Dr. Scott Atlas might be more familiar to RedState readers as a Fox News medical contributor than a member of President Trump’s White House Coronavirus Task Force. Back in April, we reported on four points Dr. Atlas shared about how to deal with COVID-19. But since late August, that’s been the former Stanford University director of neuroradiology and Hoover Institution senior fellow’s role.
In fact, if you watched the President’s afternoon press briefing Wednesday, it was hard to miss his feisty response to recent comments by the Democrat presidential and vice presidential nominees, Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, that they wouldn’t take a Wuhan coronavirus vaccine that has Donald Trump’s cooties on it. Without using their names, Dr. Atlas called out this kind of blatant politicization of medicine.
“It’s a particularly heinous and egregious abuse of the media to instill fear into people about taking the vaccine. There’s no shortcut here. Everything is safe. Everything is effective.
And for people who have particularly an influence on minority communities to instill fear and doubt, is particularly an outrageous abuse of public policy and of leadership.
These are people that have higher risk. And so I implore everyone who is in a high risk category, that when we get a safe, effective vaccine, they should take the vaccine.”
About a week ago, White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany took a liberal professor to task for spreading an out of context clip of her talking about the Obama administration’s efforts against H1N1, as our Sister Toldjah reported.
Now, Dr. Atlas says members of academia, the media, and the Left (but I repeat myself) are trying to destroy his reputation by calling him little more than a Trump toadie. He appeared on ‘The Ingraham Angle” Tuesday night to talk about his refusal to be canceled — because, he said, “[he’s] not the story here.”
Dr. Atlas began: “It’s sad to see that, as soon as you get a White House badge, you’re subject to attack.” He admitted to Ingraham that he was likely “naive” going in. “Although I knew the media was biased, I didn’t realize that things had deteriorated to this point.”
He also spoke about his sterling reputation as a scientist. “There’s no one who knows me who would think that I’m not about the science. My words have been distorted.” Later he had a message for his former colleagues at Stanford and elsewhere in the Ivory Tower:
“There’s no chance that I am a mouthpiece for the President, or that I’m going to be intimidated by people who were sort of my former colleagues and somehow think they can silence people who disagree with them. I think it’s outrageous, I think it’s sad, I think it shows where the country is right now. I think it shows where universities are right now.”
For Dr. Atlas, here’s the bottom line:
“I’m not the story here. The story’s the pandemic, the story is that we have almost 200,000 Americans who have died, and the story is, anybody who’s worth anything in their life — who’s been asked by the President of the United States to help….if someone asked me to help in the greatest crisis in a century, at least — there’s something wrong with you, if you would say no to that.”
You can watch his full interview with Laura Ingraham below:
"We are in a country here where fear is the contagion at this point." – Dr. Scott Atlashttps://t.co/WcJG2pVcQa
— Steven Anner (@Anners2Honduras) September 15, 2020
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