Scott Atlas
“China kicked sand in our face. We'll hit them back with sandstone.”
Scott William Atlas (born July 5, 1955) is a doctor who kicked sand in the face of the Coronavirus and didn't bow down to the China-sponsored disease that was cooked up with monkey brains in a bat-infested "laboratory" in Wuhan, China. He let America breathe easily again, outside some gimmick "ventilator" that makes you sick enough to view Joe Biden as the actual American president.
Atlas became former President Donald Trump's right-hand medical man, someone who could counter the defeatist Dr. Anthony Failure and Dr. Deborah "Shit" Brix. Counter, he did. Prevail, he did not (nor did Trump). But get back to work, America!
Background[edit]
Scott Atlas is the son of famous bodybuilder Charles Atlas, who is best known for showing his muscles and being the inspiration for Ayn Rand's ponderous book Atlas Oiled. Scott initially wanted to follow his father in the muscle industry business, but got diverted when his father said "Scotty" was better suited as a biologist than a bodybuilder. Scott's reluctant move away from pumping iron allowed the barely literate Austrian Arnold Schwarzenegger to steal in and become a multi-millionaire.
After finishing biology, Atlas went to medical school in Chicago. Now, everyone knows that the "Chicago school" is hard-right-wing, as much as Atlas may have insisted he is a doctor not an ideologue. He was obviously a conservative Republican, a tendency seen in his reluctance to operate on left kidneys and lungs.
Nevertheless, Atlas pioneered many new medical treatments and wrote the page-turner Magnetic Resonance Imaging of the Brain and Spine, a reference work still consulted by medical professionals straining to understand what all those "squiggles" are.
Transition to public health[edit]
However, patients are grubby and smelly, are never satisfied with the outcomes of treatment, and are quick to assume some new breakdown in their bodies is a result of what Doc did. Consequently, after decades in medical practice, moving up from practicer to "practitioner," Atlas moved again — from seeing patients to writing about how other people should see patients — the same transition his future nemeses, Drs. Fauci and Birx, would have undergone, though it is not clear either of them ever saw a patient, nor whether the patient ran away screaming. This took him from Chicago to Palo Alto, on the edge of San Francisco. He joined the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, confident that his walks home after work would feature only broken syringes and human feces instead of armed muggers.
Atlas proved expert at the work product at Hoover: newspaper op-ed columns, giving policy-makers opinions they did not request, and appearances on Fox News. He was not easy to mock on the left-wing news channels, as even their viewers remembered Charles Atlas.
Medical advisor[edit]
In 2020, the year of the Coronavirus (and incidentally, a presidential election), President Trump grew tired of having his ears bent by Birx and Fauci. Unfortunately, he did not grow tired until impeached, left in office, and rendered too weak to act, as his Doctors were convincing all 50 state governors to pour molasses over the entire U.S. economy. Cable news would crucify him if he tried now to reprise his role on reality TV and bellow, "You're fired!" But perhaps he could hire more people to spike their covfefe.
Trump, elected on a vow to repeal Obamacare, had morphed that into a hope to "repeal and replace" it with a program to do the same thing but under the much better name of Trumpcare. Atlas, meanwhile, had spent the winter at Hoover studying how to counter the inevitable drumbeat to move further to "single-payer" care (while denying being a Republican). He was a perfect fit. He had been shooting recommendations and data graphs to the White House for prompt disinterest when a junior staffer recruited him into the Trump Administration so his proposals and graphs could be ignored in person.
Atlas flew to Washington, took up residence in the Trump Hotel, and was signed to a 130-day Limited Appointment with daily nose swabbing. This avoided review by the U.S. Senate or anyone knowing what he was doing, notably CNN. He was given a badge assigning him to the West (Treachery) Wing, which he prominently displayed on the inside of his underwear. He attended high-level meetings by watching a monitor from a spare seat in someone else's office. However, as he got "up to speed," he was introduced to Task Forces, allowed to participate in bureaucratic infighting, then finally allowed to speak at Presidential press conferences as Trump stood to one side, grinning, because every time Jim Acosta badgered Atlas was a time Acosta was not badgering Trump.
Atlas was going to be offered the job of Coronavirus Czar during the Inevitable Trump Second Term, sitting at a portable desk inside the Oval Office itself so that he could interrupt if Trump misstated something to a foreign leader. Unfortunately, reality intervened, in the masked person of Joe Biden. After Trump's loss in the 2020 election, he wanted Atlas to stay on for some lame-duck infighting, but Atlas resigned and returned to Hoover.
Autobiography[edit]
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“It is remarkable that, for a woman so far past menopause, it can always be 'that time of the month.'”
Shakespeare wrote of that "ill wind that doesn't give someone a good blowjob", and a consolation prize for anyone who wastes three months trying to dominate Presidential policymaking is a chance to write a tell-all book about White House intrigue. In 2011, Atlas wrote A Pox Upon Your House, Deborah! about his time in the Executive Branch and his clashes with Dr. Birx.
The book has a massive first chapter entitled, "How I Was Minding My Own Business when the Phone Rang". Other notable chapters are "The Time I Called Birx a Liar in Front of Trump" and "The Time I Called Birx a Liar in Front of Mike Pence". Atlas states at the outset that he wanted the government to protect the vulnerable from the Coronavirus, rather than do what it does better: devise crackdowns on the innocent. Nor indeed for Dr. Birx to slip and fall into a manhole. Atlas restates this point to put each conference-room food fight in context. Then, if the reader has not been fatigued into submission, he sets it out with graphs and tables at the end.
Atlas explains that Trump believed the same thing, and once or twice said things that prove it. Unfortunately, other advisors ignored graphs and fixated on poll numbers. Rather than doing what's right, their irrelevant preoccupation was winning the 2020 election. A much larger group was guided by the tenet, "Don't Rock the Boat". They wanted to avoid vitriol from CNN, or worse, vitriol from Dr. Birx.
Atlas describes meetings where he silently fumed as everyone else went down the wrong road then — when Pence saw Atlas's exasperation and baited him — somehow provides verbatim quotations of himself finally setting them all to rights, leading to the same unanimity that had existed five minutes earlier in the opposite direction. Policy documents were edited and Pence was happy, as he still would be, one week later, when all the edits had been backed out.
Atlas recounts all the thanks he received from high-placed Trump aides, in whispers no one else heard. Once Trump's re-election was a sure thing, Atlas names the aides who confided in him that Dr. Birx had to be gotten rid of.
The autobiography was written for two audiences: (1) the author, and (2) the burgeoning Scott Atlas fan club, which has always longed for a book with every shot the White House photographer took with Atlas at the center of it. The book has no footnotes, because the other side never read a study, so what is the point in citing them? You won't really need an index, either.
Controversy[edit]
“Iron sharpens iron, if you ask me.”
The main controversy about Atlas, at least on America's renowned Twitter tele-medicine site, is that he's not an epidemiologist! When the singular focus of the U.S. Government is managing the graph of coronaviruses cases and lowering it, or reducing the peaks, or stretching it out so it doesn't overwhelm hospitals, or something, it requires a staff of epidemiologists. Epidemic: epidemiologists. Numbers guys. Okay, this is a pandemic, but there's no such thing as a pandemiologist, so epidemiologists will have to do.
So what is a "policy expert" doing sitting in a room with real epidemiologists? Being an "outlier", that's what. Pence may want open debate, but he can't really want the new West Coast "policy" guy to question established policies. Outliers harm the single-minded focus.
This controversy simmered down after it became evident that Trump intended to harm the single-minded focus. People told Atlas he was hired to be "the truth-teller" — especially when another subordinate is lying. To her face, please; sure. But then, Atlas attacked lockdowns and school closures. He said the coronavirus is harmless to children and wanted all the schools open, even though most teachers were in Florida, "brushing up their lesson plans." One can only conclude that Atlas is in the "let 'er rip" camp, with Joe Rogan. He wants everyone to get sick, suffer, and die. He insisted this isn't what he said, but in-the-know Americans have to read between the lines.
A final controversy was Atlas's recurring self-promotion at the expense of colleagues. There is no way to get such an impression from his book. But everyone saw his tweet after Fauci threw out Major League Baseball's first pitch to start the 2020 season that had been delayed until midsummer. Fauci wanted to promote an air of normality, as his order to everyone to increase to six masks would go out the next day.
  · Jul 24, 2020
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| Some epidemiologist! #Fauci throws like a girl! |
To be fair to Atlas, Fauci did miss home plate entirely, the "pitch" going up the baseline and rolling to a stop inside the dugout. But it did not decapitate the mascot; that was a scene in a baseball movie. Nor should the exchange call Fauci's scientific acumen into question, nor affect the collegial dealings between the two gentlemen.
See also[edit]
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