If you have not heard about Dr. Atlas that may be due to the fact he is one of the thousands of experts that are openly going against what the media and some officials are trying to portray and instill into the general public. Back in April, he penned an op-ed in The Hill with the title being very clear “The data is in — stop the panic and end the total isolation” to try to put an end to the fear-mongering and the overly strict mandates that according to him “there’s no science whatsoever to” support.
In that op-ed he pointed out some facts that were already apparent back then from the data that the media was falling to report:
- Fact 1: The overwhelming majority of people do not have any significant risk of dying from COVID-19.
- Fact 2: Protecting the older and at-risk people eliminates hospital overcrowding.
- Fact 3: Vital herd immunity is actually PREVENTED by total isolation policies, prolonging the problem.
- Fact 4: People are dying from being denied other medical care due to hypothetical COVID-19 fatality projections that turned out to be false.
- Fact 5: We have a clearly defined population at risk who can be protected with targeted measures.
In a Fox Report he also said:
“I think one thing that’s not somehow receiving attention is the CDC just came out with their fatality rates,” Atlas said. “And lo and behold, they verify what people have been saying for over a month now, including my Stanford epidemiology colleagues and everyone else in the world who’s done this analysis — and that is that the infection fatality rate is less than one-tenth of the original estimate.”
“The policy itself is killing people. I mean, I think everyone’s heard about 650,000 people on cancer, chemo, half of whom didn’t come in. Two-thirds of cancer screenings didn’t come in. 40 percent of stroke patients urgently needing care didn’t come in,” Atlas said. “And now we have over half the people, children in the United States not getting vaccinations. This is really what [Fauci] said was irreparable harm.“
“And I and my colleagues from other institutions have calculated the cost of the lockdown in terms of lives lost,” Atlas said. “Every month is about equal to the entire cost of lives lost during the COVID infection itself. This is a tragic, misguided public policy to extend this lockdown, whether or not it was justifiable in the beginning.”
“There’s no science whatsoever to keep K-through-12 schools closed, nor to have masks or social distancing on children, nor to keep summer programs closed,” Atlas said. “What we know now is that the risk of death and the risk of even a serious illness is nearly zero in people under 18.”
Now that Dr. Atlas is an official member of the COVID-19 team he can address the White House press directly, and the results from the recent conference were very predictable, it has tongue in cheek been referred to as a physicist trying to explain quantum mechanics to a room full of kindergartners.
When it was asked about director Redfield’s testimony to Congress claiming that 90% of Americans still not having immunity to the virus that causes COVID-19, Dr. Atlas was polite but direct and let the press know that the testimony was not true. “I think that Dr. Redfield misstated something there. The immunity to the infection is not solely determined by the percent of people who have antibodies,” said Atlas.
When the media then asked, “Who are we to believe?” Dr. Atlas cited a list of research proving that over 10% of Americans have immunity, and he reminded the media that anyone can look up the data to figure out who was right. Despite the media constantly fear-mongering and reporting misstatements, anyone who has been following the research knows that the testimony was off along with many of the measures since the data started coming in.
“The data he was talking about is [CDC] surveillance data which showed that roughly 9% of the country has antibodies. But when you look at the CDC data state by state, much of that data is old. Some of it goes back to March or April, before many of these states had the cases. That’s point number one.”
On top of using old data, point number two really stunned some people. Since the middle of the last century researchers have known that besides antibody-producing B-cells the body also has T-cells which is a second defence against infections. The vaccines being developed that will soon be pushed on us rely on the existence of T-cells, though the idea that we even need a vaccine at all depends on us pretending that these cells don’t exist.
According to Dr. Atlas even if Redfield wasn’t citing data that was over 6 months old:
“Immunity to the infection is not solely determined by the percent of people who have antibodies. If you look at the research – and there’s been about 24 papers at least on the immunity from T-cells, a different type of immunity than antibodes. […]The reality is that according to the papers from Sweden, Singapore, and elsewhere, there is cross-immunity highly likely from other infections and there is also T-cell immunity. And the combination of those make the antibodies a small fraction of the people that have immunity. So the answer is no, it is not 90% of people that are susceptible to infection.”
T-cells help to stimulate B-cells to produce antibodies, but they also fight off a virus even if the body does not have the ability to generate antibodies by mounting a direct attack to kill off infected cells. Additionally, even if immunity from antibodies fades away quickly, crossover immunity from T-cells has been shown to last as long as 17 years to coronaviruses. In fact, T-cell immunity to the SARS coronavirus outbreak in 2003 has been shown to provide crossover immunity to the virus that causes COVID-19 according to a study published in Nature.
As it turns out the common cold coronavirus that almost everyone has had can also provide T-cell cross-immunity to COVID-19, the research shows that around half of us are likely to be immune to the disease even before the virus that causes it was known to exist, which really is not all that surprising as there are at least 4 strains of coronavirus that cause the common cold.
This is not the only study to show this level of cross-reactivity. Another study has shown that in healthy donors never exposed to this virus 34% already had T-cells that reacted to SARS-CoV-2. This finding was confirmed in another study that showed 40-60% of unexposed individuals already had T-cell recognition.
If a lot of us turn out to have pre-existing immunity, the claim of not achieving antibody herd immunity until two-thirds of the population becomes infected with this virus is way off due to herd immunity via T-cells. 60-70% is the percentage that epidemiologists project that is needed for herd immunity with a respiratory virus, as it turns out it is possible that we may be there now.
During the 2009 H1N1 Swine Flu outbreak it was thought that pre-existing T-cell immunity did not exist, but it was discovered that it did which caused the CDC and WHO to update their messaging. Some question as to why this is not being done now with COVID-19 as it appears science is getting overlooked.
