Tam nhân hành

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John Tierney reviews Scott Atlas’s A Plague Upon Our House – calling Fauci, Birx, and Redfield “Covid’s three blind mice.” Four slices:

How could public officials vowing to “follow the science” on Covid-19 persist in promoting ineffective strategies (chiến lược không hiệu quả) with terrible consequences (hậu quả tồi tệ)? In a memoir of his time on the White House Coronavirus Task Force, Scott W. Atlas provides an answer: because the nation’s governance was hijacked by three bureaucrats with scant (ít ỏi) interest in scientific research or debate—and no concern for the calamitous effects of their edicts.

Atlas’s book, A Plague Upon Our House, is an astonishing read, even for those who have been closely following this disaster.

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Vice President Mike Pence chaired the Task Force, but Atlas says that Pence and the other members were regularly cowed into submission (phục tùng, quy phục) by three doctors who dominated from the start: Deborah Birx, the Task Force’s coordinator, along with Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, and Robert Redfield, director of the Centers for Disease Control.

Atlas calls them “the troika” because of their strategy for presenting a united front, never disagreeing with one another during the meetings in the White House Situation Room. (Reporting later revealed that they had made a pact (hiệp ước) to resign in unison (đồng loạt từ chức) if any of them was fired.) These veterans of the federal bureaucracy had worked closely together during the AIDS epidemic (dịch bệnh), and their track record was hardly reassuring. Their long and costly quest (cuộc chinh phục) to develop an AIDS vaccine ultimately failed, but they did manage to persuade the public that AIDS would spread widely beyond gay men and intravenous (tiêm tĩnh mạch) drug users. Redfield, with some help from Fauci, was the chief prophet (nhà tiên tri) of a “heterosexual breakout,” a threat that terrified Americans for more than a decade but never materialized (chưa bao giờ thành hiện thực).

The troika stoked more needless fears during the Covid pandemic, continually emphasizing worst-case scenarios—the computer models, for example, that wrongly forecast millions of American deaths in the summer of 2020. Surveys showed that most Americans, especially young people, vastly overestimated their risk of serious disease. Yet Fauci still wasn’t satisfied, as Atlas discovered when Fauci complained during one meeting that Americans didn’t take the virus seriously. “I challenged him to clarify his point,” Atlas writes, “because I couldn’t believe my ears. ‘So you think people aren’t frightened enough?’ He said, ‘Yes, they need to be more afraid.’ To me, this was another moment of Kafkaesque absurdity. . . . Instilling fear in the public (gieo rắc hoang mang trong công chúng) is absolutely (hoàn toàn) counter to (ngược với) what a leader in public health (y tế công) should do. To me, it is frankly immoral, although I kept that to myself.”

Fauci got the most media attention (sự chú ý của truyền thông) of the troika, but Atlas thinks that Birx did the most damage.

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The troika also ignored (phớt lờ) dozens of studies (hàng loạt bằng chứng khoa học) showing the ineffectiveness of lockdowns (phong tỏa không hiệu quả, không ích gì), and the data showing that places that avoided lockdowns, like Florida and Sweden, did as well as or better than average in preventing Covid deaths. “I never fully understood why there was no admission, even internally by the Task Force, that the Birx-Fauci strategy did not work,” Atlas writes, concluding that it wasn’t simply because the media was eager to champion anyone who questioned President Donald Trump’s desire to reopen schools and businesses. “Disagreeing with Trump, especially in this election year, ensured near idolatry on cable TV and in the New York Times or Washington Post. But I never thought politics was the main driver of those on the Task Force. Perhaps it was an unstated fear that they were in way too deep to admit their errors.”

Mainstream media were the chief weapon (vũ khí chính) the troika wielded against Atlas and scientists who opposed lockdowns and instead advocated a policy of “focused protection” that would concentrate testing and related resources on the elderly or other high-risk populations. (Atlas invited Birx to a meeting in the Oval Office with some of these eminent researchers, but she refused to attend.) Journalists caricatured their proposals as a callous “let it rip” strategy, portraying Atlas as an unqualified ideologue, unconcerned about the spread of the virus. Some of the false accusations in the press came from anonymous sources on the Task Force—presumably Fauci and Birx, Atlas writes, though Fauci denied it when Atlas confronted him. On the record, Fauci dismissed Atlas as an “outlier,” an assessment that journalists reinforced by repeatedly noting that he was “not an epidemiologist (nhà dịch tễ học),” as if that were the only relevant qualification for determining overall public-health policies.

Fauci, Birx, and Redfield were not epidemiologists, either, but they were enshrined (cất giữ vào thánh đường, coi như là thiêng liêng) as “the science” because they provided what mainstream journalists craved: scare stories that boosted ratings and made Trump look bad.

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The politician who comes off best is Florida governor Ron DeSantis, who had, Atlas observes, “a far more detailed understanding of the pandemic (đại dịch) than anyone I had encountered in the Task Force.” Trump comes off fairly well, too, in his conversations with Atlas, as he frets about the harms of the lockdowns and instinctively recognizes the futility of the troika’s strategies. But Atlas lays the ultimate blame for the lockdowns—“a crime against humanity”—on Trump himself, because he allowed Birx and her allies to remain in charge. “This president, widely known for his signature ‘You’re fired!’ declaration, was misled by his closest political intimates,” Atlas writes. “All for fear of what was inevitable anyway—skewering from an already hostile (thù địch) media.”

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