The Doctor Is In: Scott Atlas and the Efficacy of Lockdowns, Social Distancing, and Closings

[Music] an accomplished physician a scholar of public health and a colleague of mine at the hoover institution scott atlas on what we've learned about the virus and why the time has come to end the lockdown welcome everyone to another special plague time edition of uncommon knowledge with peter robinson scott welcome thanks for making the time happy to be in speaking in early march dr dr anthony fauci director of the national institute of allergy and infectious diseases quote the flu has a mortality rate of 0.1 percent this the covet 19 virus this has a mortality rate of 10 times that close quote dr atlas was dr fauci correct well no i mean at the time there was very little known to be fair the evidence that was leaking out really from china and through the who actually said that the fatality rate was 3.4 percent and at that point in time the fatality rate of that high uh it's reasonable to say hey that's justifiable to lock down temporarily because that would have been really catastrophic and the models that were made at that time projected literally catastrophic losses millions of people dying in the u.s millions of people dying in the uk for example but of course we've learned since then so the answer is no okay we will come to that the costs of the lockdown we've heard over and over and over again about the costs of the virus to us but you have written lately about the cost of the lockdown so let me ask you to take through an art take us through an article that you and your co-authors john burge how's that john burge and ralph keaney published in the hill in late may from that article quote statistically every 10 million to 24 million lost in u.s incomes results in one additional death close quote how how do you derive that what does that mean yes well let me just acknowledge the fourth co-author who is alexander lipton is uh yes so uh but in any event what's happened is when you look at this this kind of number someone might say well where'd you get that well these are data these are numbers that are pretty established in the economics literature in actuarial tables and in a variety of other publications that are published we didn't do i just want to clarify we did not do any sort of model or complex hypothetical projection we looked at established sort of retrospective data that has been done that is empirical that correlates loss of economic productivity unemployment and similarly the health care losses that we went through all right and is this work that's been done i'm familiar with work this is your field not mine so when i say i'm familiar i have a layman's sort of glancing familiarity with work that's been done on the so-called deaths of despair particularly in appalachia opioid deaths that's related to unemployment people lose their jobs the income departs from a town or a region and alcoholism goes up opioid abuse goes up death rates of all kinds go up is that that's the work well actually does it go even farther back than that well it's partly that but really most of the stuff that we included in the true health care losses were listed in that piece which are very very limited list of things but you're right the unemployment itself uh leads to worsening health and loss of lives and life years which is exactly the way economists really have to classify things it's the life years the decreased life expectancy per se it's right not so correct healthcare somebody who dies at the age of 20 has lost more according to the economist calculations than someone who dies at the age of 90. is that correct all right that's exactly right and that's a very important part of this to understand right again i'm quoting from that article in addition to lives lost because of lost income lives also are lost due to delayed or foregone health care explain that scott sure and this is one of the really horrifying but under emphasized truths of the cost of the lockdown as we said in the article for instance 650 000 americans have cancer and undergo chemotherapy right now currently half of them stop getting their chemotherapy and that's just not that that's actually happened in the us during this so-called lockdown because they're scared of going into the hospital that they might get the covid or because the hospitals have shut down or some combination of all of this exactly and this is a good question that there are two reasons one is in the beginning the hospitals because of anticipated overcrowding decided we're going to stop quote-unquote non-essential procedures and uh what that meant was not what a layman would understand off at a glance would be oh that's cosmetic surgery that yes these little okay you know i mean we're going to get uh we can live without that we can live without that but the reality is non-essential procedures meant everything that was not emergent and so that means literally thousands of biopsies per week of potential cancers were not done uh all scheduled hip replacements knee replacements were not done and all kinds of other things including for instance uh we have something like uh i i forget the number of uh total number of cancer screenings but two-thirds to three-fourths of cancer screenings were not done may i make a little confession i got an email from a medical facility that you and i both know and where i go and it said you're due for a colonoscopy i'm not especially happy for to undergo a colonoscopy at any point but i thought to myself you know what just at this moment i think i'll skip it that's the kind of thing you're talking about that's happening across the country and the second part is what you had alluded to which is the fear because it turned out that even emergency care was not getting done forty percent of people who had an acute stroke who were you basically have zero to six hours from your symptoms to get into the hospital to get treated those 40 of them did not call the ambulance that's out of fear uh same thing with heart attacks 40 50 percent of people with heart attacks did not call the ambulance and the the most ironic of all was more than half of children did not go in for their vaccinations which of course the irony uh sad irony is that this is setting up yet another health catastrophe that we did actually quantify because there are cdc data about lives lost when you don't have immunizations from some some of these really very serious illnesses all right so we have so-called deaths of despair the horrible things that happen when people lose their jobs or income just generally drops we also have all kinds of medical procedures that ought to happen that are not happening and these are not small effects they're large i'm quoting again your article in the hill quote the disease that is covet 19 has been responsible for 800 000 lost years of life not individual deaths but lost years of life so far the national lockdown is responsible for at least 700 000 lost years of life every month or about 1.5 million so far already far surpassing the covet 19 total close quote that is just that's more than a resting it's shocking you are saying the lockdown has already cost twice as many years of life as the virus it was supposed to protect us against have i got that right that is you're just saying that's factually as as best social scientists can come to the numbers those are the numbers those are the conservative numbers because uh in that calculation we only included the last years of life from unemployment in terms of the economic side and we lost the lives loss from the specific health list of about half a dozen health care misses that were not getting done and so we were very conservative intentionally so and i want to point out something else which is that was written a month ago it's true that there's been another 20 000 deaths from the virus but in addition we have another maybe 10 10 between 10 and 15 worse unemployment and more people have skipped things like vaccinations and things this is an ongoing the lockdown is not over uh you know as you know and many people know that when governments say they're opening well it's not where i live it's nowhere near open right and since you live about a mile and a half from where i live we're in exactly the same boat so scott here we are smiling but that's just to keep from crying this is this is this is horrible so let me ask you this i i have said and i've asked guests who've been on in the last couple of months public officials have been telling us again and again back in the days the days as if they were ancient history a month ago when president trump was still holding his daily press conferences and there was dr fauci and a couple of other public health officials on the platform with him and when those public health officials stood to the lecture and they talked again and again about the costs of covid and why we need to lock down to protect these lives and i assumed at the time that they weren't doing the other costs they weren't estimating the costs of the law i mean it just seems to me the way you make policy is by doing a cost benefit analysis there are benefits to locking down we save these coveted lives and there seem to be no effort to assess the costs and here comes scott atlas saying the costs are the costs outweigh the benefits all right that's a horrible finding but what you're telling me is that you were using data and work that's been around for a long time i assumed that they weren't able to model the costs of locking down as well as they were able to model the benefits that nobody had done this work yet and in fact i thought this is your your article was now i'm not a professional there may be all kinds of material i missed but as a layman who's been following it all fairly closely your article three months into the crisis was the first attempt to measure the costs of the lockdown that i have seen anywhere why why weren't they measuring the costs from the get-go well this is really the the really one of the several egregious failures of the policy uh implementation here because what basically what what we would sanely do is consider the impact of what we're doing as well as the impact of what we're trying to prevent instead they did two things they the policy makers in general they put in a lockdown they didn't care at all they did not calculate all the costs of the harms of the lock down the consequences of the lockdown they did a stop covered 19 at all costs and they used hypothetical projection models that were so egregiously wrong far far off yet they keep citing those models and so even now even now and so the extension of the lockdown is the problem i think we can all understand why the initial lockdown was done right as i mentioned once the fatality rate projections actually are data instead of projections when we see what's going on when we know who to protect which we can talk about yes you know we understand the the the really disastrous consequences of what the continuation of the initial lockdown is doing all right scott how to end the lockdown and again i'm going to ask you to take us through an article on which you're the sole author this time also published in the hill in which you lay out a plan for ending the lockdown you suggest three steps as i count them that represent in one way or another taking medical measures and here let me quote you let's finally focus on protection for the most vulnerable and that means nursing home patients those with mild symptoms of the illness should strictly self-isolate for two weeks two and we should implement prioritized testing for three specific groups nursing home workers health care workers and first responders and patients in hospitals with respiratory symptoms or fever three so scott atlas dr scott atlas md says there's no need for two thirds or more of the population to continue to shelter at home you focus on nursing homes if you feel sniffles you go home for two weeks and there are specific groups of people who are on so to speak the front lines of dealing with this and we need to test those people we don't need to wait until there are 20 million tests available each day we don't need to wait until there's a vast vaccine we do one two three doable things and we can start talking about reopening have i got you right yes exactly right and those are uh really should have been done from the beginning frankly because we knew who the vulnerable group were i've said this many times but every competent medical student knew from day one that like every other upper respiratory viral type infection the highly vulnerable people are elderly people with underlying conditions and other what are called immunocompromised people so that that is the common sense and logical way to deal with this and ins and i just want to mention instead of doing that and even to this day everyone who is healthy and not at risk is confined or strictly limited in their activities yet their they the state particularly but state leadership but also other countries outside the u.s even did not lock down appropriately the nursing homes so even in a place like sweden that has a relatively rational policy and did appropriate social distancing if people you know guidelines are very important instead of decrees and confinement they didn't confine everyone to their home but in stockholm 70 of the deaths are in nursing homes so it's not like the us leadership monopolized the incompetence the incompetence is really worldwide on protecting the obvious vulnerable population okay true enough but i want to come back to the u.s leadership the federal state and local governments absorb something like 40 percent of gdp they have been using for three months the direct coercive powers of the state to tell us what we may and may not do and with all those resources and all those powers dr scott atlas says you know what they botched it correct absolutely and again i i the botching was the extension of the initial lockdown the initial lockdown okay we didn't forgivable understandable i'm gonna understand the initial lockdown but the extension of the lockdown is completely and utterly incorrect let me continue the art of your article in the hill i'm quoting dr atlas open all k-12 schools open all the schools open businesses including restaurants and offices parks and beaches should open and outdoor sports should resume there is no scientific reason to insist that people remain indoors close quote open all the schools i mean this is are you want to put our children at risk this is really the most important thing to do for our society for for several obvious reasons number one of course if you don't if you don't open the schools uh you've locked down society because most people do not have a second home uh you know with a maid or just buying a few ipads it doesn't work that way for most people but that's really not the main reason the main reason of course to open the schools is because the children need schooling and this is why we should open the schools because there is virtually zero risk of death and virtually zero risk of a serious illness in children this is the fact this is inarguable this has proven not only every uh country outside the united states but by our own data in the cdc itself of the first hundred plus thousand deaths analyzed 99.98 deaths were not in children and in fact 99.9 percent i'm talking a percent 99.9 of deaths are in people over 24. now k through 12 of course our young children there's another big point here all over the world switzerland iceland australia the united kingdom ireland asian countries there is a minimal if any risk of children transmitting the disease even to their parents it's not just that children are not at risk at all from this disease they also do not even transmit the disease it is literally irrational to not only close school so the teachers wouldn't be at risk either the fifth grade teacher sixth grade teacher kindergarten teacher they won't be at risk either okay there's not a significant risk but i want to qualify that okay let's look at who the teachers are in k through 12 schools in the united states half of them are 41 years old or younger okay 82 percent are under 55 the risk from covet 19 for people under 60 is less than or equal to seasonal influenza so if you're going to shut down the schools because you're worried about the rare teacher who's in a high risk category you must necessarily cut close the schools from november through april because they're at the same risk in flu season now that's point number one point number two is besides the teachers are relatively young if there are high-risk teachers we don't want to put a high-risk teacher in a risky environment no one wants to do that even if the children could transmit the disease and it's not impossible but it's less likely even when they could we know how to socially isolate don't you think that teachers by now understand what six foot distancing is understand they can wear a map and if they're still afraid if they still find it impossible to do social distancing that they've been doing for the last three months if they still think it's impossible they can teach from a distance they've been doing that now instead of shutting down schools in in my way of thinking from the data if you're shutting down schools you do not care about the children because it's very critical to beyond the fact that they're not at risk to understand something very important the harms of closing the schools right this is really a big topic and no one's talking about it we know from the data already it's a fallacy to think that online education in k through 12 is even remotely no pun intended like the quality of education kids get first of all in learning itself 50 of children in the boston area are not even logging in when they're supposedly in session there's already been an estimated 30 loss in reading skills for young children with this online model and we know as parents the most obvious learning you do the most really as at least as important as the book learning if not more is the social experience learning to work in groups the physical activity you can't learn we don't send our kids to school just so that they can read a book that's a specific information we can give that to them at home we want their socializing this is normal maturation that is simply not happening the physical activity is not happening and then there's something else that i have not written about so that you couldn't possibly quote me and that is that in the uh days and i get thousands of emails per week from all over the world from researchers parents regular people thanking me for what i'm writing b and one of my emails recently came from a an emergency room doctor at children's hospital michigan who told me that these serious child abuse emergency room visits are up 35 percent during the lockdown now let me tell you what that means this is very important somebody who brings in their child to the emergency room that's not because they smacked them around and gave them a black eye these are and i'm i'm saying this with with with sadness these emergency room visits are for children who the parents think they might have killed them they're unresponsive they have multiple broken bones these are the most serious 35 percent increase in child abuse and that's directly due to the lockdown and i'll explain why because when you lose your job the correlation of amount of child abuse found in a home is directly correlated for lower socioeconomic group unemployment alcohol abuse this is markedly increasing during the lockdown when we know that almost half of people making forty thousand dollars a year or less lost their jobs by far more than people like you and i and so when these people have children and the schools are closed and there's a tremendous amount of uh stress in the household we know that the emergency room visits are going way up and that's only part a part b is that do you know where the number one place that child abuse is noticed by an outside person the school school you close the schools you have no visibility on the overwhelming majority of child abuse so this is a creating a really a catastrophic sad and simply unspoken harm to the children you realize by the way i didn't mention in that in the market this is in the article that when children go to school that's the number one place where people with children with vision would need glasses are detected children that need hearing aids i mean the the school kids the kids the school lunch program it's for some kids and they're treated all day yes exactly so you know when you shut schools you're really and there's no risk to the children again there's zero risk to the children you are directly harming children i don't understand how people who claim to be so so focused on children teachers teachers unions i think it's it's it's really outrageous this will go down as the most heinous misapplication of public policy in in in modern america scott you businesses including restaurants reopen them you say that as well you also say i didn't quote you but you argue that we'll need to use some new measures for hygiene social distancing and so forth just elaborate on that for a sentence or two would you please how different does the working environment need to be to make it safe i think that we we already okay no one knows the real answer to that but we know we are sensitized we have learned a lot of things about hygiene sensitivity to uh any kind of distancing and and this sort of social behavior no one knew what these words meant even before and now i think we've learned quite a bit and restaurants in private enterprise as you undoubtedly would would realize they want to make an environment that their customers and their employees feel safe in otherwise it's it's not going to function so you don't read and they are already responding businesses are putting in certain businesses are putting in barriers plastic barriers uh other things are being done with hygiene in restaurants and stores but i think it's important to also recognize two things number one guidelines are important and i feel like educating the public this is the role of government here i could see requiring restaurants to put up a guideline in the door that says if you're over 65 and if you are diabetic there may be a risk for being in a small space with nearby other people but that's very different from saying to a restaurant a restaurant must have six foot spacing a restaurant must have mask and and i i think this is a very important topic the science behind six foot spacing is embarrassingly weak and a one underscore to that is that the wh itself recommends three feet mostly many countries in the world use three feet some countries use 1.5 meters these are obviously arbitrary pseudo science kind of concepts and okay one of the studies that was done to necessitate masks in certain distances is they put two hamsters in cages what both of them one of them had a mask on one didn't and they blew with a fan micro droplets at them from certain distances this is not the same thing as an infectious agent causing an infection point number two though we know that 98 99 percent of people that get the virus have no serious problem with the infection half are aces repeat that percentage i thought it was at least half half are asymptomatic half are asymptomatic and 98 or 99 percent have no serious illness oh so you might feel they have a cold snap or you have the flu or it's a bad flu and you stay home right that doesn't mean that you're you're not going to go to the hospital you're not going to die and frankly if you feel that it's risky to go into a restaurant then don't go if you're 75 in a diabetic with you know heart disease and obese and you're a high risk person and you don't feel safe going into a restaurant then don't go no one's mandating anyone goes but to set up a law or restriction that is based on very very weak science at best and to say okay you must operate that or you can't open your restaurant peter 70 or 80 occupancy is meeting costs in manhattan and in most places for restaurants you can't have a functional business like that and no one wants to even go in under those circumstances the science is is really not science it's it's a fear-based and sort of cherry picking of certain studies it's very poor analysis as i say many times a lot of smart people are doing a lot of sloppy thinking all right then that let me ask you about what we should have learned or perhaps to some extent what we should have done to return to this central point which i have to say over again just to get it in my mind it's just so shocking the lockdown has already cost about twice as many years of life as the virus it was supposed to protect us against this could only have happened if our public health officials and elected leaders made terrible mistakes where did we name the top two mistakes what you've already said you can understand why dr fauci thought what he thought and recommended what he recommended you can understand the initial lockdown they didn't have good data the initial data coming out of china or the initial indications coming out of china looked very scary but that was then and here we are three months later what when should they have changed what what were the mistakes the big mistake frankly was relying on and reacting to continually the hypothetical projection models that were grossly wrong uh this is still being done i'm interviewed about this all the time while the there's a new projection the projection models now that are being used you have to realize this is a very common sense point i think every four to five days they re they readjust the projection well i mean if a model and this has been going on for three months now if a model is good why would you have to readjust it every four to five days it's because there's new data why don't we just look at the data so instead of focusing on the actual data that we've been acquiring here they keep relying on these sort of projection hypothetical worst case scenario models and those models by the way anticipate deaths based upon the rate including the rates of nursing home and non-protection of the elderly so the the models themselves are grossly flawed and we have that this is sort of a societal problem here i feel and this is not sort of my area of expertise i'm just this conjecture but we're in a world of hyperbole we're in a world where social media is an igniter of really outrageous statements and reactions and instantaneous things and we're in a world where anyone who can do a google search thinks they're an expert so we hear a lot of people pontificating about medications about side effects of medication they don't have any medical perspective whatsoever and the news is sensationalizing one example was this idea that children get this rare entity called kawasaki syndrome or it's similar to that this is extremely rare and you know but this was the headline for for over a week really and the reality is that doctors understand that there are rare exceptions that are very dangerous in virtually every disease the rare exceptions do not change the overwhelming amount of data yet that carried the day so there's this sort of reactive fear uh that has entered into the public policy making scott let me read to you a quotation this is george gilder in the wall street journal this is taking you i want to stipulate that what i i'm going to ask you a couple of questions now that aren't strictly medical and if they make you feel uncomfortable say so but i know i'm europe you study public health policy so this is a question of the interplay between democracy and and medical professionals so here's george gilder the us economy has been cratered less by the coronavirus than by the response to it driven by the undemocratic idea that science should rule there are not and never will be scientific answers to all public problems politics is how we exercise our free will and that rather than reflexively deferring to experts we should defer as much as possible to the principles of freedom and common sense close quote what do you make of that well i think that's right on target and that's sort of the difference between what i'm saying which is have regulation guidelines but that's different from sort of dictatorial confinement or conditions for selective businesses are essential and selective businesses are not the whole thing is is sort of off the rails in terms of what you thought was a free society but i would modify something and and that is that it's this is the difference between what i do in in sort of pure science because public policy healthcare policy takes into account health care but also public policy and public policy as you know has a lot to do with what he sort of called politics which is what what is the way to guide society to implement the information and what i've said and what i still say is that our leaders failed to have the capacity to sort of analyze in a logical common sense way what the experts were saying we should never and will never in any free society simply delegate to people who are computer modelers what we should do in a policy world all right let me ask you president trump and many governors have been attacked again and again very roundly for failing to defer enough to the so-called experts excuse me i shouldn't say so-called they are experts to the experts but you're almost arguing that they deferred too much to the experts that they that they failed to push back and say wait a moment my job as an elected leader is to make trade-offs and it's my job to preserve the freedoms of this nation and to engage in a certain amount of common sense and above all if i not above all but if i possibly can to preserve to the extent possible the economy the the functioning of our schools and our businesses that's my job so you're the expert you give me advice i make decisions is that that what do you make of all that well i mean i think i think this is exactly right in other words i like to say that empathy and caution are not enough from a public figure we all know that this was a disaster we all need the reassurance and and the the uh the caution but on the other hand the way to really reassure the public to me is to say in a very logical common sense way what are the facts and given all the facts and given what we're going to do this is what we feel is the best pathway to come out at the other end and i think people are reassured by having by listening to people who can logically present the information and make a logical case because okay not everyone's a scientist or an epidemiologist or an infectious disease person no one has out there in politics hardly any have really had medical training some have but the reality is that people understand logic when you have the facts and then you have people give you the facts and then you use your common sense because you know and frankly this has been missing on the other hand of this from the experts these people have been sort of talking about their own fields but they have not used deductive reasoning and common sense and logic to interpret those findings for political uh leaders and for public policy implementation so there's this guy you have a high opinion of the american people give them the facts and a little bit of guidance and their intelligence and common sense will see them through and i i think that that is 100 correct and and frankly you can see there are very few countries that have been as uh totally like what i'm saying but there are some and i'll give you an example as sweden uh which of course has been inappropriately criticized but but i can go through that if you'd like but the reality is they trusted their citizens right and what they said was these are the guidelines we're not going to do a total lockdown we believe you understand the seriousness of this and people did social distancing and people did a variety of maneuvers but on the other end of this they're coming out in a much less harmed fashion they didn't close their schools they didn't lock down their businesses they're going to take a hit because people did social distance but what we've done here is really it's going to take many many years to recover from this it's going to be a very difficult task scott covet 19 and recent events in the news take a look at two tweets let's contrast two recent tweets if we can tweet number one mayor bill de blasio of new york city on april 28th my message to the jewish community and all communities is this simple the time for warnings has passed i've instructed the nypd to proceed immediately to summons or even arrest those who gather in large groups tweet number two once again mayor de blasio this time on june 14 marching during today's east harlem pray and protest i felt confidence that change will come and there he is he's posted himself pictures of himself in large groups okay what are we to make of this well you know what we're to make is this is what you see when you have irrational people in our leadership positions i mean because there is no logic of course to what you just showed having that total disconnect but even more so even if you just took the first tweet which was uh about uh it's all about saving lives and stopping the infection period is what he said uh the reality was it wasn't about that because there was no evidence that you had to close all religious services and selectively open up other groups and other businesses that's just not the way the data was even the who recommended various other ways to deal with small spaces and so i mean i just think this was again fear and ignorance driving public policy the contradiction uh is sort of uh just such underscoring the lack of rational thought when he's out and other leaders were out meantime they keep saying it's all about lives but they didn't lock down the nursing homes and we had thousands of people in new york killed not just died in their systems killed by an order that commanded that infected nursing home patients were still going to be put back into the nursing home so these are people that have really indefensible cases and and one day i hope that there's some accountability with that another set of two items these are not contrast these are similar the contrast is that there are others opposite sides of the country venice beach in venice beach california a picture of a bulldozer that's filling a skateboard park with sand on the beach to make sure that kids don't use it and here's another picture this one is in new york city this is at the behest of mayor de blasio city workers are welding shut the gates of a public park dr atlas what do you make of venice beach and the park being shut in new york yeah well there's two two just really inexplicable uh thought processes uh going on there one is that somehow people seem to think then leadership positions that it makes sense to be confined indoors rather than be out of doors that you don't have to be a doctor to understand that that is just completely ludicrous and then when you look at the data even the original data out of japan they showed that the transmission rates were far higher by order of magnitude higher inside in confined spaces outdoors is far far lower risk to get a to get a contagious disease that's just this is just common sense i i don't even know how to explain how that is so ridiculous but the second part is locking children's playgrounds again we go back to the fact these are people these leaders consistent quote it's all about the science but they're they're doing things that are contrary to the science because there is virtually no risk to the people who would use those playgrounds the children have almost no risk in fact i'll give you a quote from the jama pediatrics uh journalism is the journal of the ama pediatrics it's a special pediatrics journal and their quote is in a this was a series of 48 pediatric hospitals in north america and their quote is the risk of a serious illness from seasonal influenza in children is quote far greater than the risk of serious illness from covert 19 in children so i mean this is a completely irrational response to lock down the playgrounds it is just i mean it defies any science whatsoever and in fact it just shows a complete lack of capability for being in a leadership position last questions scott atlas writing in the hill on may 18th the time of failed leadership must end or we are committing national suicide you wrote that on may 18th we're recording this on june 18th the lockdown hasn't ended why not again i uh i think it's a failure to communicate and the failure to communicate is also in the leading voices of the policy when we have people who are completely risk-averse like dr fauci who i have a tremendous amount of respect for when he gets out there and says well we don't know everything about the virus we don't know 100 percent of children can't get sick these kinds of statements are just really not thought not thoughtful statements they're not they're not taken by someone who understands he's speaking to the public here you have to have some perspective so the fear has been so great and the basically the people in charge are layman they're human beings i empathize with the fear but we have to expect more from the leadership than that all right will kovan 19 come back in the fall and if it does how bad will it be and if it's bad will we lock down all over again all good questions no one knows if covert 19 will come back in the fall no one and in fact we know that previous sars viruses didn't necessarily come back because this bit about viruses mutating that's actually a good thing generally because when they mutate they become less impactful that's how they fizzle out so we don't know if kova 19 will come back in the fall if it did we do know that we are far better prepared we all understand social distancing we're all used to what to do but more importantly than that even the government has done well at understanding how to mobilize resources we know how to stockpile things we know how to mobilize and have a better handle on how many ventilators we need and in fact we were never short of ventilators by the way despite the protestations of people like governor cuomo so we are far more mobilizing in our resources we're experienced we don't know if it'll come back and by the way we don't know if we will have a vaccine we can think there's good positive indicators we'll have a vaccine but vaccines are not magic wands even when we get them we know seasonal influenza vaccine is 40 to 60 percent effective it's not 100 effective so that's that should not be a pre a prerequisite a predicate for reopening we know how to deal with this virus we know uh exactly really who's going to be vulnerable to this and we know that the vast majority overwhelming majority people don't have a problem if they get infected so to me i don't care that cases are going up in fact that's not a problem at all it's only important to protect the people who are going to have a serious problem with this illness all right actually let me i said i was last questions here's a i'm just going to stick one in you mentioned that we've actually done pretty well in certain regards here's vice president pence mike pence writing yesterday in the wall street journal quote the media has tried to scare the american people every step of the way the truth is our approach has been a success we've slowed the spread we've cared for the most vulnerable we've saved lives and we've created a solid foundation for whatever we may face in the future that's a cause for celebration not fear mongering close quote how much of that do you buy well i i agree that uh we have learned quite a bit during this and we have mobilized resources and we did uh do many things correctly that said we still had a tremendous problem with protecting the most vulnerable and that's all across the country variety of states some states have 80 percent of their deaths are in nursing homes even the other day by the way minnesota had 15 new deaths 11 even the other day we're in nursing homes 11 of the 15 deaths i mean you'd think in this an area where there's restricted entry already we'd be able to handle that but nonetheless but i do so i think that we've had problems we were caught blindsided by the way i mean the world was china did not give the information they denied it was a human to human interaction they denied that it was a serious problem and then these people uh in the region where it was infection uh center really wuhan there was an allowance of flights internationally so we were caught by surprise but i think in the end despite the deficiencies i don't think we did very poorly i think in some ways we did well and it's hard to say that when you had 120 000 people die but on the other hand uh there's there's very little that could have been done in a realistic way to me uh given that we're blindsided better we're going to do much better in the next pandemic which frankly is inevitable inevitable but it's inevitable that leads to the this is the last question there will be another pandemic you just said that you just used the word inevitable now consider if you would consider the rising generation of physicians and public health officials think about the kids who are in med school right now and i repeat this heartbreaking maybe infuriating maybe it should maybe it should even be enraging but i repeat your finding that the lockdown has cost something like twice as many years of human life as the covet virus itself has cost what do you want to say to the kids who are in med school right now watching all of this happen about the central lessons that they should learn and apply when the inevitable next pandemic strikes and they may be in charge yes i mean the central lessons are to use critical thinking when you're looking at the evidence that's point numbers one through nine you really have to have a perspective when you're looking at something you don't just read the bottom line of a study we look when you're taught in a good medical school in a training program as a doctor you really the difference between a great doctor and a good doctor is not the amount of information they know it's to be able to use deductive reasoning and critical analysis of the information so i think point numbers you know the first part is use critical thinking the second part is of course when we're doing a health policy maneuver or a health policy in implementation you must understand the impact of the policy itself there's no such policy as stopping covert 19 at all costs that is never was never the policy even of the trump team of fouchy and bert in the beginning that was never the stated policy but it has devolved into that sort of thinking where we must stop all coveted 19 at all costs and somehow the public because of that policy has become so fearful that now they buy into that policy and so i think that's lesson number two is know the impact of the policies themselves at least be able to judge that before you start implementing really severe in this case draconian uh public policy scott here's the last question here in northern california when are the barber shops finally going to reopen because i'm going just crazy i've been you i can't use any more glop on my hair oh this is sort of an interesting question because i got a haircut today and and i'll tell you how yeah and actually in my barbershop and i'm pr i'm sort of happy to say it because i i think the rules are outrageous and this is what's evolving here there is sort of a speakeasy culture evolving i know this is happening in new york city because i have people who i know who live there and it's sort of like the era of prohibition where people have had enough and logical sane common sense americans have said no enough is enough and so many stores are boarding up the front or putting curtains up and now there is this what i call a speakeasy culture emerging where life will go on for the people who understand that this is actually completely irrational and it's going to happen more and more unless the political leaders sort of get their act together okay so after we close which we're doing right now i'll give you a phone call and you'll tell me the address of your barber shop and tell me the password knock knock who's there one of those dr scott atlas of the hoover institution thank you pleasure for uncommon knowledge the hoover institution and fox nation i'm peter robinson you

Channel: Hoover Institution

Views: 623,569

Rating: 4.8584418 out of 5

Keywords: Uncommon Knowledge, Peter Robinson, Scott Atlas, Hoover Institution, COVID-19, K-12, Education, Schools, Economic Shutdown, Public Health, Scott W. Atlas, coronavirus, pandemic, shutdown

Id: biC4nHPYtbA

Length: 50min 30sec (3030 seconds)

Published: Tue Sep 29 2020

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