Scott Atlas on Our COVID Mistakes

The response to COVID is arguably the single greatest public policy mistake in American history, which in turn became a global catastrophe since so many other nations followed the United States with foolish lockdowns, school closures, and other authoritarian measures that were ineffective and heedless of adverse tradeoffs.

Dr. Scott Atlas of Stanford's Hoover Institution has been vilified for his dissent from the party line on COVID, most fully explained in his book, A Plague Upon Our House: My Fight at the Trump White House to Stop COVID from Destroying America. In our conversation here, Dr. Atlas reviews the failure to consider the tradeoffs of our COVID policy, which stems ultimately from a perverse and even dangerous groupthink by our "public health" establishment.

Our conversation turns to the wider issues this episode raises, such as the authoritarian censorship and the nature of the administrative state. Dr. Atlas notes that in his frequent recent travels around the world, he is repeatedly asked: "What is wrong with America right now?"

Dr. Atlas isn't content merely to criticize our COVID response. He has co-founded the Global Liberty Institute, which will go beyond the standard advocacy for sound policy and attempt to promote accountability for the kind of policy failure we see in COVID and other ruinous areas. Among other things, as Dr, Atlas wrote in the Wall Street Journal recently, "We also need to hold universities accountable for failing to ensure academic freedom while raking in massive amounts of taxpayer money."