Three Blind Mice Led America's Covid Response

We do not know exactly what went on during the Trump administration when the coronavirus pandemic arrived in America. We have some vague sense that the government response was botched, but we do not know the details. And we do not know who was responsible.

Scott Atlas has now written a book telling us what was happening within the administration. In it he describes how a troika, who he calls three blind mice, Drs. Fauci, Birx and Redfield took over policy and largely did a very poor job. He is especially critical of Dr. Birx, an incompetent bureaucrat who had outsized influence. Whether she had a political agenda or wanted to cover up her own incompetence, she was the person most responsible for the failed policies.

Since none of the three paid any attention to him, Altas might be considered to be somewhat biased. Still, he is qualified to comment on what was happening in the White House. He

places the lion’s share of the blame with Trump administration officials who failed to fire the three. 

Now, as a prelude to reading Atlas’s book, we report on John Tierney’s review from the City Journal. Tierney himself has been following the story for some time now, and he has proved to be a reliable source.

At the least, Atlas was qualified in the science. Strangely, it did not matter to the three blind mice, whose motives seem to have been less than pure:

How could public officials vowing to “follow the science” on Covid-19 persist in promoting ineffective strategies with terrible consequences? In a memoir of his time on the White House Coronavirus Task Force, Scott W. Atlas provides an answer: because the nation’s governance was hijacked by three bureaucrats with scant interest in scientific research or debate—and no concern for the calamitous effects of their edicts.

Atlas’s book, A Plague Upon Our House, is an astonishing read, even for those who have been closely following this disaster. A veteran medical researcher and health-policy analyst at the Hoover Institution, Atlas, a radiologist, joined the Task Force six months into the pandemic, after he had published estimates that lockdowns could ultimately prove more deadly than Covid.

As for the question of mask mandates, the troika promoted them relentlessly even though the “scientific” evidence was sketchy, if not inconclusive. More importantly, the troika never considered the harm imposed on people by the lockdowns, the social distancing and the mask mandates:

Instead, the troika of bureaucrats obsessed over Birx’s charts showing how many Covid tests had been administered and what percentage were positive. They proclaimed success for their strategies when infections started to wane in states like New York and Arizona—never mind that the downward trends began before the lockdowns and mask mandates were imposed. They ignored inconvenient data, like the chart that Atlas reproduces comparing the rates of Covid cases in states with and without mask mandates: the two curves remained virtually identical throughout the pandemic. “The doctors in the Task Force showed no study about mask efficacy or any other of their policies, and they never once mentioned the harms of the lockdowns that I witnessed,” Atlas says. “Their sole focus was stopping cases, even when their policies were already implemented and were failing to do so.”

As we have reported on this blog, the question of collateral damage should have been front and center. In the end it was ignored:

It may seem incredible that the troika would violate a fundamental principle of public health by ignoring the devasting collateral damage of their policies, yet they never even pretended to conduct a cost-benefit analysis. “Perhaps the most remarkable insight in the Fauci email trove,” Atlas notes, referring to the thousands of emails from Fauci that were made public, is “the total lack of mention of harms from the lockdown throughout the pandemic.”

As for the notion that the science had affirmed the value of lockdowns, Atlas reports that such was simply not the case:

The troika also ignored dozens of studies showing the ineffectiveness of lockdowns, and the data showing that places that avoided lockdowns, like Florida and Sweden, did as well as or better than average in preventing Covid deaths. “I never fully understood why there was no admission, even internally by the Task Force, that the Birx-Fauci strategy did not work,” Atlas writes, concluding that it wasn’t simply because the media was eager to champion anyone who questioned President Donald Trump’s desire to reopen schools and businesses. “Disagreeing with Trump, especially in this election year, ensured near idolatry on cable TV and in the New York Times or Washington Post. But I never thought politics was the main driver of those on the Task Force. Perhaps it was an unstated fear that they were in way too deep to admit their errors.”

If Trump wanted to open schools and businesses, that was taken as proof that we should not open schools and businesses. As for the damage that the policy would visit on the nation, not a word. The response from the troika was that Atlas was not an epidemiologist:

Fauci, Birx, and Redfield were not epidemiologists, either, but they were enshrined as “the science” because they provided what mainstream journalists craved: scare stories that boosted ratings and made Trump look bad.

2020 was an election year. And journalists had only one thing in mind-- spinning the story to ensure that Trump would lose. The constant barrage of media attacks had had an effect on Trump, seeming to make it impossible for him to fire the three blind mice. In the end Atlas holds Trump accountable for the lockdowns. He was in charge, and he certainly knew how to fire people.

The politician who comes off best is Florida governor Ron DeSantis, who had, Atlas observes, “a far more detailed understanding of the pandemic than anyone I had encountered in the Task Force.” Trump comes off fairly well, too, in his conversations with Atlas, as he frets about the harms of the lockdowns and instinctively recognizes the futility of the troika’s strategies. But Atlas lays the ultimate blame for the lockdowns—“a crime against humanity”—on Trump himself, because he allowed Birx and her allies to remain in charge. “This president, widely known for his signature ‘You’re fired!’ declaration, was misled by his closest political intimates,” Atlas writes. “All for fear of what was inevitable anyway—skewering from an already hostile media.”