Speaker 1:
We are going to hear at lunch first from Scott Atlas and then a couple words from Carl Neuss of the Cornell Free Speech Alliance, who has been very generous on sponsoring this conference and helping some others along, too.
First Scott. Scott is a colleague and good friend of mine at the Hoover Institution. Does both health policy… Well, I’ll call you health policy among many other things. Scott has a lot to say about academic freedom.
Scott committed two sins. The first was understanding COVID about six months ahead of everybody else after putting together science, economics, and common sense. Unfortunately, everyone else was six months behind Scott on how these things are supposed to work.
His second sin was serving his country under the administration of he who shall not be named. Hint, large guy, orange hair. So with that introduction, Scott, please take it away.
Scott W. Atlas, MD:
Okay, thank you. And first, I want to thank John and Yvonne for having a spine.
I entitled the talk A Pandemic of Failure by Academia, Science, and Public Health: Will Trust Return? Because I think trust is, where do we go from here? The other context that I’d like to say is, will an ethical society return because there’s been an ethical breakdown in the United States and in much of the rest of the world, in my opinion.
Universities are granted privileged positions, particularly those involved in medical science because professors are the sources of media’s expertise. They are the experts to the public. They are appointed to head government agencies. They fund all scientific research. But the biggest failure is in their most important role, which is teachers of critical thinking and role models for our children.
They have been exposed. Science and public health are in crisis. It’s not just academic freedom. There is an unprecedented denial of fact. The credentialed class has been exposed as non-expert, politicized, and ethically deficient. We have broken the social contract with our most precious resource, our children, harming them directly and failing as role models and of course, as this conference says, the free exchange of ideas is under threat.
There’s a common theme here, and the theme is the university. Some facts, because there’s a context of factual background we must acknowledge. Under two administrations, the United States Management of the Pandemic was a failure. That’s compared to our Pure Nations and cumulative deaths per million. This is the United States. That’s a straight line, for those of you who don’t understand statistics. There’s no change in the slope of that line even though the second administration had the vaccine.
The lockdowners and the academic experts who recommended them and demonize the alternative own these outcomes. Their policies were implemented, their policies failed, killing and harming millions. The lockdowns were not previously recommended. This was the first absurdity of it all.
The standard pandemic management was articulated 15 years earlier, and that pandemic management specifically stated they should request all who remain ill are isolated at home, but others should be encouraged to come to work. That closing schools for longer than 10 to 14 days from the beginning of an epidemic by decreasing contacts among students is not warranted. That canceling or postponing large meetings would not have any significant effect. There is no basis for recommending quarantine of groups or individuals, screening passengers at borders, or closing travel. Experiences shown these actions are not effective. They’re not recommended. That was the standard pandemic management.
The safer alternative was known by spring of 2020. It wasn’t learned in 2021. It’s not news in 2022. It was articulated by several of us in the national media. Johnny Ioannidis, David Katz, myself, and Martin Kulldorff in April after March of 2020 because he couldn’t get his stuff published in the American media. So it was in CNN Espanol.
Several others later in the spring, summer, and fall came forward with the same idea, which we all said was targeted protection, increasing the protection of the people who are high risk to die and stopping the destruction of low risk people including in schools and medical care businesses and transportation.
Seven months later, the Great Barrington Declaration was written, and yes. I don’t sign petitions myself. I agree with Johnny Ioannidis. On the other hand, it’s not about that a million people sign that. It’s about that these people, Martin, Sunetra, and Jay wrote something that others could say, “Yes, I agree with that.”
The point of speaking out is not to make a case alone, it’s to allow others to see yes, there are sane people saying this stuff. It empowers everyone else and that is the importance of the Great Barrington Declaration.
Academic science promulgated two overt lies on the public. Number one, if you’re against lockdowns, you’re choosing the economy over lives. That’s contrary to decades of economic literature saying that economic downturns kill people. It’s unfortunate that the economists even at my own university were relatively silent on that, but that’s a fact.
And secondly, the lie was if you’re against lockdowns, you’re for allowing the infection to spread without mitigation. The so-called herd immunity strategy. No one ever said that. I never heard it voiced. I never even heard it discussed in the White House. That was an overt lie. That’s called propaganda. That’s in New York Times font, by the way.
Here’s some facts very quickly. The lockdowns failed period.
Bjornskov, the lockdowns did not reduce mortality.
BenDavid, the lockdowns did not have a significant impact on case increase.
Agrawal, the lockdowns increased excess deaths.
Herby, the lockdowns are ill-founded and should be rejected as a pandemic policy instrument on a meta-analysis.
And then most recently, Kerpen, Moore, and Casey Mulligan, who’s sitting over here, who analyzed it on a state basis. And on the computations on mortality, economy, and education, the states, many of which opened, South Dakota and Florida, did the best. The states that did the worst are my own state of Illinois, actually. I’m born in Chicago. California, New Mexico, New York, DC, and New Jersey. These are the states with the most stringent lockdowns. That’s fact, that’s not opinion.
The legacy of academics and public health experts, they closed the schools even though the rest of the pure nations in the world did not closing in-person schools and health in teenagers compared to the previous year, 2019, explosion of mental illness in teenagers, even though medical care facilities were shut down and therefore the blue going down is a decrease in hospital admissions for total.
Compared to the previous year, double to triple self-harm in teenagers. That’s America’s teenagers putting cigarettes out on their skin. Psychiatric illness in college age Americans, massive explosion. Drug abuse in teenagers in the United States. Overdoses, substance use disorders, massive explosion during the lockdown.
There’s a massive learning loss. This is 2021 Historical losses in math at grades four and eight, the biggest since the computation was ever done. Lockdowns especially harmed low income and poor kids. This is data published by World Bank, UNESCO, UNICEF, USAID, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation in case you’re looking for who the sources of this are. And this massive learning loss disproportionately affected students from disadvantaged backgrounds. I thought we were in a society that cared about the poor and the low income families?
Lockdowns are a luxury of the rich. They’re a luxury of the people that live in my neighborhood in Palo Alto who can assemble a micro-school of everybody with a PhD for their kid in their backyard. Mackay said, “Of all the offspring of time, error is the most ancient and is so old and familiar an acquaintance that truth when discovered comes upon most of us like an intruder and meets the intruder’s welcome.”
The university’s response to truth. Censorship. And I put censorship in quotes here because there’s a lot of nuance to censorship. This underscores some of the things that’s been said here. Yes, you can be fired from your job and I have not been fired from my job, okay? There is a value in tenure.
But you can be suspended without pay, “To put distance between you and the institution.” Formerly censured by the faculty senate, directed by your employer to “Stop writing X.” Directed by your employer to, “Write a public apology for X.” Colleagues directed to, “Stop writing defenses of Scott.” Publicly defamed by other faculty members using their Stanford titles and official emails sent throughout the university, in opinion pieces in academic journals, in opinion pieces in newspapers, in social media.
You could have your visibility reduced by abrupt cessation of lectures at institutional events compared to right before you were in the stage of the pandemic. You can have suppression of your book, contrary to the standards set for every other senior faculty authored book at your institution.
Cancel culture on campus is cowardly. It relies on the university brand to legitimize the defamation. It relies on university titles like former Dean of the Medical School or the Academic Secretary to the university. It relies on being friends with the journal editors who share your views. When it’s written that I violate the core values of Stanford faculty and the expectations under the Stanford Code of Conduct, which states that we are all responsible for sustaining high ethical standards of this institution. And in that same piece, these people make an analogy of what I said about targeted protection to, “Promoting eugenics,” or to, “The Tuskegee syphilis experiments.”
Who really violated the standards of ethical conduct of this institution? To me, that doesn’t meet basic human decency. Academic science was also exposed as political. It’s not being addressed really in this meeting, but it’s undeniable. When I’m asked by the President of the United States to go and help this country, the answer is yes. And if you don’t say yes, there is something wrong with you.
When I said that there was a targeted group of people that had high risk, that the risk to children was extremely low if they’re healthy, that immunity is conferred after a previous infection, that masks simply do not work by the data, that schools should be open, that lockdowns are wrong, and that targeted protection is the way to go, that’s exactly what Johnny Ioannidis and Jay Bhattacharya said.
In fact, I was calling them almost every day, all summer and fall, talking to them about every one of these issues. Yet only one of us, despite all the stuff they took, and I’m not minimizing that, only one of us got a censure from the Stanford faculty Senate. I wonder why?
Here’s the data on the voting of Stanford zip code. 95% Biden, 3.5% Trump. California, one third of voters went for Trump.
Even America’s media, the most poisonous media in the world, recognized political targeting. This is the editorial board of the Wall Street Journal who said, the public can be forgiven for wondering if Dr. Atlas’s appointment as a White House coronavirus advisor last month has made him a political target. A group of Stanford faculty published an open letter sliming their former colleague last week. The video came down two days later.
National Review, Atlas has been singled out for professional erasure because he had the temerity to join President Trump’s coronavirus task force and advocate rational measures for safely reopening the economy.
There is a sinful legacy here that cannot be ignored. When you censor science policy, it’s not the same thing as the general tendency of loss of creativity or diversity on campus. People die. And people died from the censorship of correct science policy. And not only that, we have set up a public health disaster in our younger generation.
Everyone, a lot of people, gained weight during the lockdown. College aged people, more than half, had an unwanted weight gain that averaged 28 pounds. That’s an obesity epidemic now. That’s public health.
Trust in public health is politicized. That’s a legacy of academia and the public health leadership. This is parents’ support for K through 12. There’s a dramatic difference by party. That shouldn’t be. There’s something wrong, not with the people, but with what science advice, policy advice, has become.
There is now a politicization of science itself. There never was before. This is data for 30 to 40 years, by party. It’s not a big difference. Now look. Democrat versus Republican. Do you have a great deal of confidence in science? That’s a disaster. We cannot have a country that science has politicized it. It’s not objective.
How to restore trust. This is what I promised I’d talk about, and some of this echoes what some people here have said. But I think there’s… I’m not naive. I was naive when I went to Washington. I’m not naive now.
There’s a statement on academic freedom by Stanford University. This is 50 years old. And it says, expression of the widest range of viewpoints should be encouraged, free from institutional orthodoxy and from internal or external coercion.
Well-meaning people of circulated a document asking the President to sign the University of Chicago statement on free expression. This was circulated, by the way, in April of 2021. I’m not saying it’s not well-meaning, but I like to put it this way. The value of an electronic document is worth the paper it’s written on. Okay?
What’s the answer? The answer is individuals, good people with integrity, must rise up. What does rise up mean? Rise up is a phrase, by the way, it’s been used historically throughout a whole gamut of leaders in the United States from Martin Luther King Jr. to our current president, Joe Biden, used the word rise up. Rise up means speak up. It’s not just encouraged in a free society. It’s required of good people to speak up.
When the Stanford Medical School smeared me, no one at Stanford Medical School publicly spoke up. No one at Stanford Law School publicly spoke up. But it took somebody who’s a real leader, Martin Kulldorff, at Harvard Medical School who’d said, “I’d be delighted to debate if Scott Atlas is right with any of the 98 signatories.” Zero people who signed that document took up Martin’s challenge.
Institution leaders must rise up and lead. We have a deficit of leadership in institutional places. We can’t fill leadership positions with people who are not leaders. That’s not a simple task, but it requires people who have a frigging spine.
Don’t forget. These people make a lot of money. This is a table of the top 60 salaries in private colleges of Presidents. There are more than 60 in the United States that make over a million dollars, okay? That big time money requires doing the job.
Martin Luther King said, there comes a time when he must take a position that it is neither safe nor politic nor popular, but one must take it because it is right.
We need to encourage, not vilify outside experts who help. Okay? These people, Joe Ladapo of UCLA, Cody Meissner of Tufts, Martin Kulldorff of Harvard, Jay Bhattacharya of Stanford, had the courage to come in when I tried to get a group of people to talk to President Trump to answer his questions.
By the way, this was met with internal resistance. This was the card handed to me as I’m sitting there, and the president’s asking questions, saying, “Okay, Scott. Five more minutes. Let’s end this.”
First of all, I’m not going to interrupt the President of the United States who took 45 minutes to go around and ask all the questions. But we need to encourage outsiders. We cannot have serious things done by career bureaucrats. We need more and more outsiders. This is not a political situation. We can’t have it, that there’s self cancellation and fear stopping people from stepping forward.
We need to hold universities accountable and tie it to money. There are more than a dozen universities in this country that get over a half a billion dollars a year from simply one agency, and that’s the NIH. They need to be held accountable for that money by allowing the free exchange of ideas.
We need to demand a public apology for errors. Why is that important? Well, first of all, anyone who’s married knows that to restore trust, it’s very important to apologize when you’re wrong.
Secondly, we cannot let this ever happen again. It’s not good enough to say, oh, let bygones be bygones. No. These people are in charge. These people killed people with their guidance. We can’t let that happen again. Where is their signed public admission of their errors and the apology for the destructive results of their recommendations?
We need to hold people who defame legally accountable. Yes, there’s a New York Times v. Sullivan case. That’s a problem, that decision, because it set a bar. And the bar is for public figures, no matter how reluctant you were to be a public figure, you have to have to endure any kind of statement unless those statements are proven to be done with actual malice. That’s a very high and very ambiguous standard. There are proposals to change that court decision. I can guarantee you there will be challenges to that.
We cannot have an incentive to just say whatever falsehood you want in the legal system. And then we need to form new institutions by people who have moral authority. Not by the same institutions. We can’t have places like Stanford pretend that they’re the flag carrier for free speech. That’s absurd.
This is a school. Jay Martin and I have been asked to co-found an Academy for Science and Freedom at Hillsdale College. And our purpose is to educate the American people about the free exchange of scientific ideas and the proper relationship between freedom and science and the pursuit of truth.
But I’m going to reemphasize this and I’m not naive in thinking it will come. It will not come. They will never admit their error. But why must it be insisted on? Because this is the legacy. Avoidable deaths in society’s most vulnerable, massive destruction of low-income families, ongoing enormous health damages to our children, and a severe loss of trust in public health and science.
Last thing, the message to all the students where I speak all over the country to, when they say, “Well, what can we do?” It’s very difficult. There’s a lot of things to do that are small, but there’s one thing you must never forget. What Chesterton said.
“Right is right, even if nobody does it. Wrong is wrong, even if everybody is wrong about it.”
Thank you.
Carl Neuss:
Representing the Cornell… The Alumni Free Speech Alliance, which is nationwide organization, about a year old. I also am a… Thanks.
I’m also a founder of the Cornell Free Speech Alliance and the Harvard Alumni for Free Speech. I have degrees from both, but the group is really founded by a group from Princeton, so at Ed Yingling and Stuart Taylor.
We now have 14 universities. It’s an alumni organization, and what we’re trying to do is team with faculty. And in this brief commentary, talk a little bit more about turning the corner in terms of what we can do and how alumni can help. I won’t read off all these schools, but we now have 14 member schools. There was a lot of press at the end of last year about this initiative in the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, elsewhere. And as a result, we had 113 universities come out of the woodwork and wanted to be part of this organization, and we’re just slowly grinding through to figure out those groups that have capable groups of alumni that can do something.
So it’s a very important group. Anyone who… You’ll see a handout on your desk they were handed out, but if any of you are representing universities or with universities that you would like to join this alliance and activate your alumni, which can be a great help, we think, follow the instructions here or see me afterwards. I can give you a flyer if you don’t have one already.
In addition, there’s a subset of these 14 schools that have created the University Open Inquiry Cooperative. It’s a model university program where the strategy is that although we have some wonderful nonprofit organizations like FIRE and ACTA, Heterodox Academy, part of the problem with the last 20 years is those resources have been stretched so thin. Over 20 people trying to change things at 2000 universities across the country is just not a very good business strategy, being a business guy.
So the Model University Initiative is working on a narrow and deep strategy toward having alumni help bring reform as opposed to a ‘mile wide and an inch deep’ strategy.
These are the five universities that are now signed up, a memorandum of understanding to proceed with the Open Inquiry Cooperative. Harvard, MIT, Cornell, UNC Chapel Hill, and University of Virginia.
Just in terms of a summary of why the strategy is important, the four constituencies that we have to influence to change things at universities, of course administration, faculty, students, alumni. But look at the numbers. At Cornell for instance, is a hundred thousand administrators, 2000 faculty, 20,000 students and 200,000 alumni. And the alumni are important because not only are there so many of them, but they’re the only group of the four stakeholders that are not captive to the monoculture. So they have independence.
They’re not necessarily the best informed, but they care about the university and most importantly, they are a long-term player. As we know, students as well as administrators are increasingly short term players. So they’re not going to be there for the long term. And we have to team with faculty because number one, they’re long term. And number two, they know what’s going on. And number three, faculty, you folks, should be keepers of the culture.
And so the alumni want to be there to encourage you to keep that culture and point it in the direction that we’ve been talking about at this conference. So the strategy of the University Open Inquiry Cooperative is, as I said, to have a narrow and deep strategy with five initial schools. It’s alumni driven. It’s faculty focused. It will also be engaging with students, the administration, so covering all four major stakeholders.
We want a team with nonprofit organizations, national nonprofits, and bring them to our campuses and have… Basically the focus is to have foot soldiers on the local campuses so that some of the national nonprofits like FIRE and ACTA and others that do such great work will have an army of people to help change that are independent and they can have unfettered voices at the university.
So we’re trying to team, as it’s shown here, the Alumni Free Speech Alliance, ACTA, Heterodox Academy, and FIRE. We want to bring them into these five universities and have a focus strategy as opposed to the whack-a-mole strategy that oftentimes is being executed by these groups. They’re wonderful groups, have wonderful resources, have more knowledge than we do. But we want to bring them, all their resources, to bear.
And Heterodox Academy now is pursuing this strategy with a mild university program. ACTA is doing the same thing with their Campus Freedom Initiative. So we’re very pleased to be teaming hopefully with both of those folks going forward. And FIRE, of course, you all know this fantastic work. So the basic strategy is to spotlight issues, outreach to alumni, faculty, students, administration, educate, organize, and influence. So that’s the strategy. There’s a little bit complex, but if you put this assortment, this consortium of groups together, the Alumni Free Speech Alliance has an alumni focus. Heterodox Academy has a faculty focus, ACTA has a administrative/administrator and trustee focus, FIRE, of course, the overall free speech focus.
So we want to impact all four of these major constituencies. The alumni is very important because it’s the only one that’s not captive to the university group think. So we want to start with the alumni, team with the faculty, and go from there.
And we want to hit both the major stakeholders as well as the power centers. Each of these stakeholders has its own power center, whether it be the Board of Trustees for the administration, student assemblies and faculty senate for the faculty, et cetera. Major donors for alumni.
So this is what we’re about, and the idea is to have three-year program where we really figure out how to get it done, teaming with people on campus and faculty members. No one’s done this before. No one’s reformed major universities before. None of us really know how to do it. That’s part of the struggle we’ve seen in this conference. So we’re about the business of trial and error, to a degree, and we want to come up with lesson learned, best practices, effective methods, practical tools over the next few years, and then proliferate those techniques and methods and tools to other universities across the country.
So thank you all and wonderful conference. We’re so pleased to be here.
Speaker 1:
So in the interest of time and patience, let’s take three questions, which could be for either Scott or for Carl. And we’ll do the usual… Whoever gets the microphone from the three sides of the room gets to ask the question.
Scott, go ahead.
Scott W. Atlas, MD:
Okay.
Audience #1:
Mine turned on? Okay. Peer pressure is important, and I am not good enough to be at Stanford, but I do know some Stanford faculty in the law school, even know medical school. So I was thinking I should maybe send them an email to the ones I know saying, shame on you, more eloquently.
But what should I tell them that they should have done and what should I tell them they should do now? Should there be something like after the Salem Witch Trials where there was a day of fasting and repentance?
Scott W. Atlas, MD:
Well, I think the problem that I try to get across is that the professors are super influential. I don’t think that you’re going to change many of their minds, but I do think they’re so impactful in the students. And I think that’s their real failure.
So I really think that… I don’t know if maybe it’s too late for them to do anything, but I think that there should be a real public discussion of what happened here. This university, the law school, I mean the previous pre-pandemic, there were letters to the editor written by the law school and other people at this university supporting people who had views that were… Ignited a lot of criticism or whatever.
They were invisible during this. And I think part of it is perhaps their own fear from COVID. I think COVID was something that induced fear and therefore irrational thinking. But I also think that we have accelerated this self cancellation by the cancel culture, which I believe, in part, was political.
I think there needs to be an open discussion of what happened here, a revisitation. It’s not good in enough to do what Emily Oster suggested in her recent article that just say okay. Let’s just… Her word was amnesty, I guess. Let’s just give it… Start over. Everybody’s a good guy and forget it.
I don’t think that’s good enough because we can’t have it happen again. These are positions of responsibility at a university.
Audience #1:
Could I contest that a bit? I’m a game theorist, and so I think about incentives and actions and information a lot. I was speaking of me writing to John Smith, so he personally knows that I know he didn’t do it, and he’ll have some emotional damage unless he does something now.
So I don’t think public discussion does that much good. You’ve got to go after the individual and shame them a little bit for not having done what they should have done. But then what should I tell him now? Should he come to send you an email saying, sorry about that, or buy you a beer?
Scott W. Atlas, MD:
No. Well, okay. I don’t know how to answer that except to say something else about the email, which I will, was that I think people don’t understand the motivation of people that were working hard like me and Jay and John on this. Because the motivation was people were dying, and I had a thousand emails a day when I was in Washington from people begging me to keep continuing. To speak out, including from people whose spouse committed suicide because of the lockdowns.
I had the same day, I wrote about this in my book, some mother sent me an email saying, please keep speaking. My daughter just tried to kill herself and you’re the reason that I gave her to keep living. I hate to be so negative, but the hubris of university professors that think that they are so impactful that they could shut down people like me? No. We need to be far more focused on what’s important.
So I don’t care about their email to me. I don’t care if you send them an email. And I’m not being negative, I don’t think that’s that important. I think it is important to move forward, to revisit what happened, but to more figure out how we cannot let this happen again. It’s not about apologizing really. I don’t need a personal apology, but what I do think is the public apology will serve the public good.
I’m worried about what the public thinks. We cannot have this happen again. That’s the center of it.
Joshua(Audience #2):
Hi, I’m Joshua [inaudible 00:33:43] from AEI. My question is about the photograph from the Oval Office, which has Joe Ladapo in it, and you told us that he was at UCLA, which of course at the time he was. But as you know, he is now Surgeon General of Florida.
So my question for you is, do we want more professors to move either permanently or temporarily into governmental positions? And if the answer to that is yes, how do we get the right ones into them so that they have an effect?
Scott W. Atlas, MD:
Yeah, my opinion is that we need to have people have short term positions. We need to have people whose careers don’t depend on a 35, 38 year history of being in a government agency. So I think it’s good to have people who are experts, whatever that means these days, join in on policy, on government policy, absolutely. But I think it’s not because we want people to be in there in those long-term positions.
When people are in a position, like for instance, Anthony Fauci for 38 years, these people don’t survive these positions because they’re politically neutral over multiple administrations. They survive because they’re politically savvy. They know how to navigate a highly politicized environment. They have friends in the media. They have different incentives, to borrow from my economist friends, about what to do than just simply give advice.
When I went in, as an example, the first day that I was there, I was asked if I would help the President after talking to the various people who you’ve heard of at the end of the day.
And I said, “Well, I just want you to know what you’re going to get here because I’m not going to agree to something that is wrong. I don’t care who tells me to. I’m not going to sign onto a group statement if it’s wrong.”
And Jared Kushner turned to me and said, “That’s exactly why we want you.”
And I think that was shockingly positive comment. But then the next comment of course was, “But you’re going to be destroyed when it becomes public.” Which I thought, okay. Then I’m going to go back to California for a bit and see if that works. So I think there’s a hazard to going in, but I think we need people to feel free like they can go in.
Now, about taking a career position. Personally, I would never take a career position in a government position because I think it’s such a poisonous environment. But I do think it’s very important that we step up and help. If you think the president is incompetent, you ought to go help. That’s obvious, because if good people don’t go help, who’s left? The people that want to be in a bureaucratic position for 38 years.
So I do think more, not professors, but people who are critical thinkers, that’s not necessarily professors, go in and help. But I think it’s not because that’s their permanent job. I think that leads to a bad incentive. I think it’s better to be an outsider who then has their own job and is an independent thinker. That’s just my opinion.
Audience #3:
I’ve been in government six different times, headed an agency that had 13,000 employees. The one word of advice for short-termers is get to the budget. The budget is the only thing that controls large bureaucracies. I’ve worked at the local county, state, and federal level. And the only way you make the change is by the budget.
Scott W. Atlas, MD:
Certainly. Money talks, I guess.
One more? Okay. No more. All right.
Speaker 1:
Okay, Jonathan, you got to be short. That means you.
Audience #4:
Scott, I agree with your statement that if you got an incompetent president, you should go help him. But the problem is, you didn’t help. I mean, you were absolutely right and yet even Trump didn’t change his policies.
Scott W. Atlas, MD:
I’m not sure how to answer that. I didn’t control anybody.
Audience #4:
Well, because I would say it’s not as simple as you’re making it. If going to work for a President who you know is not going to listen to you, may not be… I mean…
Scott W. Atlas, MD:
Okay, I think it’s a lot more complicated than that. But what I will say is I’m not sure what the advantages of not going and helping. I’m helping the country. I’m not helping President. I went in because people were dying. And there were incompetent things being done grossly wrong.
And so, you need to go in and do your best to help. I don’t see any other alternative, frankly. I really don’t. I just don’t agree with that. But I will finish by saying this. That when you’re an advisor to the President, or even when you’re the CDC, you’re just advising. You’re not setting rules. This was never meant to be that the CDC set the rules, set the law. And instead we have a situation where the advisors, the advisory agencies, are the ones with the authority. That’s not, in my view, what was supposed to happen.
And it happened partly by abrogation of authority by the people who were supposed to be in charge. And we see it even on the local level where we see people, the politicians who are elected to be in charge, say, okay. We’re just going to go with whatever the CDC says. We see it at the university level.
That’s inappropriate. That’s weak leadership. We need to get people who are leaders into those positions. Thank you.
Speaker 7:
Thank you, Scott.
Speaker 1:
Carl wants two seconds, and then I promise you, you do get your break.
Carl Neuss:
One very important thing I forgot to say, and that is Stanford University Alumni Group is the newest member of Alumni Free Speech Alliance. And Mike Roster, if he’s here… Are you here somewhere, Mike?
There’s Mike. So those are the guys. Anyone from Stanford that want to figure out what’s doing, those are the new guys. So great to have you guys on board