Dr. Scott Atlas: On Censorship, Academic Freedom, and the Pandemic

Dr. Scott Atlas -

Editor's Note: We are honored to publish Dr. Scott Atlas' remarks from today's Stanford Health Policy Conference, “Pandemic Policy: Planning the Future, Assessing the Past."

To speak about censorship, we first must acknowledge the factual context.

Lockdowns were instituted, they failed to stop the dying, they failed to stop the spread - that’s the data: Bjornskov, 2021; Bendavid, 2021; Agarwal, 2021; Herby, 2022; Kerpen, 2023; Ioannidis, 2024.

And yes, lockdowns also inflicted massive damage on children and literally killed people:

  • Bianchi 2023 Journal of Economic Dynamics and Control:
    Over the next 15-20 years, the unemployment alone will cause 900k to 1.2 million EXTRA American deaths – from the economic lockdown, not the virus.
  • Ioannidis 2024 PNAS: “(from 2020 thru July 2023), the US would have had 1.6 million fewer deaths if it had the performance of Sweden.”
  • Any judgment of the US response lies at the hands of the lockdowners: Birx, who wrote the official federal Trump policy to every governor before, during, and after my 3.5 months in Washington; Fauci; Redfield, the CDC; and the university “experts” - including at Stanford - who convinced officials to implement their lockdown strategy.

Unfortunately, my advice – “targeted protection” -was rejected, with rare exceptions, like Florida.

“Targeted protection”– that meant increasing the protection of the high-risk people, because the lockdowns were not protecting them, and ending the lockdowns and school closures that were destroying the poor and our children, first advised in March 2020, then repeatedly for months …And then formally codified in October 2020 by Jay, Martin, and Sunetra in their Great Barrington Declaration.

Remember - Lockdowns were not caused by the virus. Human beings decided to do lockdowns - they OWN the results. Their lockdowns were implemented. Their policies failed - and killed and destroyed millions. That's fact. That's the data.

This was a Health Policy problem.

Virology is NOT health policy; epidemiology is NOT health policy - these are only pieces of a larger, more complex puzzle.

While credentials are not the sole determinant of expertise, I was the ONLY health policy scholar on the White House Task Force. The stunning fact is – I was the only one focused on stopping both the death and destruction from the virus and the death and destruction from the policy itself.

That’s health policy. That's my field.

As Hannah Arendt observed in “Eichmann in Jerusalem”:

“What has come to light is neither nihilism nor cynicism, as one might have expected, but a quite extraordinary confusion over elementary questions of morality.”

Censorship first was done by the Media companies themselves – when it counted most – in 2020, before the Biden administration, when school closures and lockdowns were being implemented:

  • May 2020, YouTube bragged about its “aggressive policies against misinformation”;
  • August 2020, Facebook shamelessly admitted to the Washington Post it had already taken down 7 million posts on the pandemic;
  • My interviews as Advisor to the President were pulled down: by YouTube on September 11, 2020, by Twitter blocking me on October 18, 2020.

You might think the public – in a free society - should know what the Advisor to the President was saying?

Mackay wrote: “Of all the offspring of Time, Error is the most ancient and is so old and familiar an acquaintance that Truth, when discovered, comes upon most of us like an intruder, and meets the intruder’s welcome.”

And what was the response to Truth at Stanford and other universities?

Censorship: character assassination, intimidation, and censure.

It was also nuanced – being told “stop writing x” and “write an apology for x”; colleagues told “stop defending Scott”; no more speaking at institutional events; and more.

And understand clearly - when you censor health policy, it's not simply an abstract evil, a less-than-ideal environment for diverse views. People die. And people died from the censorship of correct health policy.

Why is Censorship used? To shut someone up, yes; but more importantly, to deceive the public – to stop others from hearing, to convince a naïve public there is a “consensus”.

But TRUTH is not a Team Sport. Truth is not determined by consensus, or by numbers of people who agree, or by titles.  It is discovered by debate, proven by critical analysis of evidence. Arguments are won by data and logic, not by personal attack or censoring others.

THAT is why lockdowners - at Stanford and elsewhere - needed censorship and propaganda; they couldn’t win on the data; they needed to delegitimize and demonize opposing views as highly dangerous, to convince the public.

And especially their LIE – the strawman “herd immunity strategy” that if you are against lockdowns, you are for “letting it rip”.  I never advised “let it rip”. It was never even mentioned, not once, in the White House - And that is not targeted protection!

We now have a frightening crisis of both competence AND integrity. Lockdowners will never admit they were wrong - on lockdowns, schools, masks, & vax mandates - and that I and others here were right – because that would take integrity.   

But TRUTH cannot be changed. Churchill was right – “Truth is incontrovertible. Panic may resent it. Ignorance may deride it. Malice may distort it. But there it is.”

And TRUTH means:

  • The earth is round
  • 1+1 = 2
  • Masks do not stop the spread of a viral respiratory infection
  • Lockdowns killed & destroyed millions, especially, sinfully, the poor

Now, those same people run from accountability, using a perversion of logic rivaling Kafka - they want to blame those of us who disagreed with what was done - for the failure of what was done!

As a professor and physician at top universities for 30 years – as a graduate of the University of Chicago School of Medicine, when facts mattered, I fear for our students. Students cannot learn critical thinking without hearing differing views, especially ideas they may not agree with – and critical thinking is THE most important lesson to learn in college.

Yet many faculty members of our acclaimed universities are dangerously intolerant of opinions contrary to their favored narrative. Some employ toxic smears and organized rebukes against those of us who disagreed - and, worse, who dared to help the country - our country, their country - under a president they happened to despise.

I am proud to be an outlier - happily proven right when the inliers are so wrong – but Cancel Culture stops others from speaking.  I received 100’s of emails from doctors and scientists all over the country, including from this institution, Stanford, and from inside the NIH - saying “keep talking, Scott, you’re 100 percent right, but we’re afraid for our families and our jobs”.

But even more destructive, it risks that future experts with a reputation to lose will be unwilling to serve their country in contentious times, a disastrous legacy to leave to our children.

To conclude, Truth may be slowly prevailing, but being proven right is not sufficient.

A peaceful society is built on trust. That won’t continue if it’s filled by people who lack the moral compass to admit their heinous errors and who refuse to allow views counter to their own. We all need the courage to step up and act with certainty on Arendt’s “elementary questions of morality”. 

Finally, to the students, never forget what GK Chesterton said:

“Right is right, even if nobody does it. Wrong is wrong, even if everybody is wrong about it.” 

Scott W. Atlas, MD is the Robert Wesson Senior Fellow in health policy at Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and served as Advisor to the President and on the White House Coronavirus Task Force from August through November 2020.

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