NEJM posts a perspective saying Stanford should have corrected Scott Atlas: Why? To look foolish? B/c Atlas was correct & his critics were wrong
During the COVID19 pandemic, Scott Atlas made many controversial statements. Community cloth masking doesn’t slow the spread of COVID19. Kids should be in school. Lockdowns have no evidence of efficacy.
In other words, Atlas was pretty smart. Randomized data would later show conclusively cloth masking doesn’t work. School closure is now regarded as a catastrophic error, and even Anthony Fauci regrets how long they lasted. Lockdowns clearly have no evidence to support them, and a brilliant paper by Chirag Patel shows they never will.
Of course, not all university researchers read or understood the evidence like Atlas, as the NEJM piece correctly notes 98 Stanford faculty (with absolutely no political bias ;) ;) ) disagreed with Atlas, who was hired by Trump.
But, what about the thousands of other Stanford faculty? We have no idea b/c there is no survey of their views.
The case of Scott Atlas then is a great case for why universities should allow Academic Freedom— because sometimes, the sole dissenting voice turns out to be right.
Yet, that’s not the way this is portrayed in the NEJM. These authors, including one author who habitually makes errors reading medical papers, thinks Stanford should have done more to combat Scott Atlas.
According to them Stanford should have issued statements saying that Atlas was wrong.
Really? Why? To look foolish later?
The idea in the commentary is laughable. Who exactly at Stanford will decide when a faculty member is wrong and their ideas threaten public health. Will we poll the full professors or all the instructors too? Will there be an appeals process? Or will the decision be made solely by the Stanford president —— when he isn’t publishing papers with photoshopped western blots— by himself, speaking on behalf of the university? Or should we just ask the university donors?
The authors provide no practical framework for how this will be operationalized.
But I agree with them a little, perhaps it would have been good for Stanford to have issue a statement
We disagree with Dr. Atlas. Cloth masks save lives and school closure is good.
That way we would all see that Stanford is run by people who are incapable of reading data, and works hard to stifle the truth.
Remember Stanford’s dean asked Eran Bendavid to quiet down on COVID19 policy— already in violation of academic freedom. Discussed in my prior post.
Cornell's New Dean, Bob Harrington, Asked Jay Bhattacharya & Eran Bendavid to stop talking to the press about COVID policy, per B's account
I was recently reading Jay Bhattacharya’s first person account of his treatment at Stanford— the vicious disputes about lockdown in the Spring of 2020— and this jumped out at me. It concerns Bob Harrington, the chair of Medicine at Stanford, and now Dean at Cornell
The truth is Eric Topol and Abraham Verghese were on the wrong side of COVID19 policy. Instead of debating masking or school closure or lockdowns, they would rather not allow their critics to try to persuade the audience. Faculty who don’t understand academic freedom are a much greater threat to public health than a million Scott Atlases, who, if we are honest, was pretty much right.
And, I didn’t just think this in retrospect
Go check out the audio at min 58 when I discuss Scott Atlas with an ID expert in 2020
Atlas got screwed during Covid. He was so disgusted with Birx (and the whole medical “establishment”), he threw up his hands and left the White House. His book is very telling which addresses group think during Covid
Thank you, Vinay, for this article! Scott Atlas sat for a great interview with Melissa Streit of Prager U wherein he outlined exactly what happened when he was at the White House with Trump in the summer of 2020. It’s quite enlightening although unsurprising due to what we know about Fauci, Birx, and Redfield. The university response during the COVID debacle had nothing to do with science or academic freedom and everything to do with fear of losing funding from the government agencies, and the jobs that come from that money. I’m not sure what can be done about this for the future but this behavior has really damaged public perception of our esteemed universities, and rightly so. I know of several families whose high achieving children are choosing not to apply to some of these schools primarily because of their COVID policies and woke ideology that they attempt to impose on their students. I’m not sure that this protest of sorts will have any impact but voting with our pocketbooks is one of the few options available to those of us who want to see something change in academia, as well as supporting people like you and others who have been working tirelessly to shine a light on these bad actors and their support structures. Keep it up!