatrist for a heart attack and that was essentially what was happening.”
After four months as President Trump’s senior advisor on the pandemic, Dr. Scott Atlas, has resigned. He’s done his job well, namely elevating doubts about the science and public health measures relating to COVID-19. A recent anti-mask tweet of his was removed after Twitter determined it to be in violation of its COVID-19 Misleading Information Policy.
The resignation comes as the country faces a deadly surge in coronavirus cases and record-high hospitalizations. Local officials nationwide will soon be facing tough decisions about limiting the spread of the coronavirus, and their job will be all the more difficult as angry citizens armed with a twisted view of the facts oppose them.
California’s intensive care units could be overloaded by the middle of December, and its hospitals could be dangerously close to full by Christmas, according to sobering projections Gov. Gavin Newsom presented yesterday.
Locally, Atlas has been championed by KUSI News (which interviewed him this morning), promoting a “herd immunity” strategy allowing millions more people to become infected with the virus.
He was brought into the administration in August after the president asked his advisers to “find a new doctor” who would argue an alternative point of view from Drs. Deborah Birx and Anthony Fauci, whose public statements often didn’t hew to the White House’s narrative.
Although his experience in the fields of immunology and epidemiology is limited to quotes in the right wing media (he is a neuroradiologist), he jumped right into the role, discounting science-led public health measures including mask-wearing, stay-home orders and social distancing.
Dr. Atlas didn’t just come from nowhere to his position in the Trump administration. According to money in politics reporter Donny Shaw, Atlas came via the Job Creators Network (JCN), a right-wing “dark money” nonprofit founded by Trump megadonor Bernie Marcus.
The group got the President’s attention following publication of a full page ad in the Wall Street Journal with the headline “Dr. Fauci, We Need A Second Opinion,” which quoted Dr. Atlas urging the administration to get behind a swift reopening of businesses following the first wave of COVID-19.
If you’re thinking the JCN group sounds vaguely familiar, you might have caught wind of their springtime effort calling on Trump to make a then-obscure drug, hydroxychloroquine, available to treat COVID-19 patients. The President bought the pitch hook, link, and sinker, going on TV and social media to repeatedly promote the drug despite a lack of scientific evidence that it was effective.
Via Sludge, which covers dark money in politics:
The Mercer family, who were top donors to Trump’s 2016 campaign, are major donors to JCN, with their Mercer Family Foundation giving the group multiple $100,000 donations in recent years, according to an analysis of tax documents by LittleSis. Rebekah Mercer’s “Making America Great” nonprofit donated more than $1 million to JCN in 2018, according to the group’s 990 filing. Robert Mercer donated $400,000 to pro-Trump super PAC the Great America PAC in 2018, and he gave $355,200 to Trump’s joint fundraising committee earlier this year.
Home Depot co-founder Bernie Marcus is the founder of JCN. Marcus is a major GOP donor who spent more than $7 million through outside groups to help elect Trump in 2016. In the current cycle, Marcus has donated $5 million to pro-Trump super PAC the Preserve America PAC, $100,000 to American Principles Project PAC, which is running ads against Biden, and hundreds of thousands more to super PACs backing Republican congressional candidates.
Atlas was hired as a “special government employee”, limiting his service to government to 130 days in a calendar year, a deadline he reached this week.
While many expressed relief at his departure, I’m afraid the damage has been done.
Via the Guardian:
Dr Celine Grounder, a member of Biden’s advisory panel on the crisis, greeted the news of the resignation with relief.
“I’m relieved that in the future, people who are qualified, people who are infectious disease specialists and epidemiologists like me will be helping to lead this effort,” she told CNBC.
“You wouldn’t go to a podiatrist for a heart attack and that was essentially what was happening.”
Thanks to Dr Atlas’ advocacy for alternative views from most epidemiological experts and miracle cures with no medical backing, he’s effectively contributed to confusion around COVID, making the Trump administration’s response to the crisis look less like a clear failure.
Finally, there’s the larger goal connected to Trump and those who created the conditions making his presidency possible, namely the erosion of public trust in the institutions needed to nurture democracy.
This rejection of science cannot be separated from attacks on freedom of the press and the notion that the public interest is served by eliminating as much government as possible. For fifty years this campaign of doubt and denigration has weakened our country in the service of those who place their own well being over others.
As Jonathan Foley said in Scientific American, back in the early days of the Trump administration:
Ultimately a healthy democracy depends on science. When Congress asked physicist Robert Wilson in 1969 what a new particle accelerator would do to help with national defense, he answered that it would do nothing. The pursuit of scientific truth, he said, “only has to do with the respect with which we regard one another, the dignity of men, our love of culture.” The pursuit of truth, an informed citizenry and the unfettered exchange of ideas are cornerstones of our democracy. They are what make America great. Rejecting evidence and empiricism is a step toward despotism.
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https://twitter.com/meredithshiner/status/1333784989587030025?s=20
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