And, according to Atlas, when he presented the data on schools to the White House Coronavirus Response team, he was ignored.
“As I finished, there was silence,” Atlas wrote. “No one offered any contrary data. No one spoke of scientific studies. No one even mentioned the discredited Korea study. Zero comments from Dr. Birx. Nothing from Dr. Fauci. And as always, not a single mention by Birx or Fauci about the serious harms of school closures. In my mind, this was bizarre. Why was I the only one in the room with detailed knowledge of the literature? Why was I the only one considering the data on such an important topic with a critical eye? Were the others simply accepting bottom lines and conclusions, without any analytical evaluation? Weren’t they supposed to be expert medical scientists, too? I waited.”
Birx then told Atlas that his opinion was “out of the mainstream” and accused him of being part of a “fringe” group that wanted schools to be reopened.
“[Birx] insisted that all experts agreed with her,” Atlas wrote. “I shook my head, thinking of some of the world-class epidemiologists who agreed with me—John Ioannidis and Jay Bhattacharya of Stanford, Martin Kulldorff of Harvard, Carl Heneghan and Sunetra Gupta of Oxford—and wondered if she or Fauci had ever read a single publication by them.”
Atlas points out in his book that evidence indicated that “almost all coronavirus transmission to children comes from adults, not the other way around.”
“That was not a predicate for opening schools, given the massive harms to kids if they were closed,” Atlas explained. “But that evidence was already shown by contact tracing and other studies in Iceland, Canada, France, the Netherlands, Germany, Sweden, Finland, Ireland, Japan, Switzerland, and elsewhere. Opened schools and childcare centers did not show significant dangers to children, adults, or teachers […] They found zero instances of a child passing the infection to an adult.”
Atlas said CDC director Redfield responded to the data by saying, “the jury is still out.”
Again, no thanks on the new nickname. I will forever be oneforthebus in recognition of Jerome getting his ring the year I joined SN!
