Scott W. Atlas, MD on America’s Moral Compass in the Face of COVID.
04 January 2023
Finally, media censorship of scientific debate during the covid-19 pandemic has become undeniable. Censorship represented an illusion of consensus and intimidated scientifically valid disagreement. Policymakers and citizens were misled by those who stifled data and scientific perspectives on risk, mitigation effectiveness, biological immunity, lockdowns, and especially the impacts of covid and the policies themselves on the kids.
Perhaps censorship explains why standard recommendations fifteen years before this pandemic remain unknown to the public. Henderson’s classic 2006 review clearly indicated two related but separate conclusions: lockdowns were ineffective and lockdowns were extremely harmful, including: “Closing schools for longer periods (more than ten to fourteen days initially of an epidemic) in the hope of mitigating the epidemic by decreasing contact between students is not justified”; “There are no historical observations or scientific studies to support the quarantining of groups of possibly infected persons for extended periods “; and “The negative consequences of large-scale quarantine are so extreme. . . that this mitigation measure should be removed from serious consideration”.
All honest leaders, all individuals with integrity, should recognize that people were directly harmed and even died because of the censoring of the truth.
But as important as the revelations of censorship have been, it is possible that we are witnessing another mistake. Focusing on social media as the main culprit shirks responsibility from the proponents of the blockade, including Drs. Fauci, Birx, Walensky, and countless academics who fill America’s “expert class.” If the public swallows this deflection of responsibility, then the reintroduction of equally reckless, destructive and morally indefensible policies by those in power remains a viable possibility.
The factual record must be set straight, or history will suffer an Orwellian rewrite and the truth will disappear. The United States has been an embarrassing outlier among its peer nations. America sacrificed its children in a unique way by closing in-person schools in 2020 and 2021, forcing the testing and quarantine of healthy and asymptomatic students, and requiring the injection of experimental drugs into schoolchildren with no clear benefit to them.
There were uncertainties in early 2020, but one fact was already clear: healthy children were not at significant risk of serious illness or death from this virus. As of spring 2020, CDC data had shown that those under the age of twenty have a 99.997 percent chance of survival. Studies from early 2020 to date in Iceland, Norway, Sweden, Finland, Spain, Netherlands, Ireland, Switzerland, France, Australia, Germany, Greece, South Korea and the UK confirmed the tiny risk for children, and also almost all transmission of the coronavirus to children comes from adults, not the other way around. And open schools never showed significant dangers to children, the community, or teachers—a demographically low-risk group with half of its members under forty-one and 82% under fifty-five. Known in 2020, these facts were verified in several studies, including those from Brown University, Duke University, Norway and others.
At this point, no one should cite the January 2023 analysis of the pre-vaccination period, until the end of 2020, also corresponding to when the virus was at its most lethal. It showed that the average ifr (infection mortality rate) was 0.0003 percent for those aged zero to nineteen, meaning a survival rate of 99.9997 percent. In agreement with the very low ifr, Levitt et al. (2022) showed no excess deaths among children and adolescents during the pandemic in almost any country with reliable death registration data. For perspective, analyzing only the youngest age groups, Iuliano et al. (2018) estimated that the absolute number of fatalities was lower than seasonal influenza fatalities based on data from ninety-two countries in the years prior to the pandemic (Ioannidis, 2022). Maybe the scientists at our university will admit in one of their signed group letters that the toll of the flu is higher for children—it’s deadlier—than covid, even in the deadliest form of this virus and before any vaccination, according to CDC data over ten years. ?
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