Massive Harms’ From Lockdowns Shouldn’t Be Forgiven: Dr. Scott Atlas

By Eva Fu

November 6, 2022 The Epoch Times

Restrictive pandemic policies shouldn’t be forgiven after the “massive harms and destruction” the lockdowns caused to the American public, according to Dr. Scott Atlas.

Atlas, a COVID-19 adviser during the Trump administration and a contributor to The Epoch Times, was responding to a recent Atlantic article calling for a “pandemic amnesty.” The argument goes that the pandemic missteps were a result of “deep uncertainty” rather than “moral failing,” and it’s time to let the issues go and move on.

The author, “while trying to be nice, is really missing the more important point of what happened during the pandemic management,” Atlas told The Epoch Times.

“The massive harms and destruction from lockdowns and school closures cannot just be simply ignored and forgiven because these were intentional, unethical, and grossly erroneous applications of public health guidance,” he said.

The school closures especially, he said, “inflicted massive harms into our younger generation—all of which were predictable, many of which were already known.”

“And to simply wipe them away by ‘forgiving’ people will minimize the seriousness of the errors and not correct this for future health care crises,” Atlas said.

An August 2021 analysis by McKinsey & Co. found that school shutdowns cost K–12 students nationwide five months of learning in math and four months in reading, with low-income and minority students being hit even harder. The unfinished learning could create a ripple effect that leads them to earn between $49,000 to $61,000 less over their lifetimes, according to the McKinsey report.

The National Assessment of Educational Progress, known as the “Nation’s Report Card,” last month appraised national math test and reading scores in fourth and eighth grades to be at a historic low.

But it isn’t just the learning loss that Atlas is seeing. The lack of contact between children and education personnel also led to a surge in child abuse in broken families. Meanwhile, youth mental health issues, substance abuse, and suicide attempts also spiked.

That, he said, is only the tip of the iceberg in terms of the damage wrought on the younger generation by the government-mandated pandemic restrictions. A March 2021 report by American Psychological Association found that six in 10 U.S. adults reported undesired weight change since the start of the pandemic. For college-aged adults, more than half of the respondents reported weight gains of an average of 28 pounds, which Atlas called an “obesity crisis.”

“In some fantasy, contrary-to-science effort to stop infections, we’ve used children as shields, and we’ve inflicted more damage on poor kids and low-income families than the affluent,” he said.

“It’s nowhere near enough to just say: ‘Oh, it’s okay,'” Atlas said. “It’s not okay. There needs to be public accountability—a public admission of grievous errors by our public health leaders and our university experts, as well as by educational leaders, including university presidents, and our K–12 school leaders.

“We cannot let this happen again.”

During his four months serving on the White House’s coronavirus task force, Atlas made a forceful push for reopening schools and businesses while increasing testing at nursing homes—views he said were often at odds with those of government experts such as Dr. Anthony Fauci, the retiring director of National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), and Dr. Deborah Birx, then-coordinator of the task force.

“When you shut down the economy and had a severe economic downturn, you kill people, that translates into lost lives,” he said. “It was a false dichotomy set up by people who wanted lockdowns. They set up a false dichotomy that somehow if you were against lockdowns, you were choosing economy over lives.

“The truth is, it was lives versus lives.”

Fauci, who in December 2020 drew criticism for flip-flopping on reopening schools, recently rejected that he was ever responsible for pushing for school shutdowns.

“If you go back, and I ask anybody to go back over the number of times that I’ve said we’ve got to do everything we can to keep the schools open, no one plays that clip,” he said in an October ABC interview, without specifying which clip he was referring to. “They always come back and say, ‘Fauci is responsible for closing the schools.’ I had nothing to do [with it]. I mean, let’s get down to the facts.”

The pandemic management “debacle,” Atlas believes, has left America in a crisis, with its ethical principles broken.

“There’s an unprecedented denial of fact, rampant on university campuses, in the media, in science, and in public health,” he said. “America’s credentialed class that leads our public health agencies, our universities, our doctors, our scientists, our schools—that class of experts has been exposed as non-experts, politicized, and lacking in ethics.

“We’ve seen our school and university leaders break the social contract with our children, harming them and failing as role models, and in the United States now, the free exchange of ideas that is fundamental to any free society is under threat.”

Rather than forgive and forget, America has a long to-do list for restoring public trust, according to Atlas.

In his view, that requires courage from “individuals with integrity” to “rise up and have their voices heard;” greater transparency into government agencies, scientific journals, and universities; accountability for those “use character assassination to delegitimize people”—“including in the courtroom;” ensuring public health guidance to consider the impact on overall health rather than a single disease; and in a legislative sense, defining public health emergency with time limits.

He also pointed to more than a dozen universities that received more than $500 million in federal grants last year from the National Institutes of Health alone.

“We need to hold these universities accountable for that money,” making sure “they allow the free exchange of ideas that they are entrusted with by the American public.”

But most of all, he wants a public apology from public health officials over their lockdown “legacy.”

“Their legacy includes avoidable death in society’s most vulnerable, massive destruction of low-income families, ongoing enormous health damages to children, and this severe loss of trust in public health and in science itself,” Atlas said. “That is their legacy. It must be publicly admitted and apologized for before we can move forward.”

The Epoch Times has reached out to NIAID and ActivePure Technology, where Birx now serves as chief medical and science adviser, for comment.

Source: https://www.theepochtimes.com/mkt_app/massive-harms-from-lockdowns-should-not-be-forgiven-dr-scott-atlas_4844772.html

FBI Sends ‘Clear Message’ to Trump, His Supporters: The Swamp Is Real, Rep. Davidson Says

By Katie Spence

August 11, 2022 Updated: August 11, 2022 The Epoch Times

The FBI raid on former President Donald Trump’s home at Mar-a-Lago is an escalation of an ongoing attack on anyone who dares to upset the political status quo in Washington, Rep. Warren Davidson (R-Ohio) says.

“I think a lot of my constituents were shocked, frankly, across the political spectrum. But obviously, the more supportive of President Trump, the more upset they were,” Davidson told The Epoch Times and NTD as part of a special report on the raid airing on Aug. 11 on EpochTV at 9 p.m.

“I think for anyone who doubted that there was a swamp when Donald Trump was saying ‘drain the swamp,’ now I think there’s true believers. So it’s historic.”

In support of his statement, Davidson pointed out that the FBI still has many of the same people who spent years supporting a Russia collusion narrative that was based on a falsified warrant.

More concerning, Davidson says, is that the FBI appears to have wholly ended its pretense of objectivity.

Davidson pointed out to The Epoch Times that former IRS o�cial Lois Lerner, Bill Clinton’s national security adviser Sandy Berger, and even Hillary Clinton allegedly mishandled and destroyed classified information but avoided raids by the FBI.

He then pointed out that the FBI has taken no action on Hunter Biden, despite a mountain of evidence of suspect business dealings.

“No accountability for Hunter Biden, no action on that; no action on any number of things that they could have taken action on, like for example, targeting of Supreme Court justices,” Davidson said.

He added it is really hard to believe that the bureau believes that it’s objective. Davidson says the message the FBI is sending is clear.
“Hey, if you support the cause, we got your back. But if you’re working against us, as [current Senate Majority Leader] Chuck Schumer promised Donald Trump, they have six ways to Sunday to wreck you.

“And they seem to have been very focused on doing that to Donald Trump.”

Davidson added the FBI isn’t just targeting Trump; it’s also targeting his supporters.

“[The FBI] seized the chairman of the Freedom Caucus’s phone. They didn’t do it in a no-knock warrant raid in the middle of the night with CNN cameras staged in the street or anything. But they did track him down.”

House Freedom Caucus Chairman Rep. Scott Perry’s (R-Pa.) phone was returned to him, but Davidson said that the FBI action to track Perry down was deliberately intended to paint him as a criminal.

Furthermore, the message is that if the FBI can target people such as Trump and Perry, imagine what they could do to an everyday American, he said.

“I think they’re trying to intimidate and scare people from, you know, being supportive of Trump or being too opposed to the status quo,” Davidson said. “You know, stay within the mainstream, don’t push back against the status quo.”

The response to the FBI raid has been overwhelmingly negative among Americans who support Trump, Davidson said.

He said Trump supporters are rightly upset about the raid and how they’re expected to respond to it. Davidson says he hopes it doesn’t go beyond anger into illegal actions and instead energizes people to vote.

“If this had happened to a Democrat president, you know, we might have more of the summer of 2020, where it was covered by the press [as] ‘mostly peaceful protests,’ but we know that mostly peaceful means it wasn’t peaceful.”

A member of the Secret Service in front of the home of former President Donald Trump at the Mar-a-Lago resort in Palm Beach, Fla., on Aug. 9, 2022. (Giorgio Viera/AFP via Getty Images)

Trump supporters are very aware that they may be targeted if they protest against the latest treatment of the former president, Davidson says.

“But if [their support] was the slightest bit of anything that was run afoul, the mainstream media and, frankly, many of our federal agencies would treat it as … some sort of, you know, violent uprising by the right and so, I think people on the right are cautious.”

Davidson said he hopes it doesn’t come to violence but acknowledged a growing frustration among Republicans over an apparent two-tier system of justice.

“Unfortunately, this reinforces it because the people that we’ve suspected had no accountability, like the Clinton Foundation, as an example, [or] like Hunter Biden.

“But then very selective accountability … for [former] President Trump.”

Holding the FBI Accountable

Davidson stated that if Republicans retake a majority in the House in November, they need to step up and not just hold hearings about the FBI’s actions.

“We are going to have to cut funds and say, ‘Hey, we … don’t want to shut the government down. We want to fund our government. But we’re unwilling to fund a government that does these things or fails to do these other things.'”

Davidson said the FBI isn’t objective or applying justice objectively. While he said there was hope that Director Christopher Wray would return the FBI to a non- partisan agency, “On the contrary, every step seems more focused on undermining the confidence of ordinary Americans.”

However, if “you’ve got the far left of the Democratic Party’s agenda in mind, the FBI seems to have your back,” he said.

He notes that the FBI is “incredibly powerful” and Republicans can’t try to hold them accountable halfway; the GOP must “get after that in a very serious way.”

Even as he wants to be fair to the working men and women at the FBI, Davidson said Republicans need to acknowledge that top leadership at the bureau is corrupt, as is “the IRS, banking regulators, all the EPA, all these agencies, Securities and Exchange Commission,” and they’re abusing their power.

“The far left has really gotten a firm grip on the administrative state.

“They’ve used the influence over the administrative state to get a firm grip into much of corporate America,” he said. “So it’s almost like there’s collusion between these government agencies and the top level.

“No one loves big government like big business, so some of our biggest businesses are also working in concert with these biggest regulatory agencies.”

Top Democrat Blocks Legislation Aimed at Preventing School Shootings

By Zachary Stieber

May 26, 2022 Updated: May 26, 2022 The Epoch Times

Commentary

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) blocked legislation on May 25 that proponents say could help prevent school shootings.

The legislation, known as the Luke and Alex School Safety Act, would require the Department of Homeland Security to establish a clearinghouse on the best school safety practices after consulting with education, justice, and health officials.

“It’s pretty simple. It just creates a clearinghouse of information of the best practices for school safety. It ensures that parents, teachers, school officials, and other stakeholders have input into what those best practices are. It doesn’t allow the clearinghouse to mandate any school to take any certain action. Maybe most importantly, it publishes the available grant programs and federal resources available for school safety,” Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) said on the Senate floor in Washington.

The bill is named for Luke Hoyer and Alex Schachter, who were both killed when a man with a gun opened fire at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Florida in 2018. It’s backed by the parents of the boys.

“It’s a good idea. It could save lives. It is an action, when people are calling for action following this tragedy,” Johnson said.

He asked for unanimous consent for the legislation. That enables a bill to pass with no recorded vote, but also opens up the possibility that a single senator could block the request.

Schumer blocked it, referencing the mass shooting that took place this week in Uvalde, Texas.

The “sad truth” about that shooting is that “hardening schools,” or ramping up prevention techniques and strategies, “would have done nothing to prevent” the shooting, Schumer said.

“In fact, there were guards and police officers already at the school yesterday when the shooter showed up. One was a school police officer, two were from the Uvalde Police Department. The shooter got past all of them, with two assault weapons that he purchased. They couldn’t stop him,” Schumer said. “The bill would not have protected those children. More guns won’t protect our children. That is the wrong answer.”

He said he was open to adding the bill’s language as an amendment to a bill he supports, but only if Republicans voted for it.

Johnson responded, saying that he would “not engage in partisanship, other than to say it is just sad.”

“It is just sad that this body can’t pass this bill, when about a month ago, they passed an identical bill that applied to churches. This one applies to schools, and yet it’s inappropriate, according to the majority leader, to pass this nonpartisan bill by unanimous consent,” he said.

The Senate is in negotiations on different measures regarding guns, but with its 50–50 divide between Republicans and Democrats, few of them, if any, are expected to be approved.

Max Schachter, Alex’s father, denounced the blocking of the bill.

“I hoped after 21 were murdered in Uvalde, partisan politics would be put aside,” he wrote on Twitter. “I WAS WRONG.”

Biden’s Big Lie: ‘Green’ Energy Doesn’t Save Money, It’s 4 to 6 Times MORE Expensive

By Stephen Moore, The Epoch Times May 25, 2022

Commentary

President Joe Biden keeps claiming that wind and solar energy are going to save money for consumers. But more government subsidies to “renewable energy” is a key feature of the White House anti-inflation strategy recently announced by Biden.

He probably got that idea from John Kerry, the administration’s climate czar, who recently claimed that “solar and wind are less expensive than coal or oil or gas.” Pete Buttigieg, the Biden Transportation secretary, makes the same claims about the thousands of dollars that motorists can save if they buy electric cars.

This couldn’t be more wrong.

Proponents of “green” energy boondoggles are often masters at playing with the numbers, because that is the only way that wind and solar electricity generation make any sense. Advocates such as Kerry love to focus on the low operating costs of solar and wind since they don’t require constant purchases of fuel. Ignoring the relatively short lifespan of solar and wind components, as well as the high initial investment, can make it appear as though solar and wind operate at lower costs than fossil fuels or nuclear power.

Let’s get the facts straight. The cost isn’t just what you pay at the retail level for gas or power. It also includes the taxes you pay to subsidize the power. A 2017 study by the Department of Energy found that for every dollar of government subsidy per BTU unit of energy produced from fossil fuels, wind and solar get at least $10.

That’s anything but a money saver.

The reason the subsidies are so high is that solar and wind have additional costs compared to their more reliable competition. “Green” energy sources are non-dispatchable, meaning their output can’t be changed to match demand. The wind doesn’t blow harder, and the sun doesn’t shine brighter, just because electricity use is peaking.

Conversely, fossil fuel entities—such as a coal plant—can ramp up generation when we need it most and ramp down when demand falls.

Widespread adoption of solar and wind generation would necessitate expensive batteries on a large scale to ensure that people still have power when the wind stops blowing or when the sun stops shining—like it does every single night.

So, unlike reliable and flexible natural gas, solar and wind require large-scale storage solutions: massive banks of batteries that are hardly environmentally friendly but are also extremely expensive. And since batteries don’t last forever, they add to both the initial expense and maintenance costs during the life of a solar or wind energy generating station.

The same problem exists with electric cars. The sticker price on EVs is considerably higher than for conventional gas-operated cars, and the so-called savings over time assume that the electric power for recharging is free. But it isn’t and power costs are rising almost as fast as gas prices.

Factors such as these are consistently ignored by Kerry and other “green” energy activists.

To genuinely evaluate dissimilar energy sources and provide an apples-to-apples comparison, the U.S. Energy Information Administration uses the Levelized Cost of Energy (LCOE) and the Levelized Cost of Storage (LCOS). These measures consider the initial costs, the lifespan of generation and storage systems, maintenance and fuel costs, decommissioning expenses, subsidies, etc., and compare that to how much electricity is produced over a power plant’s lifetime.

The numbers don’t lie: “green” energy is a complete waste of resources.

The LCOE and LCOS for solar and on-shore wind farms are four times as expensive as natural gas. But offshore wind takes the cake—it’s six times as expensive as natural gas.

Imagine paying four to six times as much every month for the same electricity! That’s the green paradise world that the Biden administration wants for America.

Yet, it’s even worse than that because electric power costs greatly affect the cost of producing nearly everything else. In the case of producing aluminum, for example, a third of the total production cost is electricity alone.

Imagine what quadrupling electricity prices would do to the prices of all the goods and services that people buy. If you think inflation is bad now, just wait until the nation is dependent on wind and solar—then you’ll see REAL price increases.

And despite official government data contradicting their own claims, the Biden administration—including Kerry—continues spouting simple untruths on wind and solar. They hope that no one will check their fantastic facts.

To the left, wanting it to be true, makes it true.

All the while, the middle class is being crushed by $4-a-gallon gasoline and businesses everywhere are buckling under $5-per-gallon diesel. The Wall Street Journal warns that electric power blackouts could be coming because of overreliance on wind and solar power.

At some point, if this push for green energy continues, the whole nation will start to look like California, where gas is $6 a gallon, the lights go out, and electric cars are stranded because of rolling blackouts.  If that’s our “green” future, then Americans should want nothing to do with it.

Stephen Moore is a distinguished fellow in economics at the Heritage Foundation, and E.J. Antoni is a research fellow in Heritage’s Center for Data Analysis. Moore is a co-founder of the Committee to Unleash Prosperity, where Antoni is a senior fellow.

Views expressed in this article are the opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times or Zero Hedge.