00:00:01.000My conversation with Dr. Scott Atlas, COVID Thought Crimes, straight from the front lines.
00:00:05.000Email us your thoughts, as always, freedom at charliekirk.com.
00:00:09.000And if you want to support our show, you can do so at charliekirk.com slash support.
00:00:13.000If you want to get involved with Turning PointUSA, go to tpusa.com, where we play offense with a sense of urgency to win the American Culture War.
00:00:19.000Come to Phoenix, Arizona, everybody, December 18, 19, 2021 for America Fest.
00:00:24.000Tucker Carlson, Candace Owens, Jesse Waters, Greg Gutfeld, Donald Trump Jr., Kimberly Guilfoyle, Jack Pesobic, Benny Johnson, tpusa.com slash AMFEST.
00:01:06.000He's done an amazing job building one of the most powerful youth organizations ever created, Turning Point USA.
00:01:13.000We will not embrace the ideas that have destroyed countries, destroyed lives, and we are going to fight for freedom on campuses across the country.
00:02:11.000So let's start with just introduce yourself, a little bit of your background, and how did you get into this entire national conversation around COVID, our reaction around it, and talk a little bit about your time in the Trump White House.
00:02:25.000So, you know, I'm a health policy scholar at the Hoover Institution of Stanford University for the past 15 plus years.
00:02:33.000And I have a 25-year background as a professor in clinical medicine and medical research at Stanford University, where I was professor and chief of neuroradiology there before taking the health policy job, which I've been doing for 10 years full time.
00:02:52.000And I was working and noticed back in February that the country was off the rails.
00:02:58.000The whole narrative about the pandemic, the pronouncements from the federal government, as well as many places in the world, were not sensible.
00:03:11.000They were not actually reflecting a logical common sense approach to a viral disease.
00:03:18.000And the country was off the rails with the lockdowns.
00:03:20.000And so in March of 2020, I began to research and write full time about the pandemic and was writing about a more logical approach, which was we knew who was at risk.
00:03:38.000Instead, what was being done was we knew who was at risk, but we were ignoring that.
00:03:43.000And we were going to lock down all of society, close schools, close businesses, and stop functioning of everyone, even the lowest risk people.
00:03:53.000And that was against the data and the science and all logic.
00:03:59.000And then basically, toward the end of July, I was called up by the White House and asked if I would come and speak to the president.
00:04:08.000Given that it was, you know, the biggest healthcare crisis in the century, and I'm a healthcare policy expert with a background in medical science.
00:04:17.000Of course, the answer is yes, I'll come talk to the president.
00:04:20.000So I came to speak to the president, and he asked me a bunch of questions.
00:04:27.000And I spoke to a bunch of other people.
00:04:29.000And at the end of the day, Jared Kushner said to me, We'd like you to help.
00:04:34.000And so I said, I just want to make sure you know what you're getting here because I'm not going to ever change what I say no matter who tells me to, if I think I'm right.
00:04:46.000I'm not going to sign on to any sort of group statement if it's not what I believe.
00:04:52.000And I'm not going to say anything that someone else wants me to say unless I think it's correct.
00:04:59.000And to his credit, he said, that's exactly why we want you.
00:05:03.000And so I felt reassured at that at the end of that day.
00:05:06.000And then he said something that was a little bit nerve-wracking, which is, you know, if this becomes public, you're going to be destroyed.
00:05:14.000And I'm very concerned about that, Jared said.
00:05:18.000And so that, of course, threw me a little bit because, you know, I'm basically not political in any way.
00:05:24.000And I was doing this because the answer when the president asks you to help is yes.
00:05:29.000So at that statement, I said, well, maybe I'll try to help from home.
00:05:34.000And after a few days, it wasn't working.
00:05:38.000And meantime, there were all kinds of nonsense being spewed out by the people on the task force, which was the voice of the federal policy.
00:05:47.000And so I said, okay, I'll come and help.
00:05:49.000So I started working there, you know, at the end of July, beginning of August, and I stayed for my temporary position, which was a 130-day temporary position.
00:05:59.000And, you know, this was how it worked there.
00:06:03.000And so basically, you know, this was a shock to me.
00:06:06.000And I think this is what people will understand from the book about what actually happened, what the thinking was, and what the actions were and the level of knowledge and critical thinking, which was absent on the task force.
00:06:20.000Well, I mean, the point is that, you know, I was used to being, I'm a critical thinker.
00:06:28.000You don't have to be a scientist to be a critical thinker, but if you're going to be a scientist, you better damn well be a critical thinker.
00:06:35.000And so I came into the task force in the middle of August, actually.
00:06:43.000There were the medical people in the task force.
00:06:45.000It was run the medical side by Dr. Deborah Burks.
00:06:49.000And Dr. Fauci wasn't running it, but he was the most influential public face of the task force.
00:06:56.000And Dr. Redfield was the head of the CDC and on the task force.
00:06:59.000And these three people, you know, they were basically, these people are bureaucrats.
00:07:05.000Burks and Fauci were in the government positions for 40 years.
00:07:08.000Okay, I had a totally different background.
00:07:10.000I'm a health policy and medical science scholar, and I'm used to being challenged and presenting from the data and analyzing in a critical way the data.
00:07:19.000So I would come into the meetings, there'd be a question.
00:07:22.000I had a dozen or 20 different scientific papers from all over the world in my briefcase, and I would go through the data.
00:07:29.000And in response to that, they would have nothing to say to refute it.
00:07:34.000They would have no refutation based on science.
00:07:36.000They would never cite a scientific article, but instead, they would just go to their friends in the media or just say, you're fringe, or you're speaking without against the experts.
00:07:49.000In the meantime, you know, I had been speaking with the experts almost every single day, expert epidemiologists, virologists, public health doctors, infectious disease scientists, almost every single day for months, including every day when I was in the White House.
00:08:05.000And, you know, I just was at a different level.
00:08:08.000I mean, the second part to realize, I think, for everyone who's listening is that the policies of the federal government advice were run by Dr. Burks.
00:08:17.000Dr. Burks was the task force coordinator.
00:08:20.000She was the official representative of the task force months before I walked in, during the months I was there, and afterwards.
00:08:28.000And so she gave the advice to all the governors in writing.
00:08:33.000She was on the road visiting them, dozens of states and public health officials.
00:08:37.000I visited one single state, and that was Florida at the request of Governor DeSantis, who did something very different.
00:08:44.000And so when you see in the news this Orwellian rewrite of history by Burks and others, somehow blaming people who were opposed to what was implemented for what was implemented on her advice, you know, this is the kind of world we're living in.
00:09:04.000If you're looking for ways to skip trips to the post office and dodge all the hectic holiday shopping traffic, why not save time and money at stamps.com.
00:09:13.000Stamps.com lets you compare rates, print labels, and access exclusive discounts and UPS, USPS services all year long.
00:09:21.000It just makes sense, especially if your business sends more mail and packages during the Christmas season.
00:09:26.000Whether you're selling online or running an office side hustle, stamps.com can save you so much time, money, and stress during the Christmas season.
00:09:34.000Access all the post office and UPS shipping services you need without having to take a trip and gets discounts you can't find anywhere else, like 40% off USPS rates and 76% off UPS.
00:09:46.000Going to the post office instead of using stamps.com is like taking the stairs instead of the elevator.
00:09:50.000Save time and money this holiday season with stamps.com.
00:09:54.000Sign up with promo code Charlie for a special offer.
00:09:56.000Just go to stamps.com, click on the microphone at the top of the page, enter promo code Charlie, stamps.com, promo code Charlie.
00:10:05.000Yeah, so there's so many, there's so many different directions I want to go with that.
00:10:09.000So let's just start with who on earth came up with this idea of locking down a country?
00:10:30.000So this was counter and in fact against what had been written in previous pandemic literature in previous iterations.
00:10:40.000This was something that originated with this idea of quote stopping the spread.
00:10:46.000Okay, so that made some logical sense.
00:10:48.000Stopping the spread meant slowing the spread, not stopping the cases, but slowing things so that hospitals wouldn't get overrun in a temporary mode.
00:10:59.000And that original, if you may remember, 15-day, let's, you know, 15 days to slow the spread.
00:11:08.000And so, you know, this sort of made sense.
00:11:10.000I think everybody was all in on this temporary 15 days to slow the spread so we wouldn't overrun the hospital.
00:11:17.000But what that happened was it evolved into this sort of obsessive and irrational, frankly, non-scientific idea that you could stop the spread of a virus by locking down.
00:11:31.000And so the lockdowns in the end were instituted.
00:11:35.000These are what I call the Burke Spauchy lockdowns.
00:11:38.000And don't forget what the public health figures in the United States say has extreme influence on the world.
00:11:46.000Believe me, everybody in the world knows and hears what our public health figures say.
00:11:52.000So when we see this kind of irrational idea from people that were not used to working with this sort of virus, by the way, Burke Spauci and Redfield share something that people don't realize, and that is they worked on HIV together.
00:12:08.000AIDS and HIV is transmitted very differently.
00:13:35.000And that makes sense because economic damages are severe.
00:13:40.000And when you lose jobs, you have, as we see, an explosion of deaths in explosion of drug abuse, explosion of sexual and child abuse, explosion of psychiatric visits, explosion of suicides in teenagers, explosion of self-harm tripling from the isolation, not from the virus, of self-harms in teenagers.
00:14:04.000This is people putting cigarettes out on their skin or cutting their wrists here, as a big predictor of suicide, by the way, from the lockdowns.
00:14:12.000The U.S. stands out, by the way, in following the Burke's Fauci advice of closing schools.
00:14:18.000In the fall of 2020, our peer nations in Europe already recognized the data from the whole world's data that the schools were not a place where the cases spread, in fact, to adults.
00:14:36.000In fact, children had extremely healthy children, extremely low risk from COVID.
00:14:41.000That was proven by them a year and a half ago.
00:14:45.000And it was already proven that children are not a significant source of spread to adults.
00:14:50.000And it was also proven that teachers do not have a high risk in school settings from the world's data.
00:14:55.000Yet the United States kept its schools closed for the full year in almost the entire country, Western Europe open.
00:15:03.000This is a tragic abuse of children in the United States, really a breaking of the social contract between society and its children.
00:15:15.000And we were harsh critics of the lockdown, citing your commentary in your writings early and often.
00:15:21.000However, what confuses so many members of our audience, and since you were on the front lines, I'd love your take on this, it seems obvious.
00:15:38.000I mean, these decisions have major and serious consequences.
00:15:43.000And we're completely at odds with the data.
00:15:46.000You know, strip all the politics aside, just looking at it empirically, you could not justify more lockdowns, more school closures, yet we did.
00:15:54.000Can you give us any insight into the internal dynamics?
00:15:57.000Did Fauci and Burks have a separate pile of data they weren't telling anyone?
00:16:02.000Or was it there's another side of the story where they just didn't care?
00:17:24.000Yeah, I'm going to take the over, if you want to speak in betting language, on how many years it'll take for lockdown advocates to admit they were wrong.
00:17:31.000These people's whole careers are in there.
00:17:49.000And they, for instance, a scientist wrote the article to The Lancet in February 2020, claiming it was already known that the virus absolutely was of natural origin.
00:17:59.000And anyone who said otherwise was a conspiracy theorist.
00:18:03.000Okay, this is not a scientific statement.
00:19:24.000The second fact that people don't understand is that the main thing that underlies scientific promotions in universities, faculty promotions, successful research, journal publications, is NIH funding of the research.
00:19:39.000And then the people in charge of the scientific journals are the same people who review the research funding.
00:19:44.000And so there's this very sort of nepotistic, I don't know how to describe it.
00:19:50.000They control the careers of all the scientists, the funding stream, and they control the funding stream.
00:19:55.000And so it would be very risky, as a hypothetical, for funded young, particularly by assistant associate professors in universities.
00:20:05.000It would be very risky for them to start saying something that countered what Dr. Fauci said, for instance.
00:20:10.000So there's this sort of conflict of interest built into the system that's very nefarious and is now interfering with seeking the truth.
00:20:20.000Okay, we're in a country here where science has been politicized and where there is intimidation that prohibits the free exchange of ideas.
00:20:29.000And this bodes very poorly for being able to solve future crises.
00:20:34.000And we know this is not the last healthcare crisis or other crisis that we will see.
00:20:40.000So, and then the other part of this is financial, of course.
00:20:43.000When you have companies making tens of billions of dollars per year, their incentive is to make the money.
00:20:51.000And so, you know, you have a company, let's just say company X is pushing boosters for vaccines.
00:20:58.000Now, boosters for vaccines, these vaccines are experimental.
00:21:02.000They work in terms so far the data shows that they prevent people who have a risk of dying from dying.
00:22:06.000But even worse than that is the booster stuff.
00:22:08.000When you have a company who's making tens of billions of dollars and they're pushing the boosters, and then you have scientists who are not public health leaders who are not using the normal thinking about saying things should be used like boosters where we have no significant safety data on an experimental technique, experimental drug, the safety data from Israel is on 30 days of observation, as far as I know, 30 days in a few thousand people.
00:22:50.000And so you have an experimental drug with known side effects.
00:22:54.000We don't have transparency on the side effects.
00:22:56.000There's not a transparency on the side effects from the vaccine.
00:23:00.000And we have people pushing vaccines on young people, children, and very young adults who are healthy, who have extremely low risk from the illness.
00:23:10.000And we're expected to push vaccines and boosters eventually on these people.
00:23:16.000I think you have to wonder who is who, where are the bioethicists here?
00:23:20.000Okay, where are the, this is really, you have to question the morality of what's going on in this country.
00:23:31.000I want to tell you guys about good ranchers.
00:23:33.000Okay, you've heard me talk about it a lot.
00:23:34.000Look, good ranchers, they achieve the trifecta.
00:25:44.000And so I'm just disappointed and confused, I guess, that as wealthy and as powerful our nation is, that the obvious was ignored by the people in charge of our public health.
00:26:01.000I would have thought that we were at a place post-enlightenment that we could look at the data, look at it non-dogmatically, non-politically, and say, you know, the lockdowns are not helping.
00:26:13.000The, you know, the massive vaccine, you know, inoculation campaign might not be wise or prudent with certain populations.
00:26:21.000But, doctor, you touched on this, you know, profit incentives, you know, Fauci controlling the funding.
00:26:27.000But what we're really getting at, though, is that science, as they always say it, is not the primary motivation here.
00:26:38.000Yeah, I think it's a fair statement to say that decisions were made that were not just counter to science and denying decades of scientific knowledge.
00:26:48.000We still see that today, but they were really against the public health interest of the country.
00:26:56.000They were counter to the public health interest, and they still are being made, that are counter to the health interests of the country.
00:27:04.000When you talk about what the public health leadership did, the task force people, the doctors, Burke, Spauci, and others, their opinions on what to do were focused on one thing, stopping COVID-19 pieces at all costs.
00:27:20.000That's an inappropriate leadership of public health.
00:27:24.000My focus as a public health policy expert here was the appropriate focus, which is you have to consider all of health.
00:27:36.000You never do a public health policy without considering the impact of the policy itself on the public health.
00:27:49.000The public health impact of this lockdown part of our history is not going to be completely felt for years, if not decades.
00:28:00.000There's one study in the National Bureau of Economic Research that says that over the next 15 years, there will be 900,000 deaths of Americans extra from the lockdowns, not the virus, from missed medical care, from the unemployment, from all the things that I sort of partly articulated here.
00:28:20.000And when we see that, that is really an unconscionable - this is the greatest error of public health policy probably in the history of the modern world.
00:28:32.000That's a huge statement, and I agree with it.
00:28:37.000And by the way, one more thing: it was much more impactful on lower-income families, on children in lower-income families.
00:28:46.000This was lockdowns are a luxury of the rich.
00:28:50.000Okay, when you have people who are in this elite class, including the class that I'm in, my job goes on from Zoom meetings.
00:28:59.000You get Amazon delivering things, but the people that have regular jobs, the people that clean the bathrooms in the restaurant, it's not just the restaurant owner, it's all the people that work there in the small businesses.
00:30:03.000But there are outlying questions as why are the countries that are so vaccinated having spikes in COVID?
00:30:09.000Israel, Singapore, Gibraltar, Vermont is the most vaccinated state in the country, and they have the highest COVID rate right now in America.
00:30:43.000But assuming you have that in theory, you should make a judgment on your own risk from the illness and your own risk or benefit from the vaccine.
00:30:52.000So high-risk people, I personally think, should take the vaccine.
00:30:56.000I think high-risk children should take the vaccine, high-risk from COVID.
00:31:01.000Okay, but high-risk children are not most children.
00:31:04.000And so basically, what's happening to answer your question lies with the data on the vaccine.
00:31:11.000When you look at the studies from the UK, from Israel, from Qatar, and as a side statement here, I never thought I'd see the day where I trust the data from other countries more than I trust the data from our own country.
00:31:31.000But in any event, when you look at the data, and the best study recently I read was from Sweden, and these studies all show the following pattern.
00:31:39.000They show, this is the answer to what's going on in part anyway.
00:31:44.000You know, they show that the protection against infection is very temporary.
00:31:51.000You can vaccinate people with these vaccines, and after three to five months, you have a precipitous drop in the protection against being infected.
00:32:02.000Okay, so when you look at that, that happened in Israel, that it has 39% efficacy after six months.
00:32:11.000You look at Qatar, which showed that the and the other Israel studies that compared natural immunity, the studies that are important in Sweden, the studies show that the protection against death stays there for very, very good.
00:32:27.000As far as we know, we don't even have a year after vaccine yet.
00:32:30.000But if you look at Sweden, after nine to 10 months, still very high, 80% protection against death, unless you're over 80, the people who are over 80 starts to drop after about nine months.
00:32:44.000Doesn't mean it's dropped to zero, but it's still pretty high.
00:32:47.000You have to realize vaccines generally don't are not foolproof.
00:32:50.000I mean, the flu vaccine, you know, half the people who die from flu had vaccination.
00:32:58.000Okay, so, you know, it's not a surprise that it's not perfect even against death.
00:33:02.000But against infection, there's a precipitous drop down to anywhere from zero to 20% after six months.
00:33:09.000So that's very different from people who have had the infection and recovered.
00:33:13.000The study from Israel is the best one that showed this in a large study that showed that there's 27-fold higher incidence of symptomatic COVID in people who were vaccinated compared to people who were recovered naturally from the infection.
00:33:31.000The best immunity data that we see, if you compare two groups, people who were never infected but had the vaccine, compared to people who were infected and didn't get the vaccine, the people who were infected and didn't get the vaccine have a much more durable immunity, eight-fold better, eight-fold reduction in hospitalizations compared to people who got the vaccine.
00:33:51.000So the vaccine, okay, it isn't as good as what was hoped in terms of preventing infection.
00:33:56.000And so people, we've had the vaccine now going since mid-December in the U.S.
00:34:01.000So plenty of people have had it after six months.
00:34:03.000If you're high risk, that's a case to get a booster.
00:34:07.000Okay, high-risk people, meaning people have high risk to die or get serious illness.
00:34:13.000But people who have a low risk, I think that's a different kind of question.
00:34:18.000So it's not a surprise given the data that we're seeing increasing cases even in populations that have been vaccinated.
00:34:26.000We have to remember one other thing, Charlie, if I can, which is the idea that mandating vaccines, even for people who are low risk, low risk from illness, people who are children, all these kind of sort of inappropriate mandates, in my view, are undermining the confidence in the vaccines.
00:34:47.000The worst enemy of vaccine acceptance is inappropriate mandating of the vaccine.
00:34:53.000Okay, this is really causing people who should get the vaccine to say, wait a second, I don't want the vaccine.
00:34:58.000By the way, we know there are complications from the vaccine.
00:35:01.000It's not clear how frequent, but very serious complications in young males, myocarditis.
00:35:07.000It's a small percentage, but it's serious.
00:35:10.000Other countries are issuing warnings about this.
00:35:13.000Other countries, England's group, the group consulting the UK's government, has said for now they do not recommend because of the cost-benefit ratio here, meaning risk-benefit, they do not really recommend people under 16 getting the vaccine.
00:35:29.000Okay, we're busy trying to mandate vaccines for school children here.
00:35:33.000I don't, there's something uniquely off the rails in the United States.
00:35:39.000Internet privacy is extremely important.
00:35:42.000New news out shows that Google has been colluding with the federal government to hand over your data if you might have searched something wrong into the search bar.
00:35:53.000So, what are you doing to protect your search history?
00:35:56.000Well, this is why you need ExpressVPN.
00:35:59.000Using the internet without ExpressVPN is like going to the bathroom and not closing the door.
00:36:35.000Every device, I have those beautiful three letters, VPN with a rectangle around it.
00:36:40.000It's rated number one by CNET and tech radar.
00:36:44.000Here's the cool thing: it works on phones, laptops, and even routers.
00:36:48.000So everyone who shares your Wi-Fi can be protected.
00:36:52.000Here's the thing: I have it on my iPhone, I have it on my iPad, I have it on my computer.
00:36:57.000Express VPN for me has been a game changer to be able to know that the tech companies or the government have to go through a whole nother barrier to try to spy on us.
00:37:09.000When we see with the new announcements out of DC, if you spoke at a school board meeting lately, you better get a VPN.
00:37:14.000Secure your online activity by visiting expressvpn.com/slash Charlie today.
00:37:23.000It's extremely important to anonymize your online activity, expressvpn.com/slash charlie.
00:37:34.000And you can't, how can we, how can you pinpoint it?
00:37:37.000I mean, it's just all the different factors you already talked about, I guess.
00:37:43.000There's an inappropriate, you know, there's a government overreach here that is contrary to the science.
00:37:49.000The CDC has made statements contrary or ignoring natural immunity.
00:37:54.000Okay, we're the only country that I know of in the Western world that just simply ignores the fact that half of our population has immunity, very good immune protection from COVID.
00:38:37.000But so, just to kind of complete it all together, Doctor, it doesn't seem like there's many people like you.
00:38:42.000I can name them a short list, but why is there so much silence amongst the American medical community?
00:38:50.000Partly, yeah, partly because of this complicated relationship of their own careers depending upon funding from the NIH itself.
00:39:01.000But, you know, this points out something very important: the censorship, the censure by the intimidation by academia on people who are speaking the truth or at least wanting to have the debate is effective.
00:39:28.000These were scientists at universities, at Stanford University.
00:39:32.000There are still people afraid to step forward because they saw what happened to me.
00:39:37.000There are people inside the NIH that wrote me encouraging words and saying they were afraid to step forward.
00:39:43.000We must stop this politicization and this attempt to censor people.
00:39:50.000This cancel culture has impacted science.
00:39:54.000And if you have impacted science without scientific truth and the seeking of truth by the free exchange of ideas, what kind of society do we have?
00:40:03.000Well, that's what we're living through.