COVID-19 Congressional Investigations Need to Focus on Five Key Areas: Dr. Scott Atlas

Syringes containing Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccines in Denmark in a 2021 file image. (Claus Fisker/Ritzau Scanpix/AFP via Getty Images)

The House hearings on the federal COVID-19 pandemic response need to focus on key areas, Dr. Scott Atlas said in an interview, which aired on Newsmakers by NTD and The Epoch Times on Feb. 8.

Atlas is a Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford and a former advisor for President Donald Trump’s White House Coronavirus Task Force.

“There are basically five areas that we need to focus on for the investigations,” Atlas said.

Those areas include: public health guidance, health agencies’ possible conflicts of interest, the origin of the virus, the vaccine failures, and censorship by Big Tech at the behest of the government.

Atlas further said that comprehensive investigations into all five areas are necessary for restoring public trust.

The Key Areas

In their 2022 midterm campaigns, Republicans promised to investigate the pandemic response if they gained a Congressional majority. And while they failed to gain a majority in the Senate, they did secure a majority in the House.

As a result of that victory, and in keeping with their campaign promises, Republicans on the Oversight and Investigations Subcommittee and the Health Subcommittee began a joint hearing on Feb. 8.

The hearing, titled “The Federal Response to COVID-19,” should zero in on five key areas, according to Atlas.

For the first area—public health guidance—Atlas said that “public health guidance was massively incompetent at best and unethical at worst.” He added that includes both Trump and Biden administrations.

“This pandemic was mishandled in 2020, 2021, and all the way through until today, under the leadership, at that point of Dr. Birx, who was the head of Trump’s medical Task Force, Dr. Fauci, and Dr. Redfield [at the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)].”

Atlas further alleged Birx, Fauci, and Redfield lied about masks and lockdowns by claiming they'd work even when they knew the science said otherwise.

Dr. Scott Atlas, a founding fellow of Hillsdale College's Academy for Science and Freedom, at the Hillsdale College Kirby Center in Washington on March 17, 2022. (Bao Qiu/The Epoch Times)

Regarding the second area of investigation, Atlas said, “the [National Institute of Health (NIH)], the CDC, and the [Food and Drug Administration (FDA)] failed and had massive conflicts of interest that [the public was] not really made aware of.”

He said the hearings need to pursue answers regarding, “Why were the drug trials of FDA-approved drugs never done in the spring and summer of 2020? Why was the vaccine efficacy data distorted and never shown to the public? Why was emergency use authorization for vaccines that were experimental given without adequate clinical data, including for children, who, when healthy, [are free from] significant risk from serious illness from the disease?

Under that part of the investigation, Atlas said there also needs to be answers about funding for gain of function in China, and Pfizer’s influence with people in power—including the President of the United States.

The origin of COVID-19 is the third area Republicans need to focus on when investigating, according to Atlas, and that includes why scientists quickly dismissed the lab-leak theory.

“Why is there a cover-up, in fact, a collusion, with NIH-funded, NIH-dependent, American scientists writing letters to scientific journals, saying that, anything saying that the virus wasn’t natural was a conspiracy theory back in February 2020? That was a lie.”

He added, “There was also collusion with the [World Health Organization]. We were not allowed, as an independent nation who had massive deaths from this virus, to get transparency from China. The WHO has massive funding from China, [and] the public needs to know about this.”

Dr. Anthony Fauci, White House Chief Medical Advisor and Director of the NIAID, shows a screen grab of a campaign website for Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) while answering questions at a Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee hearing on Capitol Hill on Jan. 11, 2022. (Greg Nash-Pool/Getty Images)

The fourth area Atlas wants Republicans to examine is the lies surrounding COVID-19 vaccines.

“The public was lied to, repeatedly, by both CDCs of Trump and Biden,” Atlas said.

“Things like the efficacy and stopping transmission. Or in stopping infection at all. Okay, that was a lie,” Atlas said. “That data was known to be false. They didn’t show the data. In fact, they lied or distorted data to achieve a behavioral goal. This is supposed to be a free society and, frankly, an ethical society. That’s unacceptable behavior.”

According to Atlas, the final area to look at includes censorship between the government and Big Tech. He specified the investigation must include the Trump administration.

“It’s not just by the Biden administration,” Atlas said of censorship. “It’s by the agencies during the Trump administration. The censorship of the media was most important during 2020, not the fourth quarter of 2021.

“I’m talking about 2020, when Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, pulled down videos—including of myself when I was advising the President of the United States—because Big Tech and their agencies, in collusion even in the Trump administration, we’re trying to stop the truth from becoming known to the public.”

Restoring Public Trust

Atlas said investigations into these areas are necessary because “The truth is very important in resetting public trust.

“We need accountability and a public admission of error, or at least a public airing of the facts because we need to restore truth. They have destroyed, and I’m talking about two administrations now, public trust in agencies, in expertise in general, that we need as a functioning free society with diverse opinions.”

Atlas said he also wants to see specific reforms and a “house cleaning” in the CDC, the NIH, and the FDA.