From the historic campus of Hillsdale College in Hillsdale, Michigan, where the good, the true, and the beautiful are taught, nurtured, and honored, this is the Radio Free Hillsdale Hour, bringing the activity and education of the college to listeners across the country.

I mean, this is sort of the irony of the whole situation is the three society that purports to care about minorities and lower income families.

What we end up doing with these lockdowns and school closures is harm particularly those populations.

This is your host, Scott Bertram.

That's Dr. Scott Atlas, co-author of COVID Lessons Learned, a retrospective after four years,

a report published by the committee to unleash prosperity,

and we'll take an in-depth look at that report today with Dr. Atlas.

He's a fellow at Hillsdale College's Academy for Science and Freedom, the Robert Wesson

Senior Fellow in Healthcare Policy at the Hoover Institution, and as I mentioned, co-author

of the new report, COVID Lessons Learned.

Dr. Atlas, thanks so much for joining us.

I want to begin by asking about the overall response, particularly from public officials

from government, did the response from federal and many state governments,

inadvertently feed into a sense of panic in the public.

Yeah, the overall flaw was that it disregarded standard pandemic management known for, say, 15 years,

well understood ways to deal with viral respiratory pandemics

because it was known that lockdowns and closures of schools, et cetera, not only do not work,

but are extraordinarily harmful. And because of the implemented lockdowns that disregarded the evidence on this pandemic even,

it induced significant fear in the public that spiraled into even more harms

and ultimately has led to a loss of trust in public health and other expert level guidance.

Come back and talk about the public trust in a few minutes.

One of the major weapons used by government were various stages of lockdowns.

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