I was working at a frantic pace, multitasking as best I could. Because I treated every request as urgent, real-time, I felt added pressure; but nothing was more urgent than vetting the president’s public remarks. Adding to the requirement for my input was that this president loved engaging with the press. That meant that a new briefing could be called at any moment, and those briefings were frequent. I came to assume that there would be a press briefing every day, and for every briefing, there would be a pandemic update. I was one of many who were asked for input—topics, data, edits, sources of numbers, trends, and anything I thought would be important to highlight or include, thematically or otherwise. It was not simply the magnitude of the pandemic that created my concerns, it was the requirement for perfect accuracy in every detail.
Despite my initial involvement, Kushner had kept to his desire to shield me from what he knew would be an assault by the media; we had no immediate plan to change that approach. But this was not a highly structured environment. My unveiling to the press by the president was spur-of-the-moment, totally unplanned.
In the first several days after my arrival, I was not yet involved in the “pre-briefing” that occurred just before the president entered the Brady Press Briefing room to deliver his remarks. A small but varying group of relevant advisors would join the president in the Oval Office. He would sit behind the Resolute Desk, going through the printout handed to him by the staff sec. Usually, Kayleigh, Stephen Miller, Kushner, Derek Lyons, Hope Hicks, and a few others would stand or sit as the president looked through and hand-edited what he wanted to use as his script. As he sat with his marker deleting or adding specific points, he would ask questions to those in the Oval Office about particular issues. At times, people would also offer comments they thought he should hear, even if he didn’t ask. I soon became a fixture in those pre-briefings. But in the beginning, I was inputting remarks beforehand, via the staff sec’s creation and editing process.
On this day, after I finished my inputs and others had finalized them, the printouts were brought up to the president. I spontaneously decided to go up to Kayleigh’s office to show her some data and explain some important points about various trends. This was something I often did, because I wanted to make sure that Kayleigh fully understood not just the statements themselves, but the data behind them, so she would be fully armed for the inevitable pushback from the press.
This time, Kayleigh was standing at her desk. She showed me the final edit of what would be said in minutes to the nation by the president. I froze—the editing process had created a small change that in turn generated an incorrect statement about the pandemic data. That was my domain, and I absolutely could not let the president state something that was not 100 percent correct. I nervously told Kayleigh this must be corrected. She quickly said, “We better go in to tell him, right now; he’s about to give the briefing.”
We hustled over to the Oval Office. As we entered the anteroom, Kushner was standing at the doorway, and I quickly explained there was an error in the remarks. He gestured to me, saying, “OK, go in there and tell him.” The president was already standing, beginning to exit the Oval Office, talking as he headed toward the doorway. I spoke up.
“Excuse me, Mr. President.”
“Hi, Scott!” he smiled broadly, with his booklet of remarks in hand.
“There is a mistake in your remarks,” I declared.
He stopped in his tracks. “What mistake?”
“The sentence in there now says ‘with no increase in deaths’ but it should say ‘with no significant increase in deaths.’ That’s not the same thing.”
President Trump looked around, seemingly surprised that I would care about this trivial detail. I was uncertain what would come next. He then announced to the small group walking with him, “If this were anyone else, I wouldn’t change it. But since Scott says it should be changed, then I will.” With that, he took out his marker, made the change, and flipped me the pen to keep. I smiled, said thanks, and then he continued to walk toward the briefing room.
Unexpectedly, he turned to look over his shoulder. “Scott, want to come in with me?” Kushner and I looked at each other. We both knew this would alter the plan of my remaining in the background. I instinctively said, “OK, sure,” and we began walking. Jared smiled, shrugged his shoulders, and said, “OK, well, here goes. Good luck!”
The president, Kayleigh, and I walked toward the entrance. I nervously turned to Kayleigh. “Kayleigh, please tell me exactly where to go, exactly where to sit, exactly what to do!” Smiling at my anxiety, she instructed me to enter first, before her, and sit in the far chair on the side. So I did.
In my first appearance in the Brady Press Room, the President entertained questions while I watched alongside Kayleigh McEnany. (Credit: Official White House photographers)
And for that briefing, all I could do was sit there and try to come up with something, just in case the president asked, as he often did, if I “wanted to say a few words.”
That didn’t happen, and I was relieved. However, my unveiling in the Briefing Room was handled very awkwardly, with only an offhanded comment from the president at the podium. “Everyone knows Scott Atlas, right? Scott is a very famous man, who is also highly respected,” President Trump said. “He’s working with us and will be working with us on the coronavirus. And he has many great ideas.”
Instead of explaining my background as a health policy expert of more than fifteen years with an extensive medical background, it was left to the press to define me. And of course, they did. That lack of preparedness by the White House communications team was harmful to me and the president himself.
This episode foreshadowed many shocks about the workings of the White House. I assumed that everyone in the West Wing would understand that if the special advisor to the president was attacked, it undermined the president’s own credibility. Of course, that was the intent of the attackers, which is why it continues even today. At the very least, I had anticipated that the White House would be on solid footing in terms of dealing with a hostile press. I expected a highly skilled, coordinated group that knew how to push back on “fake news,” because that seemed to be a constant in Washington.
I could not have been more wrong. Not only was there no polished, professional team prepared for dealings with the press, it was if there was no previous experience with such dealings. Kayleigh herself was absolutely outstanding—she knew her stuff cold, and her preparation on a huge portfolio of issues was truly amazing. I was constantly in awe of her poise but even more at her total mastery of the material.
Other than Kayleigh, though, the White House communications team was amateurish at best. To my knowledge, they reported to Chief of Staff Mark Meadows. With one or two exceptions, the team was a group of young people, very nice, but in way over their heads. That left it up to me to defend my own credibility and to fight the discrediting of the president’s remarks on the pandemic. Without the unforgettable support of two extraordinary, truly exceptional people—the phenomenal Liz Horning, senior advisor to the Counsel to the President, and (outside Washington) a brilliant senior advisor to a prominent governor—I would have been almost totally on my own.
* * * * *
The pandemic had been an ongoing nightmare for eight months before I set foot in DC. In my eyes, the administration was in total disarray. They were sending out two contrary messages: the Task Force was pushing the Birx-Fauci lockdowns, while at the same time, the president was pushing for reopening. This conflict was not only chaotic; it was highlighted by the anti-Trump media. That created fear and uncertainty in the population. And through it all, hundreds of thousands of people were dying, despite the lockdowns. Yes, the elites—including the political class, the media, and professionals able to work from home—were inconvenienced, no doubt. But the bulk of the country, especially working class and poor families, was being destroyed by the closures and shutdowns.
On top of this gross failure of public health leadership, the media constantly threw gasoline on the fire by highlighting every negative about the pandemic, even when positive news was available. No opportunity to inflame the voters was going to be missed by what I now believe are the most despicable group of unprincipled liars one could ever imagine—the American media.
No question, the Trump administration’s communications team was overwhelmed; so perhaps I should have anticipated that they would also be unprepared for my casual introduction to the media. I was naive, though. I assumed the White House team understood that if I was delegitimized, then the president would be undermined as well. They certainly should have had enough experience by now to understand the need to present adequate credentials for presidential appointments. Clearly my assumptions were wrong. But even after witnessing their amateurish bungling in allowing a hostile media to define me, I was still not prepared for what happened.
An all-out attempt to undermine my credibility was immediately underway, involving gross distortions, straw man arguments based on blatant misrepresentations of my views, and straight-out lies. First, my background. I had been a health policy scholar for more than fifteen years, in an endowed senior faculty position at one of the most respected policy institutes in the world. Several years earlier, in 2012, I had pivoted from medicine to a focus on health policy, resigning from my faculty position as professor and chief of neuroradiology at Stanford University Medical Center. This career shift was accomplished after nearly three decades as a professor at America’s finest medical centers from coast to coast, twenty-five years in academic medicine at the very top of my field. I was an honorary member of several medical societies, a visiting professor all over the world and at nearly every major academic medical center in the country, a sought-after speaker who had written several acclaimed books, and a policy expert who had recently testified to Congress about the pandemic. I had never bothered to mention my academic background in public, let alone to anyone in the West Wing, because to me it was self-evident and frankly undignified.
None of that mattered. The media refused to be truthful about my background, engaging in propaganda tactics scarcely different from those used by regimes like the USSR or Communist China to discredit political enemies. Everyone had warned me that anyone willing to stand next to the president was going to be attacked, but the vitriol still threw me. It was not that I expected fairness. But I was not prepared for the total lack of integrity and even basic decency in America’s media. Willful distortion and lies to destroy anyone willing to answer the president’s call to help the country were now totally acceptable.
At one point, I walked into Rader’s office, shaking my head. “John,” I said, “I don’t think they know who I am. They don’t understand that this is not at all a political position.”
John looked at me with uncharacteristic intensity; his usual easygoing smile had disappeared. Having been in Washington for several years by then, he immediately set me straight. “No, Scott, you are the one who doesn’t understand. The moment you were introduced in that room, you became part of this administration.”
I was completely taken aback. I absolutely did not understand that, not one bit. None of my motivation for being there was political. What the hell was happening in this country? Were the media so venomous about Trump that they were willing to destroy someone who wanted to help the country, regardless of politics?
It wasn’t enough for me to point out over and over what I thought should be obvious—namely that I was asked to help precisely because I was in health policy, not epidemiology. To determine the best path forward in a health crisis with broad impacts and a wide array of possible responses, it should go without saying that government leaders must consult experts who could weigh the impact of the policies themselves. That’s the role of policy experts like myself with a broader scope of expertise than that of epidemiologists or immunologists. And that’s exactly why I was called to the White House. There were zero health policy scholars on the Task Force; no one with a medical background who also considered the impacts of the policies was advising the White House. And not once before my arrival did the harmful impact of the Task Force’s draconian efforts to stop the virus ever get mentioned, let alone undergo detailed discussion, by any of the other medical scientists in the room.
The media properly should have been calling out the Trump administration for months over the lack of health policy experts on the Task Force. In the end, the most egregious failure of the Task Force was its complete and utter disregard for the harmful impact of its recommended policies. This was outright immoral, an inexplicable betrayal of their most fundamental duty. I have no doubt it will go down as one of the greatest public health failures in history.
Yet now, regardless of my position and expertise, I was to be discredited. Why? Because I had the audacity to step forward and help the country alongside a president whom the media despised. That meant I had to be delegitimized, undermined, even destroyed. After all, it could not be the case, it must not be allowed to be true, that this president was listening to legitimate experts, academicians of the highest level, scientists with national and international reputations. Absolutely nothing would be permitted to change their settled narrative that Trump “wasn’t listening to the science.”
Totally disregarding my seventeen years in health policy and full-time position in a public policy institute, the media did their best to pigeonhole me as a radiologist and breathlessly denounced me as “not an epidemiologist.” Many times, I honestly wondered, who in their right mind would want health policy to be designed solely by someone as narrowly focused as an epidemiologist or a virologist or any basic scientist for that matter. I am still incredulous about that inane criticism, which I also heard repeated by former colleagues in academic medicine who rushed to discredit me because I had disregarded their advice to refuse to help the Trump administration.
The absurdity peaked when I heard what surely wins the prize for dumbest comment of the year about me from the press. In response to hearing my clinical opinion that we expected the president to recover from COVID and come back to work soon, Chris Wallace of Fox News blurted out to his Fox colleague, “He’s not an epidemiologist!” As if the opinion of an epidemiologist on a clinical medical question would be more credible than a doctor with decades of experience consulting on thousands of patients with infectious diseases and other illnesses in the US and throughout the world. Wallace further exhorted his viewers: “Follow the scientists! Listen to people like Anthony Fauci. Listen to people like Deborah Birx!” People whose entire careers had been confined to bureaucratic agencies would be the ones to look to for clinical perspective, I guess.
Eventually, the bizarre “epidemiology” claim became simply comical. It’s still a source of laughter in my family, who often start a joke by saying, “Well, I may not be an epidemiologist, but …” In the end, it was like living in a Kafka novel, though with far more dangerous consequences. Major news journalists were so blinded by their political hatred, so willfully ignorant, perhaps so frightened themselves, that they could not process simple common sense. These people were the filters and purveyors of important information to the public. Hence, their ignorance generated even more fear in an extraordinarily fragile nation.
I still wonder how much lasting psychological damage was caused by the American media, especially to our younger generation. Adding to the lunacy, as my Stanford and Harvard epidemiology colleagues frequently reminded me, cackling through their laughter, they didn’t even realize that Dr. Fauci was not an epidemiologist either—perhaps the one thing he and I had in common.
Meanwhile I was also taking fire from my colleagues back at Stanford. In September 2020, soon after I had been introduced publicly as an advisor to the president, a group of Stanford medical school professors issued and actively publicized a letter that advanced several false claims about my policy views. Claiming they were “calling attention to the falsehoods and misrepresentations of science recently fostered by Dr. Scott Atlas,” they organized and disseminated their statement by Stanford’s internal listserve email, and it was posted on a School of Medicine website—violating Stanford University policies while giving the false impression of an official institutional opinion. They were quickly forced to pull the posting down.
The Stanford Provost reprimanded them by writing, “You can use your University title and professional affiliations, however, you must make it clear that the views and opinions expressed are your personal views and do not reflect the official policy or position of Stanford…. In the last week, we saw an inappropriate use of our official Academic Council email list. A letter from some medical school faculty was written and signed, consistent with the freedom of faculty to voice their opinions. However, the letter was distributed to all members of the Academic Council using a University email list and that was not consistent with policy. That will not happen again.”
Responding to their shockingly inappropriate letter, Dr. Joel Zinberg in a September 2020 piece in National Review called “Cancel Culture Comes to Medicine” noted what was really happening. “Atlas has been singled out for professional erasure by 98 of his former Stanford medical, epidemiological, and health-policy colleagues because he had the temerity to join President Trump’s coronavirus task force and advocate rational measures for safely reopening the economy.” He also reprimanded Stanford by stating the obvious: “The academy is supposed to encourage and tolerate vigorous debate, not end it with mob condemnation. Experts can and do disagree in good faith over the next steps to be taken to handle Covid-19. Disagreement in good faith ought to be accompanied by full and open discussion, but that is not what the Stanford letter is trying to achieve.”
Victor Davis Hanson, a distinguished scholar of history at Stanford and Hoover Institution, also called out “the unscientific attack on the science of Dr. Scott Atlas.” He posed a question no one honestly needed to contemplate. “So why—other than politics—is there now a concerted media attack on Dr. Scott Atlas, an adviser to the Trump administration on COVID-19 policy?”