Glenn Ellmers: "[2020 Advisor to Trump] Atlas..blames Trump partly for being too driven by the polls, he is especially dismayed by Trump’s excessive deference to expert authority..They had convinced him to do..disregarded 'his own common sense'"
https://claremontreviewofbooks.com/pandemic-pandemonium/
Scott Atlas, who witnessed and participated in some of the federal decision-making, writes in A Plague Upon Our House about the almost pathological evasion of responsibility at all levels of the pandemic response: “Accountability remains absent from government leaders, public health officials, and scientists in failing to admit errors about lockdowns; some even distort their records and portray disastrous death tallies as ‘successes.’” Atlas’s book offers a blow-by-blow recounting of his frustrating role as an advisor to President Donald Trump during the second half of 2020. An accomplished radiologist and medical researcher, Atlas wanted decisions to be informed by the best available data. While he blames Trump partly for being too driven by the polls, he is especially dismayed by Trump’s excessive deference to expert authority. The president, Atlas writes, “let [White House Coronavirus Response Coordinator Deborah] Birx and Fauci tell governors to prolong the lockdowns and school closures and continue the severe restrictions on businesses—strategies that failed to stop the elderly from dying, failed to stop the cases, and destroyed families and sacrificed children…. They had convinced him to do exactly the opposite of what he would naturally do in any other circumstance,” and so he disregarded “his own common sense” and allowed
grossly incorrect policy advice to prevail. For months, his inner circle feared “rocking the boat” ahead of the election. They stopped the president from getting rid of people who were grossly incompetent, purely because of the election…. And on top of that tragic misjudgment, the election was lost anyway.
Atlas reserves his greatest scorn for Birx, a federal bureaucrat since 1985, who had been Barack Obama’s ambassador for America’s global AIDS response. She was the driving force behind the lockdowns, Atlas argues, even when their uselessness, and indeed harmfulness, had become painfully apparent. “Birx had one game plan, and she stuck to it, regardless of the evidence of failure.” [https://claremontreviewofbooks.com/pandemic-pandemonium/]
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