Coronavirus: Review of Public-Health Issues
What has the battle against Covid-19 looked like from the perspective of a public-health policy expert? Scott W. Atlas, M.D. has written the book, “A Plague Upon Our House,” regarding his fight at the White House to stop Covid from destroying America. This book is an imprint of Post Hill Press and has ISBN 978-1-63758-551-1 (paperback). The following discussion is based on Chapter 20 and the Coda appearing in that book.
Atlas quotes (on his page 272) Professor Sunetra Gupta, who wrote that assumptions rapidly accumulate in mathematical models of epidemiology, often leading to very large errors in predicted numbers of deaths. Some models’ results for coronavirus deaths were sometimes too high by a factor of 4.5, leading to a harmful clamor for economic lockdowns despite their inevitable side-effects: other medical treatments missed, education-years foregone, mental-health problems incurred, and alarmist health-policy groupthink rationalized.
Were children especially at risk? Atlas reports (on his page 276) that as of June 9, 2021 there were 62,538 Covid deaths in California, and exactly ZERO of them were children under 18. The European Center for Disease Prevention surveyed seventeen countries and found that open schools were not associated with accelerating community transmission. On his page 282, Atlas states that his home state of California, having less than 17% of its students in fully in-person schools as of June 2021, compared unfavorably with Florida, which had 100% of its students in fully in-person schools at that time.
Atlas finds that the attachment of the general public and of government leaders to face-masking is unfounded. On his page 296, Atlas mentions a study published in May 2021 by University of Louisville researchers, who found that mask mandates and use are not associated with lower SARS-Cov-2 spread in the U.S. Atlas finds that the public’s refusal to accept that masks are not needed after vaccination is evidence for the existence of deeply damaged psyches and of invincible groupthink among many Americans.
On his page 299, Atlas notes that decades of research on lives lost from unemployment and missed medical care indicate that the pandemic lockdowns were very harmful. Through May 2020, 1.5 million years of life had been lost due to lockdowns, which was almost double the 800,000 years of life that had been lost due to Covid-19. Atlas also mentions the harmful ideas of the bureaucrat Redfield (see page 287 for the idea that universal masking would defeat the pandemic in eight to twelve weeks) and of the bureaucrats Fauci and Birx (see page 307 for Fauci-Birx lockdowns as the antitheses of the Florida approach). In the opinion of Atlas, these bureaucrats caused a great deal of unnecessary carnage among the American people. On pages 307 – 310, Atlas affirms the superior anti-pandemic performance by the state of Florida, led by its Governor DeSantis, who opposed masking mandates and prolonged lockdowns. Instead, Florida maintained open schools and, among the ten largest states, had the lowest age-adjusted mortality rate for all ages.
On his pages 315 - 330, Atlas relates how, immediately after being introduced by the U.S. President at his August 10, 2020 press briefing, he (Atlas) was attacked by totalitarians posing as mainstream media. YouTube pulled down some of his video interviews. Twitter blocked his account. In February 2021, JAMA (Journal of the American Medical Association) published a defamatory attack on him. The totalitarians’ first Orwellian lie to the public was that anything said against lockdowns was a choice of money over lives. This was not true: The issue is number of life-years lost in various scenarios when accounting for all risks. The totalitarians’ second Orwellian lie to the public was that the anti-lockdown position advocated letting the infection spread freely until herd immunity would be achieved. This was not true: The issue is the relative merit of universal lockdowns versus the focused protection of the most vulnerable, especially of those in nursing homes. Atlas’ viewpoint was encapsulated in the Great Barrington Declaration, which has been co-signed by 14,794 public-health officials and medical scientists, as well as 43,575 medical practitioners as of June 27, 2021.
There are other negative aspects of U.S. public-health policy as well. In the print edition of the Wall Street Journal on January 27, 2022, Dr. Marty Makary described the ruin of many lives by public-health officials who have insisted that workers with natural immunity be fired unless they were also vaccinated. In contradiction to that approach, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) last week released data showing that natural immunity (the immunity acquired by an unvaccinated person who recovers form Covid-19) is 2.8 times more effective in preventing hospitalization, compared with vaccination. Moreover, natural immunity is between 3.3 and 4.7 times more effective in preventing Covid-19 infection, compared with vaccination.
Makary notes that the National Institutes of Health (NIH) has always disdained natural immunity as having unknown longevity, even while refusing to study the matter. Hence, Makary and some colleagues at Johns Hopkins University did the required study themselves: Among 295 unvaccinated people who recovered from Covid-19, 99% of them had Covid-19 antibodies up to nearly two years after infection. This result should be unsurprising, because other severe coronaviruses such as SARS and MERS also confer lasting immunity.
In Makary’s opinion, public-health officials have a lot of explaining to do. Even CDC director Walensky signed the “John Snow memorandum” of October 2020 declaring that there is no evidence for natural immunity to SARS-CoV-2 following natural infection. In view of the clinical fact that no one ever sees reinfected patients on ventilators, something must be causing that observed absence - - and that something is natural immunity! Nevertheless, public-health officials recklessly destroyed the careers of some pilots, truck drivers, teachers, soldiers, and others who had recovered form Covid-19 and who chose not to be vaccinated.
Adverse effects of this irrational public-health policy (ignoring natural immunity) have also invaded hospitals. The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services decreed that all facilities under its jurisdiction must require vaccination of staff. [The U.S. Supreme Court disallowed such a mandate in the case of OSHA (Occupational Safety and Health Agency).] One understaffed hospital in Washington state, having lost 55 staff due to non-vaccination, ran so short of workers that it “summoned staff who were Covid-positive to return to work even if they were sick,” but with only mild to moderate illness.
By way of summary of the critiques of public-health policy offered by Makary and Atlas: Makary concludes that many politicians and public-health officials owe apologies to American workers and that fired workers with natural immunity should be rehired. Atlas goes further by comparing “the Party” in George Orwell’s dystopian novel, 1984, to today’s coterie of leading public-health officials. Atlas (on his page 317) quotes Orwell: “If all others accepted the lie which the Party imposed - - if all records told the same tale - - then the lie passed into history and became truth.”