Atlas: I Watched The Nation’s ‘Top Scientists’ Lie About COVID And Get Away With It
After watching this debacle on TV, I knew full well what was coming later that day. The media would latch on to this and create even more public panic.
By Scott Atlas
November 23, 2021
This is an excerpt from the author’s new book, “A Plague Upon Our House,” which releases December 7 and is available now for preorder.
[CDC Director Robert] Redfield’s congressional testimony on September 23 immediately caught my attention. I watched in disbelief as Redfield told Congress that “more than 90 percent of the population”—more than three hundred million people in the US—remains susceptible to the illness.
The statement was based on incomplete and outdated data, as well as an apparent lack of understanding of the literature, and it struck me as one of the most erroneous and fear-inducing proclamations of any public health official to that moment. Approximately two hundred thousand Americans had already died from COVID; the last thing the public needed was an exaggeration of the future risks, implying to some that ten times that number could still die.
First of all, the numbers didn’t add up. At that point, confirmed cases in the US already totaled approximately seven million, and the CDC itself had estimated that approximately ten times the number of confirmed cases, a very conservative estimate, were likely to have had the infection. A Stanford seropositivity study back in April had shown that confirmed cases underestimated the total infections by a factor of approximately forty times. It made no sense that only 9 percent, or thirty million Americans, had been infected.
Second, the 9 percent calculation was blatantly wrong. That number came from antibody testing by the states. I looked at the CDC website myself, and sure enough, the data was based on antiquated testing from several states.
Some antibody totals were pulled from several months earlier, before many of those states had experienced a significant number of cases. It therefore grossly underestimated the number of cases that had already occurred. The data was simply not valid, but you needed to pay attention to the details.
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https://thefederalist.com/2021/11/23/atlas-i-watched-the-nations-top-scientists-lie-about-covid-and-get-away-with-it/
