Natural herd immunity to me is reckless.
Trump should have fired Fauci back in March and appointed Dr. Ben Carson or Dr. Scott Atlas as his primary medical responder to this fake pandemic. So now Dr. Atlas has finally come out with what he should have said publicly when he was still advising Trump:
Former WH COVID Adviser Shatters Pro-Lockdown Narrative with One Simple Question
Ex-WH Adviser Buries Lockdown Logic with 1 Simple Question
By Joe Saunders
Published December 23, 2020 at 12:33pm
PART I
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.”