Dr. Scott Atlas, onetime member of former President Donald Trump's COVID-19 task force, said that Dr. Anthony Fauci worked hard to undermine the Republican president and greatly misled the American public over the coronavirus pandemic.

What are the details?

During a recent interview with the Daily Signal podcast, Atlas — a radiologist and senior fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University — said that Fauci, former White House coronavirus response coordinator Dr. Deborah Birx, and former director of the CDC Dr. Robert Redfield were to blame for the woeful response to the pandemic.

In his latest book, "A Plague Upon Our House: My Fight at the Trump White House to Stop COVID from Destroying America," Atlas wrote, "The American people need to know the level of incompetence, the lack of rigor, the lack of critical thinking. I was stunned at what I saw. We had bureaucrats in charge of the policy and that policy was the restrictions and lockdowns. And it failed.”

"From your vantage point, both in the White House, when you were working on the task force, and since then, what is the most egregious example of where individual and academic freedom came under attack?" the Daily Signal's Rob Bluey asked Atlas during the interview.

Atlas said that he experienced the suppression of academic and individual freedom firsthand — and that he experienced an inherent bias against him simply for helping Trump in an advisory capacity.

"I was asked to help the president in the biggest health care crisis in the century, and as a health policy at expert and a medical scientist for 25 years, and more in the decade of full-time work in health policy, I said yes," he told Bluey. "It had nothing to do with politics. There’s something wrong with you, frankly, if you would not say yes. I knew the president was despised by a significant proportion of the country, but that didn’t matter. And when I got there, I was under attack by people who were really attacking me out of a political animus toward the president."

'I represent science'

Bluey cited Fauci's recent statement in which he insisted he represents science.

"What do you make of his statement in this pushback that he seems so offended by?" he asked.

Atlas said that no person with any common sense would take Fauci's remark seriously.

"I think every person with a with any commonsense brain really has the same reaction to that kind of delusional statement that I would. So I won’t go into my personal reaction to that statement, but I will say it this way: That’s not what I saw when I was in the White House," he insisted. "What I saw when I was in the task force meetings were three doctors on the task force that controlled the medical policy, really, which were Dr. Fauci, who was the most visible face of the policy to the country, but not in charge of the task force. Dr. Deborah Birx, who was in charge of the medical side of the task force, she was the official task force coordinator with capital letters. She had the role and personally wrote all of the written advice to every state. All of the governors received her advice as the federal policy guidelines. She flew to dozens of states, she personally visited all of these state’s public health officials doling out the federal guidance. And Dr. Redfield was the third doctor who was the head of the CDC."

He added, "These people were bureaucrats, Drs. Fauci and Birx were 40-year bureaucrats. I was very different. I had more than a decade of health policy expertise practicing. I had 25-plus years of medical science clinical research and education. I brought in dozens of papers, the world’s literature."

'I was stunned at what I saw'

Pointing to his new book, Atlas said that the American people deserve to know the truth of what he said was a "level of incompetence" and "lack of critical thinking" on the task force.

"I was stunned at what I saw," he admitted. "We had bureaucrats in charge of the policy and that policy was the restrictions in lockdown. And it failed. It failed by the data to stop the spread of the infection. It failed to protect the elderly and stop them from dying. And it destroyed millions and millions of families, including the children who were sacrificed, and I’m talking about particularly low-income families."

Atlas added that as a public health leader, you shouldn't make wild promises such as "I'm going to stop this one infection at all costs, without regard for all of public health."

"It failed, by the way," he continued. "But it also inflicted massive harm because you have to remember, we shut down a lot of medical care. It wasn’t just cosmetic surgery or something like that that was shut down. We had 650,000 people with cancer on chemotherapy. Half of them skipped their chemo just during the spring of 2020 out of fear. We had 85% of living organ transplants did not get done compared to the previous year. We had two-thirds of cancer screenings did not get done. These people still have cancer."

Atlas added that many people who put their chronic health conditions on the back burner during the early days of the pandemic, whether voluntarily or because hospitals were full, are now finding themselves sicker than ever.

"They’re going to come back with widespread, what’s called metastatic, disease. A lot of them are going to die," he continued. "We had massive increases in drug abuse, in spousal abuse, in child abuse. ... So this was a massive harm, and the harm, again, all the losses, we are almost on the verge of destroying a younger generation, by the way, we have a massive rise in anxiety disorder, in depressive disorder."

Atlas added that the mental health crisis in younger patients is a direct result of the lockdowns during the pandemic.

"We had tripling of medical visits to doctors by teenagers for self-harm in the United States compared to the previous year. What does that mean? That means these are kids putting out cigarettes on their skin, slashing their wrists out of the isolation," he insisted. "It’s the lockdowns that did this. It’s the isolation. It’s not the virus. The isolation was caused by the grossly wrong public health advice. And this is going to take decades to solve."

Biden is also failing the American public, he says

Atlas elsewhere during the interview blasted President Joe Biden, whose performance as president thus far he said is a "failure."

"It’s a failure because there’s been a continuation of the disconnect from fact," he insisted. "First of all, there’s this bizarre notion that restricting people indoors, or whatever restrictions you want to impose on people, or these mask mandates, or anything else stop the spread of the infection or eliminate the virus. That’s proven wrong. We knew it a year ago, a year and a half ago. It’s still going on. There’s a sort of a bizarre lack of understanding of fact."

Atlas also said that many people are in denial concerning vaccine mandates and that natural immunity is far too discounted.

"There is very good protection in people who have recovered from the infection," he said. "That’s natural immunity. It would’ve been a shock, if that didn’t occur. This goes back centuries, by the way. But it certainly goes back decades in the medical literature. And it’s proven with this specific virus that people who recover from the infection have very good protection. In fact, the protection in people who’ve recovered from the infection is superior to the protection of vaccinated people who have never had the infection. That’s factually true, that’s inarguable. And to not acknowledge that is almost inexplicable, really, except if you’re just motivated to just be blind to the truth, or to hide the truth from the American people."