Stanford’s campaign against Dr. Scott Atlas for the sins of working for former president Donald Trump and advocating for balancing the costs and benefits of COVID-19-mitigation measures has taken a new and ugly turn. In September, 105 Stanford medical and health-policy faculty members published an open letter accusing Atlas, their former Stanford medical-school colleague and then White House coronavirus-task-force member, of deliberate misrepresentations of the “established science” surrounding COVID-19 that “will lead to immense avoidable harm.” The letter writers did not cite any publications or statements by Atlas to support their claims. Now two of the letter writers, joined by psychiatrist David Spiegel, a third Stanford colleague who did not sign the original letter, have doubled down. In an article in the Journal of the American Medical Association, they repeat the allegations and suggest that miscreants such as Atlas should be censured by professional medical societies, medical-licensing boards, and universities where they are faculty members. This vendetta has to stop.
Like the earlier letter, the JAMA article provides little evidence of Atlas’s alleged misrepresentations. Indeed, the sole source cited is a New York Times article that misstates Atlas’s positions. Moreover, some of Atlas’s alleged misstatements of science are not misstatements at all. None of this stops the three JAMA authors from insinuating that Atlas is comparable to physicians who promoted eugenics, conducted the racist Tuskegee syphilis experiments, and fraudulently linked vaccines to autism.
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