A former White House Coronavirus Task Force member sounded off about the consequences students faced as a result of nationwide shutdown policies during the COVID-19 pandemic during a Friday speech at the University of Chicago.
Scott Atlas, a Robert Wesson Senior Fellow in health policy at Stanford University’s Hoover Institute, spoke during the “Academia’s COVID Failures” symposium. Atlas was one of several guests that attended the event and delivered an approximately 10-minute speech during which he blamed university and school leaders for imposing lockdown policies that led to mental and physical problems among American youth, according to The Chicago Thinker’s video of the speech. (RELATED: Dr. Scott Atlas Tells Citizens To ‘Rise Up’ In Face Of Further Lockdowns In Michigan)
“Almost all of Western Europe recognized the spring 2020 data that all over the world there was a minuscule risk to healthy children for serious illness, so Western Europe opened schools for the 2021 year even during otherwise stringent lockdowns, but most of America’s governors closed in-person schools,” Atlas said. “Hundreds of thousands of child abuse cases went unreported because schools were the number one agency to report that, mental health disorders in teenagers and college-aged children skyrocketed, self-harm by teenagers doubled to tripled, overdoses and and substance use disorders in teenagers increased by 40-120% and massive learning losses occurred.”
Atlas served as an adviser to former President Donald Trump about the COVID-19 pandemic.
White House coronavirus adviser Dr. Scott Atlas speaks on Covid-19 testing in the Rose Garden of the White House in Washington, DC on September 28, 2020. (Photo by MANDEL NGAN/AFP via Getty Images)
Moving on to vaccinations, Scott slammed university medical centers for injecting “healthy infants and toddlers with this experimental drug” during a National Institute of Health clinical trial, despite the demographic being at low risk.
“Is that not the standard for medical ethics in university research hospitals?” Atlas asked. “And even if it were true that vaccines prevent the spread of infection, which it does not after only several weeks according to the data from all over the world, what kind of society uses its children as human shields for adults?”
He alleged that the shutdowns began a “public health disaster” for young people, citing increased weight gain among college students.
The symposium included “three separate panel discussions about the ways in which academic freedom on university campuses has been sabotaged and how the COVID pandemic brought that issue to light,” according to a press release published by The Chicago Thinker. It was hosted by the Academic Sanity Consortium, which was founded by University of Chicago students.
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