The White House Coronavirus Task Force
Much of what happened behind the scenes on the Coronavirus Task Force was quite surreal, and Atlas compared it to being at the
Mad Hatter’s tea party from Alice and Wonderland. Although I understand his rationale for this analogy, I personally believe that the events he chronicled are more accurately encapsulated by the movie
Idiocracy—many of the events Atlas recounted resembled scenes straight from the movie like this one:
The essential problem with the Coronavirus Task Force was that very few members of the Trump Administration had a good grasp of the science behind COVID-19, and instead deferred to the expertise of the doctors within the White House.
Then reality hit me. The vice president had some papers in his hands. With great pride, he excitedly showed me a printout that had just been handed to him. It was a very simple, frankly crude, chart documenting the increasing number of PCR tests administered by the day in the United States. “Congratulations!” I replied, feigning excitement. But inside, I realized something far more significant was being revealed.
The White House was looking at the simplest indicators—rudimentary numbers without detail, without context, without any concept of what actually mattered. The total number of tests was far from the critical part of the situation. We were already more than six months into the pandemic. What should have mattered was who was tested, when they were tested, what the testing revealed about contagiousness, and what positive testing meant in terms of action. That was my first “OMG” moment.
Note: During the pandemic, the media regularly catastrophized not having enough ventilators, which led to a national drive to produce as many ventilators as possible (despite their excessive use being a key cause of death during the pandemic), and did something similar with the vaccines (whose increased administration likewise caused harm). Likewise, the media (and celebrities) continually admonished the Trump Administration for not offering an ever- increasing number of COVID-19 tests to the public, which led the administration to keep on increasing their deployment, despite no tangible benefits (and only harms) resulting from their mass implementation.
The three most vocal doctors on the task force, Anthony Fauci, Deborah Birx, and Robert Redfield (the CDC director) were all career bureaucrats with deep ties to the Department of Defense, whose experience with handling infectious diseases primarily came from HIV, a virus which behaves
completely differently from SARS-CoV-2.
What was less understood was how closely connected
they were to each other and their previous mutual involvement in questionable research studies (such as
this one by Redfield and Birx discussed in
Vaccine A or Fauci’s long history of atrocious human experimentation throughout the HIV era detailed within
The Real Anthony Fauci). Because of their longstanding ties, they consistently echoed identical (and often nonsensical) policy positions on the task force, and it was later revealed that they
had formed a pact that they would all resign in unison if Trump dismissed a single one of them from the task force.
Prior to Atlas’s involvement, for the prior six months, the Coronavirus Task Force had committed itself to handling COVID-19 through doing the following:
•Encouraging as much mask wearing, social distancing and hand washing as possible.
•Performing as much COVID-19 testing as possible.
•Using the positive results from the COVID-19 tests to justify as many lockdowns as possible for all segments of the population.
This approach had a few major issues:
•Everyone already knew the COVID mitigation approaches (e.g., washing your hands) within a month of COVID-19 beginning in the United States, so there was no point in continuing to belabor the point (governors eventually got so frustrated with Birx spreading this message but doing nothing more, that they stopped accepting her solicitations to visit).
•They were abjectly failing to prevent those most vulnerable from dying from COVID-19 (e.g., the elderly).
•They were devastating the American economy and creating significantly greater health consequences than those caused by COVID. These consequences primarily arose from the poverty they created, the severe mental health issues resulting from social isolation (particularly for adolescents), and the harms from individuals having to forego routine necessary care.
Note: many other issues also arose due to the lockdowns such as significant increases in domestic abuse.
Atlas instead advocated for the following:
1) Continue the basic COVID-19 mitigation measures (e.g., washing hands).
2) Prioritize the available resources for protecting those at high risk of dying (e.g., at the nursing homes).
3) Allow everyone not at a high risk of dying to live their lives as normal without a large number of harsh mandates placed upon them. This was especially true for allowing children to return to schools.
Unfortunately for Atlas, while these three approaches were both absolutely critical and clearly logical, many entrenched interests strongly opposed doing them. In turn, many of the pleas for amnesty we are now witnessing are seeking forgiveness for blocking the policies Atlas (and many other prominent academics) advocated for.
The Mad Hatter’s Tea Party
One of Atlas’s most disturbing discoveries on the COVID-19 Task Force was the extreme lack of medical knowledge presented by the de facto leaders of the COVID-19 Task Force, Birx, Fauci and Redfield (e.g., they did not appear to understand that most of the population were at very low risk from a fatal infection, or that different risk factors entailed very different risks of a severe COVID-19 infection). Since these three individuals were effectively able to dictate the national COVID-19 policy we suffered through for years, I will share some of Atlas’s observations.
Evident from my first encounter was what appeared to be a functioning troika of “medical experts” composed of Drs. Birx, Fauci, and Redfield. They shared thought processes and views to an uncanny level. One depressing commonality was that none of them showed detailed knowledge of ongoing scientific literature on the pandemic. As opposed to what I had experienced with my colleagues in academic research centers, I never witnessed any of them provide any detailed critique of any journal publication. Unlike scientists with whom I had worked for decades, I never saw them voice any critical assessment, methodological or otherwise, of the pitfalls of any published studies. That analytical process is an extremely important part of evaluating medical research. Likewise, none of the three ever brought scientific publications into the meetings that I attended. And unlike other doctors I had worked with, none showed familiarity with clinical medicine or had any clinical perspective on medical journal publications or any facility with clinical terminology in meetings I attended during my time in Washington.
Atlas thus found himself in the curious position where he (with the assistance of anonymous academics around the world—some of whom I suspect migrated to Substack) had to compile and critique the existing data on COVID-19 and make it available to the Coronavirus Task Force as no one within the federal government was fulfilling this
critical role.
Even though I handed out a number of these published studies to everyone at the table, no one ever mentioned them in the Situation Room. My guess was that no one in the Fauci-Redfield-Birx troika ever opened them.
I will now share some of Atlas’s most salient observations on these three individuals.
Anthony Fauci
First, in Fauci’s case, although he continually spoke to the media (to the point that many in the White House questioned how he had the time to do it), Fauci was rarely present at the task force meetings. In the cases where he was present, his primary focus was on how to further terrorize the (already terrorized) public about COVID-19. I could not help but notice that this was almost identical to the playbook he developed during the AIDS epidemic (detailed within the
Real Anthony Fauci), which allowed him to become one of the most successful bureaucrats in history.
Because of Fauci’s narrow focus on all the potential, but unknown harms of COVID-19, Fauci rarely contributed anything to the task force, nor appeared to be able to grasp the merits of approaches less fearful than the ones he relentlessly promoted to the public.
I described data verifying the absence of unusually high risk to teachers. I was doing almost all of the talking. Fauci listened. He offered no other studies, no other data, and nothing in dispute, other than commenting, “Well, what if we aren’t totally sure?” I was taken aback, because this was not the sort of thought process I anticipated in a data-driven scientist or public health expert.
Interestingly, there was only one time during Atlas’s time on the task force where Fauci discussed a research paper he had reviewed with them. In this instance, Fauci excitedly shared a study (which Atlas had already reviewed) suggesting an association between COVID-19 and myocarditis. What was noteworthy about this instance was that Fauci demonstrated not only that he failed to understand the study (it did not support what Fauci was claiming it did), but also to Atlas’s great surprise, that Fauci did not even understand how to pronounce standard medical terminology contained within the paper.
Note: One of Fauci’s claims to fame is that he is a chief editor of the foundational textbook for internal medicine. I checked the version which was published shortly before COVID-19 and found the mispronounced term, encephalomyelitis, was used 33 times within “his” textbook.
Since Fauci appeared to be unable to logically defend his policies, he would often use the media to attack Atlas from afar. False statements about Atlas were frequently provided to the media and in certain cases, Fauci directly attacked Atlas on national television.
Robert Redfield
Redfield, the CDC director, appeared to be the most reasonable of the three (however he almost always ended up 100% agreeing with Fauci and Birx). Nonetheless, like the other two, he failed to grasp the lack of evidence supporting the value of masking, cited nonsensical data to justify his policies, and frequently helped enable the misdeeds of the other two.
In one instance, after a great deal of work, Atlas was able to convince the task force to dial back the CDC’s testing recommendations into something much more reasonable (e.g., in many instances, it was left to a physician’s discretion to perform testing rather than it simply being indefinitely required irrespective of a physician’s judgement). Redfield nonetheless silently redacted that recommendation from the final summary of the meeting. Atlas later caught Redfield’s redaction and was ultimately able to make sure the agreed upon change, against Redfield’s wishes, did enter the official guidelines.
Once the guidelines were published, a media firestorm erupted against this guideline change, full of salacious and false accusations from anonymous sources against the Trump Administration. Much of this was so over the top (and echoed by leading Democrats), that many friends of Atlas from abroad—Switzerland, France, even Brazil—emailed him, saying, “What the hell is wrong with the United States?” After, two weeks of this (without Redfield consulting the task force), the CDC’s guidelines were then retracted.
Note: Redfield recently testified before Congress that SARS-CoV-2 came from a lab, directly contradicting Fauci’s statements throughout the pandemic. As many of you know, FOIA emails have shown early in the pandemic that Fauci coerced leading academics to bury the lab leak theory. Similarly, Fauci, in private communications spoke out against the masks he pushed on Americans. Additionally, in a July 2020 interview (go to 04:20), Fauci directly admitted that the cycle thresholds for the PCR testing he had forced on Americans were unlikely to correlate to someone having a COVID-19 infection.
Deborah Birx
Although Fauci was thought to have the greatest influence over the COVID-19 task force, Deborah Birx actually assumed that role, and did everything she possibly could to encourage lockdowns and testing across the nation. Interestingly, when Atlas tried to determine how she had obtained her critical role on the task force, he discovered that no one actually knew how she had gotten onto it in the first place.
Like Fauci and Redfield, Birx had an atrocious understanding of the data underlying her policies (based on Atlas’s account, she appeared to be the worst of the three), and seemed to continually pick and choose whatever correlation she could find to support her policies, regardless of how absurd it was. This frequently led to moments that left Atlas dumbfounded as he came to appreciate how scientifically illiterate the entire task force was, something extremely concerning given that they were depending on Birx for their data.
For example, Birx used the catastrophic (
and clearly disproven) models used throughout the pandemic to promote the lockdowns in order to support her policies. This was accomplished by showing that the deaths which the models had predicted failed to occur in areas that adopted mask mandates and lockdowns, and then attributing the adoption of these policies as the reason why the model’s predicted deaths had not occurred. Since the deaths predicted by these models also failed to occur in areas which did not implement any of Birx’s policies, this suggested that the models were simply wrong, but as you would expect, Birx was never willing to consider this possibility.
Birx also always used highly inaccurate datasets pulled from Google (e.g.,
this one), to support her policies, which researchers around the world knew were highly inaccurate. Birx also repeatedly failed to recognize strong confounders to causative correlations that she identified (e.g., if COVID-19 cases in an area were already dropping before mask mandates or lockdowns were implemented, you cannot argue those policies caused the decline which happened—especially if an identical decline was observed in nearby areas which did not impose those policies).
Birx would also frequently identified essentially meaningless trends within the data available to her, and then directed everyone’s focus to the importance of that figure (e.g., the test positivity ratio or college students having symptoms too minor for them to recognize that they had SARS-CoV-2).
One of the saddest examples was Birx becoming alarmed that a ratio she had discovered (positive COVID-19 tests relative to COVID-19 hospitalizations) was increasing, despite there being no actual increase in total COVID-19 hospitalizations. Birx, in turn, proposed solving this issue by increasing the number of COVID-19 tests of asymptomatic individuals (these individuals are unlikely to get hospitalized even if they test positive), so that the ratio would be lowered.
Like many of the previous examples, the entire task force (including Fauci) failed to recognize the absurdity of this approach (it only served to artificially alter a theoretical ratio with no real life significance). Atlas then clearly explained the logical issues with this approach, but despite this, the task force could not process what he was saying and ultimately chose to adopt Birx’s recommendation for more testing.
Birx frequently pulled many other things out thin air. These included arbitrarily decreeing specific times that bars must close to slow the spread of COVID-19 (which, without any evidence to support it, changed from 11:00 PM to 8:00 PM as time moved forward) and coming up with increasingly sophisticated (but entirely meaningless) color codes for the graphs of data she had obtained from Google. Further compounding this behavior, she appeared to be highly emotionally unstable, was regularly prone to outbursts or passive-aggressive behaviors when she did not get her way, and would double down on her incorrect interpretations of the data when evidence undermining her conclusions were provided to her by Atlas.
Although she held significant sway in the White House (largely due to the national media adoring her), near the end of Trump’s presidency, many besides Atlas finally began to lose their patience with her:
“We absolutely need to get rid of Birx.” I [Atlas] replied with a noncommittal, “Really?” Giroir [the Assistant Secretary for Health] went on. “She cannot work with anyone. She just goes full speed ahead without consulting anyone. She’s extremely difficult, she flies off the handle at any criticism, and she doesn’t understand the data. The president needs to get rid of her.”
Normally, I would not want to devote this much time to critiquing a clearly dysfunctional human being. However, given that her whims became national policy and grievously harmed millions, I felt what actually happened behind the scenes needed to be covered here.
Unlike Atlas, I do not whatsoever consider myself an expert in most of the disciplines necessary to develop a national COVID-response. However, I am relatively certain based on what Atlas shared, that in my free time, I could have easily produced dramatically better evidence-based guidelines than what the “most respected” doctors in America were able to devise over nearly a year on the task force. That’s quite scary when you think about it.
She [Birx] strongly tried to reject my point [to prioritize targeted protection of the elderly], leaning across the table and emphatically telling me, “Nothing more could be done; we are already doing everything!” But stating something aggressively did not change the facts. Their efforts were failing to stop the deaths, and more could be done.
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