Scott Atlas

Scott William Atlas (born July 5, 1955) is an American radiologist, political commentator, and health care policy advisor.

He is the Robert Wesson Senior Fellow in health care policy at the Hoover Institution, a conservative think tank located at Stanford University.

From 1998 to 2012 he was a professor and chief of neuroradiology at Stanford University Medical Center.

From 1998 to 2012, Atlas was Professor and Chief of Neuroradiology at Stanford University Medical Center in California.

He trained more than 100 neuroradiology fellows in his teaching career.

He joined the Hoover Institution in 2003.

During the United States presidential campaigns of 2008, 2012, and 2016, Atlas was a Senior Advisor for Health Care to several presidential candidates.

He served as a senior advisor for health care to the Republican presidential campaigns of Rudy Giuliani in 2008 and Mitt Romney in 2012.

He has advocated eliminating the Affordable Care Act and replacing it with modified tax deductions and incentives.

He has also called for changes to Medicare and "aggressive reforms" to turn Medicaid "into a bridge to private insurance" and encourage health savings accounts.

Atlas views the Medicaid expansion as "one of the most misguided parts" of the Affordable Care Act.

He opposes proposals to establish a public health insurance option or single-payer healthcare.

In December 2021, Atlas helped found the Academy for Science and Freedom with Martin Kulldorff and Jay Bhattacharya, a program of the private conservative liberal arts college Hillsdale College.

According to the American Board of Radiology, he is board certified in diagnostic radiology, while his certification in neuroradiology lapsed in 2017.

He is the editor of Magnetic Resonance Imaging of the Brain and Spine, a 2,000-page illustrated textbook with 83 contributors.

He has also written four books on health care policy.

Atlas is the Robert Wesson Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, a conservative public policy think tank.

Atlas was selected by President Donald Trump in August 2020 to serve as an advisor on the White House Coronavirus Task Force.

In that role, Atlas at times said misinformation about COVID-19, such as theories that face masks and social distancing were not effective in slowing the spread of the coronavirus.

His statements and influence on policies caused controversy within the task force.

Contrary to the recommendations of most of the scientific community, Atlas recommended establishing herd immunity by allowing or encouraging low-risk people to get COVID-19 while attempting to protect more vulnerable people.

He advocated that states should not engage in COVID-19 testing of virus-exposed but asymptomatic individuals, called for faster reopening of schools and businesses, and encouraged residents to resist or "rise up" against state restrictions adopted to prevent the spread of the coronavirus.

Atlas resigned from his position in the White House on November 30, 2020.

Atlas received a Bachelor of Science degree in biology from the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign and his MD from the Pritzker School of Medicine of the University of Chicago.

On August 10, 2020, President Donald Trump announced that Atlas would join his administration as an advisor on COVID-19.

Atlas, a radiologist, is not a specialist in public health or infectious diseases.

He reportedly caught Trump's eye because of his frequent appearances on Fox News that summer.

Atlas said misinformation about COVID-19.

He claimed that children "have virtually zero risk of dying, and a very, very low risk of any serious illness from this disease" and "children almost never transmit the disease" although children can carry, transmit, and in some cases be killed by the COVID-19 virus.

As of September 2021, 544 American children had died of COVID-19, 0.095% of all COVID-19 deaths.

He expressed skepticism that face masks help prevent the spread of the virus, including in a tweet in October 2020 that Twitter removed after determining it was not accurate.

Later that day, HHS official Brett Giroir, the Assistant Secretary for Health, reaffirmed that masks did work to prevent transmission of the virus.

Dr. Deborah Birx, the White House coronavirus response coordinator, was reported to be "relieved" by the removal of Atlas's tweet.

He argued that only symptomatic individuals should be tested for the coronavirus, and pushed for the August 24, 2020, change on the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) website saying that people who had been exposed to the virus but showed no symptoms should not be tested.

This position was opposed by many public health experts including CDC scientists, as 40% of people infected with the virus are asymptomatic but can still transmit the virus.

On September 18 it was reported that the change to the testing recommendation had been written by the White House coronavirus task force, and had been placed on the CDC website by political appointees in the Department of Health and Human Services without the knowledge of CDC scientists.

The original CDC recommendation — that anyone exposed to the virus should be tested whether or not they showed symptoms – was restored to the website the next day.

He advised that the virus should be allowed to spread naturally among people deemed at low risk, while protecting the most vulnerable populations, so as to gain herd immunity.

The Washington Post reported that Atlas was the leading proponent within the Trump administration for a herd immunity approach to the virus, although some experts cautioned that such an approach could lead to hundreds of thousands more American deaths.

Atlas later denied that he advocated for the herd immunity strategy, said "there's never been a desire to have cases spread through the community," and said it "has never been the president's policy."