Well, we are very, very blessed to have a keynote speaker tonight while you're being
served food, and this is going to be just a fantastic, fantastic talk.
I'm really looking forward to it.
We're talking about restoring trust in medicine and science, and tonight we're going to be
treated with a wonderful, wonderful, I'm sure, speech by Dr. Scott Atlas, a physician, and
the Robert Wesson Senior Fellow in Health Policy at the Hoover Institution at Stanford
University.
He investigates the impact of government and the private sector on access, on quality
and pricing in healthcare, trends in medical science and technology innovation, key economic
and civil liberties issues, which we've been talking about all day today, related to health
policies.
He is a frequent policy advisor to policymakers in the United States, in other countries,
and Dr. Atlas was a special advisor to POTUS, the president there, and a member of the White
House Coronavirus Task Force in 2020, has advised several candidates for
President, members of the U.S. Congress, and health agencies before his policy
appointment at the Hoover Institution. He was professor and chief of
Neuroradiology at Stanford University Medical Center for 14 years and an
academic medicine for 25 years. He is the author of more than 100 peer-reviewed
papers and 200 policy pieces in numerous books, received many awards from leading
institutions. But what I've loved about watching Scott from afar, I just met him
tonight for the first time, is he's not just brilliant obviously, but he's the
kind of brilliant that doesn't need to shout. He's got the facts, he's got
reason, he's got the quiet courage necessary to say what needs to be said
and it's louder than a megaphone. So please get ready for a keynote that's
I'm sure going to be sharp and clear and maybe even inspiring.
So with that, I now present to you Dr. Scott Atlas for your keynote.
Thank you very much, very kind of you.
Well, thank you for that introduction.
Good evening everyone.
Thanks to the organizers.
Great to see many of my friends and supporters here.
Great to be in a room where people believe in personal freedom.
Actually, I live in California, so you can imagine that.
I spoke at a recent international meeting, the Alliance
for Responsible Citizenship, or ARC, in London,
which is a society begun with Jordan Peterson.
And I was asked to address the question,
can institutions be reformed?
ARC joins voices from all over the world to discuss how
to refresh institutions and the best values of Western heritage,
values that provided the world
with history's most successful societies,
but particularly the commitment to freedom.
I asked that audience to first consider why at this moment
in history are we even focusing
on how institutions should be reformed
or if institutions can even be reformed.
Because for decades we've been aware
that institutions were failing.
Editorialized this on as journalism,
wasteful corrupt government, agenda-driven schools
and universities with many conservative faculty
and even students self-censoring,
afraid to voice their unpopular views.
And the answer, of course, is COVID.
It's the pandemic mismanagement, specifically,
the most tragic breakdown of leadership and ethics
that free societies have seen in our lifetimes.
It's COVID that fully exposed the massive
across-the-board institutional failure,
including a shocking overt censorship in our country
and the loss of freedoms and frank violation of human rights
in this country when explicitly founded
on a commitment to freedom.
And yet, oddly, the pandemic remained invisible
at the ARC conference,
unmentioned by dozens of speakers addressing freedom.
It was the elephant in the room, just as explaining the truth
about lockdowns, the pseudoscience, masks,
and social distancing mandates, closing churches and businesses,
prohibiting visits to our elderly parents
and nursing homes while they die.
All of that is missing today
from the public statements about healthcare.
Today, in the wake of COVID,
we are left with an undeniable crisis in health.
Trust in health guidance has plummeted more rapidly since 2019
than any other government institution,
with almost two-thirds of people rating the FDA and CDC as,
quote, only fair or poor.
Half of America no longer has much confidence in science itself.
Trust in our own doctors and hospitals dropped from 71% in 2019 to 40% in 2024.
That loss of trust is part of the disgraceful legacy of those
who held power, who we relied on to use critical thinking
and an ethical compass on behalf of the public,
who were handed the precious gifts of automatic credibility
and nearly blind trust.
To understand how to move forward to restore that trust,
it's important to first acknowledge basic facts.
And we have to say them repeatedly, because you may not realize it,
but outside this room there's a whole country out there
where most people do not know the facts and do not agree with what many
of us think in this room.
And the reason we have to say the facts is because we must live
in a society where facts are acknowledged.
Facts are the starting point of all rational discussion.
Remember, lockdowns were not caused by the virus.
Human beings decided to impose the lockdowns,
and lockdowns were instituted.
They failed to stop the dying, and they failed to stop the spread.
That's the data.
And lockdowners ignored Henderson's classic review 15 years earlier,
well-known, showing that lockdowns were ineffective
and extremely harmful, and they rejected the alternative,
targeted protection that was recommended in national media first
in March 2020 independently by John Ioannidis, by David Katzen,
by me, and then repeatedly for months.
And that's important because it was based
on data already known then back in spring of 2020.
It was not learned seven months later in 2020
when my friends wrote the Great Barrington Declaration,
or in 2021, or 2022, or 2023.
And the Burks Fauci lockdowns directly inflicted massive damage
on our children and literally killed millions of people,
especially most sinfully the poor.
The US alone would have had 1.6 million fewer deaths
through just 2023 July if it had the performance of Sweden.
And over the next 15 to 20 years, the unemployment alone,
not the virus, will kill another million Americans.
Beyond the reckless disregard for the foreseeable death,
America's leaders imposed sinful harms and long-lasting damage,
mandatory school closings, forced isolation of teens
and college students, and required injections
of healthy children with experimental drugs attempting
to shield adults.
These are permanent black marks on America.
It's also worth remembering this was a health policy problem.
While credentials are not the sole determinant
of expertise, I was the only health policy scholar
on the White House task force advising the president.
Virology is not health policy.
Epidemiology is not health policy.
Clinical medicine is not health policy.
Those are pieces of a larger, more complicated puzzle.
As Hannah Arendt observed in Eichmann and Jerusalem,
quote, 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.
More than massive incompetence, more than a fundamental lack
of critical thinking, we saw the disappearance
of society's moral compass so pervasive
that we have rightfully lost trust in our institutions,
in our leaders, and most importantly,
in our fellow citizens.
Trust is essential to function in a diverse society.
Why did free people accept these draconian,
unprecedented illogical lockdowns?
That is the question.
And the answer reveals the reason
for today's silence on the pandemic.
Clearly, censorship and propaganda are key parts
of the explanation.
They're tools to control people.
They convinced the public of two fallacies, that the consensus
of experts on lockdowns existed, and dissenters
to that false consensus were highly dangerous.
Remember, censorship was first done
by the media companies themselves in 2020
when it counted most, before Biden took office,
when school closures and lockdowns were being implemented.
In May 2020, YouTube bragged about aggressive policies
against misinformation.
August 2020, Facebook bragged they had taken down
seven million posts on the pandemic.
My interviews as advisor to President Trump
were pulled down by YouTube in September 2020.
I was blocked by Twitter in October 2020
as advisor to the president, you might think the public
in a free society should know what the advisor
to the president was saying.
What was the response to truth
at America's universities are centers
for the free exchange of ideas, including my employer,
Stanford University.
It was character assassination, intimidation,
and to me, formal censure.
Why is censorship used?
To shut someone up, yes, but far more importantly,
to deceive the public, to stop others from hearing,
to convince a naive public there is a consensus on truth.
But truth is not a team sport.
Truth is not determined by consensus or by numbers of people who agree
or by titles, it's discovered by debate,
proven by critical analysis of evidence.
Arguments are won by data, by logic, not by personal attack.
I'm proud to be an outlier, happily proven right when the inliers are
so wrong, but cancel culture is very effective
because it stops others from speaking.
I received hundreds of emails from doctors and scientists all over,
including from Stanford, from other professors,
and from inside the NIH itself, saying, keep talking, Scott.
You're 100% right.
We're afraid for our families and our jobs.
No one at Stanford Medical School, no one spoke publicly
in support of me at that time.
Only one person who was highly visible spoke up,
and that was Martin Kaldorf, a Harvard epidemiologist who wrote
in and publicly challenged the 98 signatories at Stanford
to debate on whether I was correct or not.
Of course, none of them accepted Martin's challenge.
But that alone doesn't explain today's silence
about that extraordinary moral collapse.
And it is not simply issue fatigue.
It is also that so many smart people,
including many claiming to support the new disruptors,
bought into the irrational measures when it counted most,
when our kids and when the poor were being destroyed.
Uncomfortable to discuss and admit,
but far more fundamental when we think about what happened
than the SARS to origin or Anthony Fauci or even the vaccine.
That acquiescence, that silence, that cowardice,
that failure to grasp reality are inconvenient truths
that no one wants to admit.
Today, disruption is sorely needed,
and many of us are basking in the resounding victory
of history's most disruptive politician,
President Donald J. Trump.
As promised, his administration is moving quickly,
disrupting on several fronts, national security, trade,
immigration, crime, and perhaps most importantly,
with Elon Musk's effort to eliminate government waste
and fraud and protect our money because, remember, the government has no money, as Margaret Thatcher
so eloquently put it. It's our money. It's taxpayer money.
In healthcare, important changes in the status quo have begun. First, with Elon Musk's Doe
Jeffords streamlining tens of thousands of Department of HHS bureaucrats while exposing
massive fraud and waste in programs like Medicaid.
And Secretary of HHS Bobby Kennedy has also initiated an important new dialogue with his
Make America Healthy Again mantra, focused mainly on wholesome foods to achieve the goal
everyone wants, good health for themselves and their children.
And no doubt, ensuring safety of all drugs and eliminating corruption in pharma and the
food industry are also crucial to health, and I'm a strong supporter of these ideas.
We also have two excellent appointments in health, my good friends and colleagues Marty
McCary to FDA and Jay Bhattacharya to NIH.
Both Marty and Jay are highly knowledgeable, have top training expertise, and are committed
to critical thinking, to legitimate science, and most importantly, to the free scientific
debate.
But I am concerned.
I'm concerned that most are simultaneously eager to turn the page
on the human rights violations, on the censorship,
on the true constitutional crisis.
No setting the record straight.
No official recognition of facts.
No accountability.
The ultimate disrupter won and his disrupter appointees will now be
in charge so somehow all is well.
Silently turning the page
on modern history's most egregious societal failure would be
extraordinarily harmful.
failure to issue official statements of truth
by the new government health agency leaders
about the pandemic will prevent closure
for millions of people who lost loved ones
and whose children suffered such harms.
And it would completely eliminate all accountability.
Remember, only public accountability
will prevent recurrence.
And accountability is necessary to restore trust
in institutions and leadership.
but as I said most importantly,
trust among our fellow citizens.
My second concern, yes, the era of trusting experts
solely on the basis of credentials must be over.
But will we now see a backlash
against the failed expert clash usher
in a different wave of false belief?
We cannot forget legitimate expertise is legitimate.
Known medical science is still valid.
Unfounded theories based on simple correlations
are not scientifically sound.
And we do not want to inadvertently replicate
the cancel culture that harms so many
with another wave of demonizing anyone
who doesn't 100% support the new narratives.
And that's already begun.
If you disagree with any of the incoming opinions,
then you're, quote, bought by pharma.
While blind support is just as bad as blind opposition,
we must use critical thinking.
What reforms are needed now?
The first step to restore trust is formal official statements of truth on the lockdowns,
the mask and pseudoscience mandates from HHS, NIH, FDA, CDC and CMS leaders.
We need to forbid by law all shutdowns and reset that the CDC and other agencies are
only advisory.
They recommend.
They don't set laws.
They give information.
They don't have the power to set mandates, and if we think our guaranteed freedoms are
not always valid during a crisis, then those are not guaranteed freedoms.
We need to add term limits, I suggested five years, to all mid and top level health agency
positions.
We cannot continue the perverse incentives from career bureaucrats accruing personal
power like Anthony Fauci and Deborah Birx with their 30-plus years in government.
All new heads of HHS, FDA, NIH, CDC, and CMS should be prohibited from post-government
company board positions in the health sectors they regulate.
It's unethical. It's an overt, shocking conflict of interest. Why hasn't that been announced?
We need to forbid drug royalty sharing by employees of the NIH, the FDA, and the CDC.
I think many of us know that $325 million of royalties were shared with pharma by employees
over the 10 years prior to the pandemic.
That's a shocking, disgraceful conflict of interest.
I am opposed to all mandated drugs.
First, as everyone here knows, the essence
of all ethical medical practice is informed consent.
What kind of free country requires you to inject the drug
into your child or yourself.
In public health, you give the information.
You shouldn't need to force anything legitimate,
but you do need to prove the case.
We need to require the immediate posting of all discussions
in FDA, CDC, and NIH meetings.
They work for us.
What are they saying we should know real time?
We need accountability for all government funding.
We have over 15 universities getting more
than $500 million per year just from the NIH alone.
The essence of research is free debate.
That's what legitimate research hinges on.
If they're thwarting that with intimidation or say faculty censures,
why would they be entitled to U.S. taxpayer money?
More broadly, I and others are working on policies
to ensure the free exchange of ideas.
That's the essence of all legitimate science.
the basis of the mission of education.
Ideological gatekeeping in public discourse has no place
in a free society, especially in science and health.
Here's the point.
The solution to misinformation is more information.
There is no one who should be trusted to be the arbiter of truth.
Ultimately, though most solutions don't come
from institutions or government.
They come from individuals.
I fear we have a disastrous void in courage
in our society still today.
To quote C.S. Lewis, courage is not simply one of the virtues,
but it's in the form of every virtue at its testing point.
We cannot have a peaceful free society if it's filled with people
who lack the courage to speak and act with certainty
on what Hannah Arendt described as elementary questions of morality.
Finally, if there are any young people here, but to everyone,
We can never forget what G.K. Chesterton said.
Right is right, even if nobody does it.
Wrong is wrong, even if everybody's wrong about it.
Thank you.
Thank you.
I think we have time for questions.
And we have roving microphones.
Raise your hand and a microphone will magically appear.
Thank you very much.
I would love to have the printed text of what you just said, but my question is, we have
of a president who I think God spared to do what he's doing,
but he also is a person of great ego and we either love him
or find that annoying, but what do you think is going
on regarding whether Trump can ever admit
that Warp Speed was a disaster?
Okay, the question is will President Trump
in your words admit the Warp Speed was a disaster?
Well, I have a little bit of a different take.
I think warp speed encompasses a lot of things, number one.
So there's logistical things, there were certain things
that were done well, but there were other things
that were done very, very poorly.
But that's, you're not asking me my opinion.
You're asking me if President Trump will get up there
and say warp speed was a disaster.
The answer is emphatically no.
That's a zero.
No.
And I actually don't think warps, you know,
I understand what you're saying.
I think warp speed, like I say, is a very different thing
from the vaccines, the science behind the vaccines.
In my view, I think we have to look at this as we have a president
of the United States who is a layman, a layman.
I'm going to use that term.
This is sort of a medical audience here.
And it is not, although there is one person at the top.
When you're presented, I'm trying to be empathetic here.
When you're presented by all your advisors, not me,
I didn't get there until July, end of July 2020.
When you're presented as a layman during a crisis
by saying this is America's top infectious disease expert,
Anthony Fauci, okay, this is the woman who, and I heard this said
in the White House, by the way, this is the woman who cured AIDS,
Deborah Birx, she was an ambassador
under the Obama administration to the HIV, in the HIV era.
And so when you're told these things by people who you trust,
you know, you're sort of, okay, now despite all that, what I saw
and personally in the Oval Office and elsewhere,
was President Trump agreed with me by the time I got there.
And he, in fact, before I got there,
wanted to open the schools and all this kind of stuff.
But that didn't happen, obviously.
And so we had a parallel effort.
The federal policy was the White House Coronavirus Task Force.
He was not part of that, even though it was under his watch.
So it's sort of a complicated, it's
It's more complicated than the question may allude to, but the answer to your question
is no.
I think if somebody has the mic, they should stand up with the mic.
Hi.
Hi, Dr. Scodd-Atlas, thank you for that presentation.
So Sean Needham, I'm a pharmacist, and I just want to ask, so what kind of power does RFK
Jr. or Marty McCary have to actually pull the COVID shots off the market immediately?
I don't have a definitive answer to the question.
The question is, do they have the power to pull these COVID vaccines off the market?
I would imagine that the answer is yes, they do.
Because the FDA can determine and say something is not safe or whatever.
So my impression is the answer is yes, they have the power to do that.
Thank you for that response.
Thank you for that response.
And I can tell you, as a pharmacist, I've seen drugs that have way less side effects
that have been pulled from the market before these have been pulled.
So I mean, hopefully, I mean, I'm cautiously optimistic, but I think it should happen immediately.
Yeah, I think there's a lot of moving parts to the vaccine story, the hazards, the lawsuits,
FDA. I think this story, I think it's tough to speculate exactly what's going
to happen but that story is not going away. Let's put that way. Thank you for
joining us. I'm Stuart Tankersley. I'm a family medicine doctor. I've treated
almost a thousand vaccine injury patients and like several of these people
I think there needs to be a Nuremberg trial for these people that did this, but more importantly
on the short end, what do you think needs to be done to promote from NIH, HHS and all
of them to treat these millions of vaccine injuries, what needs to be done to move in
that direction?
Well, I think that they are moving in that direction.
My impression, okay, is that there is an effort inside to, you know, first of all, you know,
we have to be patient.
I mean, Marty and Jay were just sworn in like four days ago.
So I'm good friends with them and I always have to sort of wonder if I'm not being patient.
But I think there is a clear, it would be sort of silly to think that that sort of area
of vaccine injury is not going to be a big focus.
I think it is going to be a big focus, but I don't know exactly how they're going to
proceed.
You know, I think one thing besides patients is, patients, ENCE, is there is a reality
of Washington.
It's one of the reasons why I said I don't want to participate back in November when
and I was asked, because you don't just walk in and say, okay,
we're going to do X, Y, and Z, and therefore it's done.
It doesn't work that way.
It's a Leviathan.
It's a massive and very vicious place.
And there's a lot of people.
You can walk, the career bureaucrats in these agencies,
they're literally career bureaucrats.
They're there for decades.
They don't need to listen to a new administration from their point
of view because they're all last though.
I always said the reason that yet Fauci last
through several administrations is not because he was excellent.
It was simply that he was very skillful
at navigating a highly politicized environment.
And that's what it is.
And so when you walk in there and say we're going to do X, Y, and Z.
I'm going to reorganize this and reorganize that.
Okay. I mean, it may be very worthwhile.
I think it's naive to think
that this stuff is just accomplished so easily.
And I'm very concerned.
That is one of my concerns is that, you know, again,
like I'm good friends with some of these people.
But if you've never been there,
it's very hard to fathom what you're up against.
And if you're naive about it, you're going to be devoured.
So I think, again, sorry to be long-winded,
but the answer is yes, I am certain there
will be a focus on that from everything that I can see.
But I'm also, I'm cautiously optimistic about these things.
Cautiously optimistic.
Scott, I know how rigorous you are
in evaluating the scientific literature
from personal experience working with you at Penn.
But what was your take?
This happened a couple of months before you got to Washington.
President Trump had ordered the national supply
of hydroxychloroquine to be released through HHS.
And that was blocked by the FDA and BARDA.
And there were also two fraudulent papers
from the surgesphere that had to be retracted.
Have you ever seen that level of academic fraud
in the journals like that before?
You know, a couple of comments.
Number one, I wasn't aware of the academic fraud.
I'm not 100% sure.
You know, I always have to, I always think about this.
I don't know if it was all new.
I feel like most of it was just exposed.
And we didn't know what was going on.
Now, at that level, I never saw the editorialization
of the scientific journals, of the publications,
of the blockage of publications.
and it also is of the drug availability.
Of the use, you know, most drugs, I would say something
like the numbers in like 30 to 50%
of prescriptions are off label.
Okay, but that was taken away from doctors
and we had somebody who was a pharmacist here.
And so, it was shocking to me.
Again, I was sort of idealistic.
I've lost a little bit of the idealism, I guess.
But I don't know how much of it existed before
with the manipulation of the data, of the narrative,
of the publication of the voice of doctors
who were saying something anti-mainstream.
The other, like, anecdote I want to say is,
when I was first called in and said, would you talk
to the president in July of 2020?
That's what they first asked me.
Would you just come in and talk to the president?
And so I said, well, of course.
People are dying.
He's being advised by people who don't know what they're talking about.
And so the first thing I said when I walked into the Oval Office was,
by the way, you should have said hydroxychloroquine doesn't work.
Because then people would have said, oh, we must prove it works.
So, yeah, I mean, I think we're all shocked by the fraud of what happened.
But again, like I have to reiterate, this is not over.
Okay, I don't trust that somehow we won and, you know,
and so therefore, okay, it's all solved.
It's not, it's that old saying, it's not the beginning of the end.
It's not the end of the beginning.
It's the beginning of the beginning.
And there is no disarming going on on the other side, not at all.
Thank you.
Oh, okay.
You are an expert on public health policy.
That's your core competence.
Can you share your point of view on the World Health Organization or the need for a structure
like the WHO?
As we're seeing the United States pulling back WHO facing fiscal crisis, what's your
prescription doctor?
Yeah.
I mean, this is a very good question, of course.
You know, the WHO, I said before President Trump went into office that we need to at
at least temporarily, withhold all funding and pledges
to the World Health Organization
because it's grossly incompetent.
They've been failures over and over again.
It's massively corrupt.
And they actually went so far as to praise China
for their transparency on COVID
at the time that China blocked the WHO
from going into the Wuhan labs.
This is how corrupt the entire organization was.
So I completely agreed with, and we are the biggest funders
as a country basically of the WHO.
So we need to have accountability and that has to be fixed.
Now then President Trump sort of announced later we're out of WHO,
which I'm not 100% sure what the status of that is.
But I do think that in the right hands with the right scientists
in the right public health experts and the right transparency
and accountability,
that the international public health organization could be a
good one.
That does not mean that we should ever
and no sovereign nation should ever delegate authority
to any third party, particularly an international.
Why would we do that?
So, you know, as you and probably many people
are aware that the Biden administration had endorsed
emphatically this pandemic treaty that was being crafted
by the WHO without even seeing it.
They said we're 100% behind it even though it was in draft form
and being revised, so it was insane.
And I'm completely opposed to any,
I can't believe any sovereign nation would want to do
that kind of thing where they're controlling your intellectual
property, they're forcing you
to distribute what you develop at certain prices or free.
They're declaring an emergency in your country.
Okay, this is just completely unacceptable.
But again, I do think there is a value more so for non,
for undeveloped countries, for low income countries,
to have public health assistance,
to have public health guidance, to have public health efforts
like the World Health Organization is supposed
to do, so the bottom line is I don't think it's a worthless organization
if it's done correctly, but as it stands right now,
we shouldn't be funding a WHO.
Hello, my name is Tracy Hollister from North Carolina.
I was Kennedy's deputy director, deputy elector director on his campaign.
But before that, I wanted to say, I just respect you for your courage and your speaking out.
I got to organize a COVID and the Academy conference
and recruit people at Stanford,
and I became so acutely aware of the pain
you must have faced with that censorship letter.
So I just wanted to share that with you.
Thank you.
My question is about gain-of-function research.
It seems to be the elephant in the room.
So many people are not talking about it.
What I want to know is, what is the responsibility
and ability for both HHS and Trump,
or even the likelihood of them,
to talk about how unethical,
how deeply unethical gain-of-function research is,
how we have been leading it through Fauci and Collins,
and start to reverse the U.S. funding of it,
both in Athens, Georgia, and Wisconsin,
and the labs in Ukraine,
because if we don't shut these labs down,
we'd have more pandemics.
So what do you think can be done about that?
Yeah, gain-of-function research is a complicated topic
that I think has been oversimplified.
So A, millions of dollars, this is true, factually true,
were funding Wuhan lab dangerous virus research,
so-called gain-of-function research in Wuhan at a time
when it was banned in the United States.
And that was the NIH funding it.
that was Francis Collins and Anthony Fauci.
That's a fact that was reported by the Inspector General back
in the sort of second half of the second decade of 2000s.
So that can't be okay.
The topic of gain-of-function research though is complicated
to people because you can make, it's all about what you define
as gain-of-function research.
And I think broad sweeping decrees
about gain-of-function research, there's some pitfalls to that.
You can make the case that a lot of molecular biology,
molecular genetics research, maybe even all of it,
is gain-of-function in the loose sense of the word.
I just think it's sort of complicated.
I know Bobby Kennedy has spoken out, totally opposed,
to gain-of-function research.
I know Jay Bhattachary has said he's totally opposed
to gain-of-function research.
On the other hand, there are a lot of very good molecular geneticists
who are not.
It's simply that the way it's done and you don't sit there
and fund a sloppy lab in a third world country
to start doing dangerous research.
It doesn't mean all dangerous research should be banned.
So I'm not really in the camp of blanket ban,
end of function research and like some kind of a simplistic statement
because it's not so simple.
In fact, I was sitting there with Sinatra Gupta and Jay at a meeting,
and I don't know if everybody knows who Sinatra Gupta is,
but she's really superb, knowledgeable in everything about viruses
and research and getting a function.
She's the opposite.
She, and I'm not saying that, okay, somebody who's an expert says no,
therefore I agree with that.
saying it's a discussion to be had rather than an immediate ban.
That's my opinion.
I know others may disagree.
But I think we need to have this really flushed out
because I actually view the gain of function discussion by people
in the Congress at their Senate hearing.
Why did they focus on that?
Okay, I'm going to give them
that they thought it was dangerous research.
They don't know what they're talking
about the people in the Congress.
They have zero knowledge about this stuff.
But they want to pretend they do.
That's okay.
It's essentially dangerous, but they're also doing it
to divert the attention from everything I just spoke about
because they were involved.
They supported the lockdowns.
They supported the school closure.
The congressmen, including the republicans and the democrats.
They don't want to talk about that,
but it's easy to vilify Fauci or gain a function.
So I think everything that's discussed,
we have to be very thoughtful.
The topic of gain of function is complicated to me
and I think we need the debate.
We need the thorough scientific discussion and airing
of this to the public.
But I'm not sure it's such a straightforward issue.
That's just my opinion.
Hi, Dr. Atlas.
Thank you so much.
Everything that we went through could happen again tomorrow
because of one thing, and that's the PREP Act.
What are your thoughts, ideas from a policy point of view
and lobbying, this is what doesn't get touched on very much.
One, the PREP Act.
Two, the Bayh-Dole Act and the malaligned incentives
with universities and federal funding and patents.
And number three, the Smith-Munt Act,
propagandizing the American people.
I'm sorry, could you repeat the question again?
Okay, the three acts.
PREP Act, the Bayh-Dole Act, and then the Smith-Munt Act
that allows propaganda on the American people from our own government?
Yeah. Well, I think we need to seriously reform all.
We need to take a look at, and this is what I'm sort of most excited about.
We need to take a look at everything that the government is funding
and making all the funding that we as a government give
with taxpayer money accountable to the public.
We cannot have, and we need to look at shielding from liability.
We need to look at all these laws.
We need to look at the way that the indirect costs are allocated.
All these things are really things
that are controllable by the government.
So, the problem is that the status quo has feeds
on the status quo always.
And that's why, that is why the most essential part of the election
to me, the essential part of Donald Trump, is we need a disruptor.
No matter what he does, we need the disruption in my view.
And because we're never going to get it, I don't think we're going
to get it again in our lifetimes, frankly.
I think this is it.
And so we're, I think all of these sort of congressional,
very complicated legislations and acts
that may have been all well intended have severe unintended
consequences that now we know.
And so they're going to be re-looked at.
The problem is I may point out, I put this on Twitter the other day,
you know I happen to think Elon Musk is probably the most important person
for freedom in my lifetime.
And the problem with Elon Musk is he has the same position that I had
which is called special government employee and that's 130 days
and that's it.
So he's done in about six weeks.
at least being inside, and I think people don't realize
that just like I left, I wasn't fired, I didn't quit
in a rage or anything, my appointment ended, and so that was it,
and he's out, and so a lot of the disruption we hope to see,
but I'm not before he leaves, I am somewhat skeptical
that there will be legislative disruption.
Congress, I don't trust them.
I don't have a lot of respect for most people in Congress.
I don't trust them.
Their main incentive is to be re-elected.
That's it.
And so it's a cynical thing to say, but I'm concerned about that.
I have a question.
I'm internal medicine and I treat a lot of Medicare patients
and I really like the new name Independent Medical Alliance,
but I have a hard time not being discouraged
because of things that are being standardized
and under public health,
and it's so hard to individualize the care of a patient
for that patient without being penalized for the quality,
for example, through the insurances
and through the NCQA,
the National Community Equality Assurance.
So what we're seeing in Michigan,
at least in our southwestern area,
southeastern area is that things are being standardized.
For example, all the pathologist practices have been taken over
and they basically are no more independent.
Then we have other groups that are now taking all the radiology practices
and putting them into a standard group.
So we're losing the independence.
So I don't know as far as policy, how can we stop that?
It's so discouraging.
No, no, I'm sorry to interrupt.
This is really something very important, but it's less exciting
than some of the things people talk about.
I think what we, you know, and I have an op-ed that I'm about to submit
that we just have this disruptor elected.
He needs to disrupt the healthcare system.
And the healthcare system is not what people think it is.
The healthcare system, and I'm sure the doctors
to understand is mainly government control.
Okay? It's Medicare.
Medicare sets the payments and private practice, private hospitals
and private reimbursements are generally, but not always,
based on Medicare rate, 1.2 times whatever the multiple is.
So in that sense, there is a increase going
on about the centralization under government control.
Just as the time comes when we see we cannot trust the government
with things like health, just as the data keeps staring us in the face
that the government centralized systems
in the world are complete failures.
We have Bernie Sanders putting forward a Medicare for All bill,
which is outlawing, outlawing explicitly private insurance.
We have people that were appointed in this administration,
this administration, who favor single payer health care.
So I'm concerned, this is a big concern.
And the way to get out of this is to get government out of controlling health care.
That has to be done.
Okay, one more question, I think.
One more?
One more.
Last question.
Save the best for last year?
Okay.
There you are.
Scott, first off, thanks so much for being here tonight.
Let's all give it up for Scott.
Thank you.
Wanted to see if you can give me an update or your opinion on this.
There was an article that was written by the Washington Post on February 18th.
It says, Trump casts psychiatric and weight loss drugs as threats to children.
And it says, President Trump has instructed his administration to scrutinize the threat
to children posed by antidepressant stimulants
and other common psychiatric drugs
targeting medication taken by millions
in its latest challenge to longstanding medical practices.
And if you go down the article,
it says that the order said that the commission
should prepare a make our children healthy again assessment
within 100 days that examines the prevalence
of these threats posed by the prescription
of these selective serotonin re-uptakers, inhibitors.
Boy, that's a tough one to say, guys.
And psychotropic mood stabilizers, stimulants,
and weight loss drugs.
Can you give us any where we stand
on that hundred days since February 18th?
So A, it's an important topic, I think everybody,
a lot of people here are aware that the psychotropic drugs,
particularly in children, have significant side effects.
I'm not sure the basis of their use in certain diseases,
for instance in autism, and they have limited efficacy in some
of the things they're prescribed for with serious side effects.
So that's a big topic.
I do not know where they are on that.
I'm 100% certain that that is a Bobby Kennedy priority.
And so I don't think these are things that,
my personal opinion is that these are not passions of President Trump
as I was saying to somebody beforehand.
No president wants to even deal with healthcare.
They don't understand that.
It's a political nightmare.
So this is really coming from the HHS effort and my guess is
that that is a priority.
I don't know.
I'm not talking to them about that.
But I think that that is a priority.
But I don't know where they are in the commission.
You know, again, the people that were disappointed,
they literally were sworn in, I think, on Monday or something.
So I just think 100 days, OK, it's bold.
But I think it's a priority.
So I can't tell you why it's very, very important
that this be taken serious?
I think it is being taken seriously, but I'm happy to chat with you.
Yeah. I look forward to talking to you.
Thank you so much.
Okay. Thank you very much.
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