Dr. Atlas and America's Giant Measles Party

Frustrated with Dr. Anthony Fauci, President Trump embraces Dr. Scott Atlas

On June 30, 2020, Americans were asked to choose between President Trump and Dr. Anthony Fauci, his top public health official. Five days earlier, the president had declared “Coronavirus deaths are way down. Mortality rate is one of the lowest in the World. Our Economy is roaring back . . .” After three months of lockdowns, President Trump was anxious to reopen America.

But Dr. Fauci, disagreed. Worse, he disagreed publicly. On June 30, Fauci testified before a Senate panel. “Clearly we are not in total control right now . . .” Fauci told the senators. “We are now having forty-plus thousand new cases a day. I would not be surprised if we go up to 100,000 a day if this does not turn around.”

Fauci had not only publicly contradicted the president, Fauci’s prediction had been right. By the end of the year, 345,000 Americans would be dead from COVID, a large majority having died during the six months after Fauci made his prediction.

For months, President Trump had been uncomfortable with several of his COVID Task Force members. That was especially true for the outspoken Dr. Anthony Fauci, who was disparaged as “Dr. Doom and Gloom” by many of the president’s aides inside the White House.

During July, the White House began a campaign questioning Dr. Fauci’s management of the pandemic. In mid-July, the White House quietly distributed a paper to friendly media outlets smearing Dr. Fauci. Similar in spirit to President Nixon’s “Dirty Tricks” decades earlier, the document provided examples of Fauci purportedly offering bad medical advice. The accusations, though, were often taken out of context or relied on selective editing. That same month, the White House quietly began a social media campaign against Dr. Fauci starting with a cartoon rendering Fauci as a faucet drowning Uncle Sam. The cartoon was posted by Daniel Scavino, a White House deputy chief of staff.

Watching from a distance, Canada’s Toronto Star newspaper declared that “the smearing of Fauci is beyond disgusting.”

A cartoon posted by the White House staff was part of a smear campaign against Dr. Fauci.

Dr. Fauci’s popularity with the public may have contributed to his unpopularity in the White House. From the beginning of the pandemic, public opinion polls consistently rated Fauci’s handling of the COVID-19 pandemic well above President Trump’s. A Quinnipiac University survey conducted in May, at the height of the first COVID wave, asked respondents whether they approve of President Trump’s and Dr. Fauci’s handling of the coronavirus. The respondents gave Dr. Fauci a strong 68 percent approval rating while Trump was rated at 41 percent.

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On August 10, President Trump introduced Dr. Scott Atlas, a respected Stanford professor and radiologist, as the newest member of his COVID Task Force. Starting with an April opinion piece published in The Hill, Dr. Atlas had been a frequent commentator on Fox News and other conservative outlets, advocating for eliminating most COVID restrictions. The favorable coverage caught the president’s attention. “Scott is a very famous man, who is also highly respected,” Trump said. “He’s working with us and will be working with us on the coronavirus. And he has many great ideas.”

Dr. Atlas believed the nation could achieve “herd immunity” to COVID by allowing the young and healthy to become infected while protecting those at most risk. Months before his White House appointment, Dr. Atlas had described his approach during an April 23 interview on the popular Steve Deace Show:

“We can allow a lot of people to get infected, those who are not at risk to die or have a serious hospital-requiring illness, we should be fine with letting them get infected, generating immunity on their own, and the more immunity in the community, the better we can eradicate the threat of the virus.”

Once popular, “measles parties” were considered dangerous after an effective vaccine became available.

Dr. Atlas’s approach to herd immunity reminded older Americans of the popular “measles parties” held during the nineteen-fifties. Before reliable vaccines were available, parents intentionally exposed their children to measles and other childhood diseases (while eating cake and ice cream) in the hope that the children, after a brief infection, would build-up lifelong immunities to the diseases. The parties were a calculated risk by parents, as during the nineteen-fifties, five hundred American children typically died of measles each year. Today, with safe and effective vaccines available, public health officials strongly discourage measles parties. Although few die of measles today, it remains a serious disease, with one in four infected individuals requiring hospitalization.

Dr. Atlas’s proposal to encourage the virus to spread throughout the population was opposed by much of the medical community, including many of his former Stanford colleagues. On September 9, seventy-eight medical professionals at Stanford Medical School wrote an open letter condemning Atlas. The letter claimed Atlas was promoting “falsehoods and misrepresentations of science [which run] counter to established science and, by doing so, undermine public health authorities and the credible science that guides effective public health policy.”

But millions of Americans, exhausted with COVID restrictions and anxious to return to their normal lives, agreed with Dr. Atlas. Perhaps none more so than the nation’s hardcore motorcyclists. From August 7 through August 16 over 460,000 motorcyclists converged on Sturgis, South Dakota for the 80th Annual Sturgis Motorcycle Rally. Few were worried about social distancing and face masks. Why should they be after riding across the country on a motorcycle at seventy miles per hour?

The rally was filled with ten days of motorcycle races, parades, contests, vendor fairs (T-shirts proclaiming “Screw COVID, I Went to Sturgis” sold well.), rock concerts, and all around carousing.

An estimated 460,000 motorcyclists attended the 2020 Sturgis Motorcycle Rally.

But more than a giant block party, for many motorcyclists the Sturgis Rally was a cherished annual ritual. Chuck Chamberlain had attended the rally since he was twenty-four years old. “My first year was 1986,” Chamberlain told a New York Times reporter. “This is my family. We communicate for the rest of the year. My children come here, my brother comes here, my daughter met her husband here. My daughter got married here.” For thousands like Chamberlain, the warm camaraderie of Sturgis outweighed the risks of COVID.

The urge to return to a normal life was understandable, but epidemiologists feared large gatherings like the Sturgis Rally would increase COVID deaths, both among the rally attendees, and later friends and family infected when the motorcyclists returned home. A month after the rally, a study conducted by San Diego State University used cell phone data to track rally attendees returning to their home in counties across the nation. Based on the rise in COVID cases in those counties, the study estimated that 267,000 new COVID cases were linked to the rally.

From July through December, 2020, North and South Dakota had the nation’s highest COVID death rates.

Some researchers believed the study’s estimate of 267,000 new COVID cases was far too high. But a month after the Sturgis Rally, COVID death rates in North and South Dakota began rising steeply. By the end of the year, the two Dakotas, measured during the period from July through December, had suffered the nation’s highest COVID death rates. Together, North and South Dakota averaged over 1,500 deaths per million while the other forty-eight states averaged only 650 deaths per million.

There’s no available record of what Dr. Atlas thought regarding the Sturgis Motorcycle Rally, but South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem stood firmly behind her support for the rally. In a late August radio interview, Governor Noem was asked whether the rally should have been allowed: “I think it was an event that a lot of people came and enjoyed and exercised their freedom,” Governor Noem responded. “We love South Dakota and think it’s beautiful and tourism is our number two industry.”

Most South Dakota residents must have agreed. Even though the state’s COVID death rates during 2020 were among the highest in the nation, Governor Noem won reelection two years later by a 27 percent margin.

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Note: A subscriber has asked why there are no endnotes in my weekly newsletters since the newsletters often include quotations, statistics, and copyrighted material. That’s a good question, but for now, I’ve chosen to keep these postings informal and, hopefully, entertaining. My forthcoming book, COVID WARS, from which most of these newsletters are drawn, has an extensive bibliography located at covidwars.us/endnotes.pdf.