Welcome to the Federalist Radio Hour. I'm Joy Pullman, the executive editor here over

at the Federalist during a very busy news week. We're welcoming Dr. Scott Atlas to the

podcast. He's a senior fellow in healthcare policy at Stanford University's Hoover Institution

and a former member of the White House Coronavirus Task Force. He's out this week on December

7th Pearl Harbor Day. Maybe that's fitting with his brand new book. It's called A Plague

Upon Our House My Fight at the Trump White House to stop COVID from destroying America.

Dr. Atlas, welcome. Thank you for having me. Happy to be here.

So as I mentioned to you, I wanted to spend this podcast talking, you know, two-thirds

half about the content in your book, the angle that it's taking, instead of another

round of media hysteria. So let's just start out though. Could you give me your two-minute

reaction to the current kind of hysteria cycle about COVID, the so-called Omicron variant?

Sure. It is a continuation of the hysteria of what we saw for the previous year and

half. And I call it hysteria because it again is denial of basic science, denial of the

data that we see in this variant, and denial of what everyone who's really a thinking scientist

or doctor who's had medical school level of virology would expect. We expect, as a pandemic,

virus evolves to see mutants, mutations, so-called variants. That's what happens as a pandemic

becomes endemic, which means a virus that comes and goes at low levels without a lot of

lethality. And so this is a strain, this is a variant. The expectation is that variants

will occur. That's point number one. Point number two is variants when they occur typically

survive because they're still very contagious, but they're less lethal. This is the expectation.

That's sort of what we've seen actually, despite all the hysteria about the Delta variant,

it was very contagious. And it's true, a lot of people died, but the ratio of people who got

...