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Quotation of the Day…

is from pages 79-81 of Scott Atlas’s hot-off-the-press 2021 book, A Plague Upon Our House: My Fight at the Trump White House to Stop COVID From Destroying America:

Evident from my first encounter was what appeared to be a functioning troika of “medical experts” composed of Drs. [Deborah] Birx, [Anthony] Fauci, and [Robert] Redfield. They shared thought processes and view to an uncanny level. One depressing commonality was that none of them showed detailed knowledge of ongoing scientific literature on the pandemic….

I also noticed that there was virtually no disagreement among them. It was an amazing consistency, as though there were an agreed-upon complicity – even though some of their statements were so patently simplistic or erroneous that others in the room, even those without medical backgrounds, sometimes felt compelled to make corrections. I found myself grateful to people like Seema Verma, Marc Short, the VP’s chief of staff; and others who occasionally spoke up to challenge their conclusions – grateful, because at some meetings, I felt burned out, simply unable to muster the energy to yet again correct something so unmistakably wrong. That happened most commonly when selective correlations were assumed to be cause and effect, like a non-scientist might conclude (for example, pointing to the correlation of cases with the timing of a mandate in one state but ignoring that comparison in a different state where it did not correlate).

Even on those strikingly unsound conclusions, Drs. Birx, Fauci, and Redfield virtually always agreed, literally never challenging one another.