Atlas's Case Against the COVID Lockdowns.

• Author: Henderson, David R.

A Plague Upon Our House: My Fight at the Trump White House to Stop COVID from Destroying America By Scott W. Atlas, M.D. 352 pp.; Bombardier Books, 2021

Was the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus so dangerous to so many people that extreme government lockdowns were justified? Did the fatality rate from COVID differ substantially according to people's age and presence of co-morbidities, and did governors and other policymakers systematically take account of those differences? Did it make sense to close schools to in-person attendance for anywhere from a few months to over a year? Was mask-wearing indoors, even by people who had no COVID symptoms, an important contributor to slowing the spread of the coronavirus? And what really went on at those meetings of the Trump White House's Coronavirus Task Force? Specifically, were the members carefully reading the numerous studies that were being published in the United States and around the world and adjusting their advice accordingly? Did it make sense for governors and other policymakers to focus only on COVID and ignore the major costs--including the costs to health--from lockdowns?

Dr. Scott Atlas, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, addresses all of those questions and more in his book A Plague Upon Our House. (Disclosure: I am also a Hoover fellow and know Atlas professionally.) But he does so much more than that. He lays out how dysfunctional both the task force and the White House were in dealing with the coronavirus. Based on my own experience at interagency meetings in Ronald Reagan's administration, I find Atlas's many reports of people on the task force "going with the flow" completely plausible. It's true that we have to take his word for what went on, but based on my experiences with him at Hoover, I do.

Beyond making his case with many facts, Atlas is a passionate man, and his book reads as if it were written in anger and frustration. Some readers might find that off-putting. I like it because he almost never lets his passion override his respect for facts and reasoned argument. Indeed, his passion is largely based on his view that lockdowns led to many deaths, destroyed millions of livelihoods, and caused needless suffering--a case he makes well.

A researcher's questions/ Atlas tells his story largely chronologically, starting in February 2020 and ending in December 2020. In February 2020, while working on a different book, he started paying attention to the pandemic. He thought that the early-reported 3.4% fatality rate from COVID--which, if true, would have been very scary--didn't make sense. He noted that the 3.4% was based on a badly biased sample. The people being tested for COVID in the first month or so were largely people who were sick enough that they sought medical care--making them medical "cases." Based on what infectious disease specialists knew about past viruses, it was virtually certain that many other people had the coronavirus but did not have extreme symptoms. The case fatality rate, in short, was the wrong measure; what mattered was, and is, the infection fatality rate. And...