During his brief tenure, Atlas was a lone voice against Birx’s absurd fixation on COVID cases rather than infection rate fatality data as a metric to justify the widespread lockdowns that destroyed the lives of many Americans for almost three straight years. He and many others believe the lockdowns probably did more harm to the American people than the virus itself.
Atlas is a neurologist and a Robert Wesson Senior Fellow in health policy at Stanford University’s Hoover Institute. His expertise in public policy far exceeded others on the task force, including Birx. Atlas served as a dispassionate, apolitical, and objective voice in the White House. His many relationships with respected scientists outside D.C. also served him well.
Atlas was in contact with brilliant minds like John Ioannidis, a world-renowned epidemiologist at Stanford. Looking back, Ioannidis proved to be remarkably accurate in his predictions. He had conducted a serology study early in the pandemic, finding that much more of the population had been infected with COVID-19 than others were projecting. Notably, he said the “true infection rate fatality was in the ballpark of seasonal influenza.” The denominator was much larger than was being discussed.
