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Former Trump adviser: ‘We broke the social contract’ by harming children during COVID

Published

12 months ago

13 minute read

Dr. Scott Atlas

From LifeSiteNews

By Emily Mangiaracina

Dr. Scott Atlas revealed how the White House Coronavirus Task Force squashed dissenting voices without critiquing the actual scientific data, setting the foundation for irrational and harmful COVID policies.

A former adviser and dissident on the White House Coronavirus Task Force condemned the U.S. COVID policy response for having ignored scientific data and “brok(en) the social contract” by “harming our children as a society.”

In an interview with PragerU CEO Marissa Streit, Dr. Scott Atlas gave a scathing rebuke of nearly every aspect of the U.S. policy response to COVID, the formulation of which he was able to witness up close, as an adviser to former President Donald Trump in 2020 alongside high-ranking health officials, including Dr. Anthony Fauci. Atlas told Streit how he was stunned to see that during the COVID meetings, key officials appeared indifferent to the health data that Atlas argued should guide their policies.

“There was never a single meeting — and this is sort of shocking to even keep reliving — not a single time where Deborah Birx or Anthony Fauci or Robert Redfield brought scientific papers into the meeting,” Atlas told Streit regarding the powerful trio that shaped the direction of the COVID task force’s meetings. Birx served as the White House Coronavirus Response coordinator; Fauci was the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID); and Redfield was the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

Atlas said that the trio was critical of his own views but did not once address the data he presented or the validity of any design study. Instead, they made “ad hominem” attacks, accusing him of being an “outlier.”

“And even worse, not a single time did they disagree with each other, which of course is unheard of — implying that they were just there was a groupthink going on, not critical thinking,” Atlas said.

It is noteworthy that, as Atlas pointed out, the trio made a pact with each other to resign from their task force position if any of them were fired by Trump, which Birx revealed in 2022. “That strikes me as people not caring if people are dying — they care about their own position,” Atlas told Streit.

Atlas believes the team purposely excluded dissenting scientific voices when possible, citing at least two instances which seemed motivated by this desire to maintain groupthink.

The first occurred when Fauci called Atlas to request an invite of epidemiologists researching COVID. “ I said, ‘That’s great. I’m going to have some of the world’s top epidemiologists and infectious disease experts and virologists come in…and we’ll have a discussion of the data.” However, Fauci ended up dropping the plan. “That was never brought up again, because what they instead wanted was Fauci, Birx, Redfield and me only, with no witnesses as to what was going on,” said Atlas.

Atlas told how he was called into Jared Kushner’s office less than 24 hours before the meeting, with some of the health experts already flying into Washington D.C., to be told it was now canceled. He was told that Birx sent an email to the team saying that she was “uncomfortable” with the meeting and that she was not going to attend.

“So I said no, that’s unacceptable. I said first of all, the meeting was set to have her come. Second of all, if she doesn’t know enough or is so insecure about her knowledge that she can’t come, okay, well that’s too bad,” recounted Atlas.

“In fact this is the only time where I really thought I was going to quit,” said Atlas, adding that the thought of canceling the meeting was “so outrageous,” since people were “dying” at the time.

Kusher then proposed that they have a meeting with Trump, but only for “five minutes.” However, the president proceeded to ask Atlas’ team of health experts questions on the relevant issues such as school closures, the virus’ risk to children, hydroxychloroquine, etc. Meanwhile, Atlas “kept being tapped on the shoulder” as he was told to wrap up the meeting.

Atlas refused to interrupt, explaining, “I’m not going to interrupt the president of the United States, that’s obvious. Secondly, this was important. Third, he was asking great questions. And in fact…[Trump] said he was so happy to have what he called ‘five geniuses’ here.”

“Why are they afraid to have expert scientists come in?” said Atlas, going on to note that their behavior was “the mark of people who were extremely insecure,” and “had different motivations” than that of saving people.

“My motivation was very simple. People were dying. It’s my country. I’m going to help. I was really appalled at the perverse motivations that I saw,” he continued.

Of each failure amid the COVID response, Atlas was most grieved over the harm done to children. When asked if leaders of the teachers’ unions were aware that children “were not big spreaders” of the COVID virus, Atlas replied:

“This is one of the greatest sins, in my view…what we as a society did to children. I don’t want to get choked up …it’s so awful. We broke the social contract we have as a people by harming our children…and injecting, for instance, experimental drugs into children that have side effects, many of which are uncertain, for a disease that those healthy children did not have a significant risk from, to use them as shields. I mean, this is almost unspeakable.”

Given that studies in early 2020 showed that open schools do not increase the infection rate of the community, and that about a dozen studies during that time showed that children suffered a miniscule risk from the virus, and “were not significant spreaders,” Atlas asserted that school closure policies were utterly “irrational.”

He explained the massive harm that was inflicted on children through these closures.

By August of 2020, the CDC had already shared evidence that it is “extremely harmful” to children’s learning to shutter in-person learning, with “much worse” losses for minorities and poor children.

“Secondly, there was an explosion of psychiatric illness in teenagers and college kids from the isolation,” Atlas continued, elaborating that there was an “explosion” of visits to doctors for self-harm —teenagers putting out cigarettes on their skin and slashing their wrists” because of the psychological pain of the isolation from school closures — as well as a “massive explosion in drug abuse substance abuse in teenagers.”

There was furthermore a “massive increase” in suicidal thoughts in teenage girls, and a whopping one in four college-age kids in the U.S. thought of killing himself during lockdowns, the CDC reported in July of 2020.

Pointing out that teachers objected to the possibility of even teaching their students remotely, Atlas lambasted them for breaking “every ethical and moral responsibility they had to teach our kids.” He added that according to studies, teachers were generally severely afraid of getting COVID at work, much more afraid than people in other professions.

“Are these people even thinking? These are the people we’ve entrusted to teach our children. They have disqualified themselves by being irrational, and by sacrificing children for their benefit,” concluded Atlas.

He laid blame on other doctors as well, for not questioning what they were being told by the medical establishment.

“The medical community failed, and they failed because they acted like sheep. They didn’t question what they were told. They didn’t read the studies. They weren’t fluent in the data. And it’s very sad, it’s embarrassing, and they rightfully have lost trust,” said Atlas.

He further explained that besides “doctors being spineless sheep and not critical thinkers,” there is another major reason that the medical profession capitulated to the official narrative on COVID. It is that science and medical research is funded and controlled by a “cartel of people at the top,” according to Atlas.

“The National Institutes of Health (NIH) is the main funder of science in the U.S. and therefore the world,” said Atlas, and “indirectly is controlled by a cabal of very powerful politically connected, interdependent people who are also the chairs of departments and medical schools.”

“It turns out that every academic scientist, every university scientist, to get promoted needs an NIH Grant…I don’t think the public understands that they’re therefore dependent on the NIH. So you’re not going to get many assistant professors who are willing to sacrifice their career advantage by speaking out against the NIH,” including its department heads like Fauci or Collins.

He also pointed out that more than 15 university medical centers in the U.S. receive over $500 million every year from the NIH alone, naturally compromising their independence.

“I’m not making excuses for them, I’m explaining their behavior…one of the things I learned about all this is there’s so many people in our government in positions of leadership that don’t have the necessary integrity to be leaders, because integrity at very least is telling the truth,” Atlas said.

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Pentagon agency to simulate lockdowns, mass vaccinations, public compliance messaging

Published on June 12, 2025

By

From LifeSiteNews

By Tim Hinchliffe

With lockdowns, mass vaccination campaigns, and social distancing still on the table from the last around, it appears that AI and Machine Learning will play a much bigger role in the next.

DARPA is getting into the business of simulating disease outbreaks, including modeling interventions such as mass vaccination campaigns, lockdowns, and communication strategies.

At the end of May, the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) put out a Request for Information (RFI) seeking information regarding “state-of-the-art capabilities in the simulation of disease outbreaks.”

The Pentagon’s research and development funding arm wants to hear from academic, industry, commercial, and startup communities on how to develop “advanced capabilities that drive technical innovation and identify critical gaps in bio-surveillance, diagnostics, and medical countermeasures” in order to “improve preparedness for future public health emergencies.”

As if masks, social distancing, lockdowns, and vaccination mandates under the unscientific guise of slowing the spread and preventing the transmission of COVID weren’t harmful enough, the U.S. military wants to model the effects of these exact same countermeasures for future outbreaks.

The RFI also asks participants “Fatality Rate & Immune Status: How are fatality rates and varying levels of population immunity (natural or vaccine-induced) incorporated into your simulations?“

Does “natural or vaccine-induced” relate to “population immunity” or “fatality rates” or both?

Moving on, the RFI gets into modeling lockdowns, social distancing, and mass vaccination campaigns, along with communication strategies:

Intervention Strategies: Detail the range of intervention strategies that can be modeled, including (but not limited to) vaccination campaigns, social distancing measures, quarantine protocols, treatments, and public health communication strategies. Specifically, describe the ability to model early intervention and its impact on outbreak trajectory.

The fact that DARPA wants to model these so-called intervention strategies just after the entire world experienced them suggests that these exact same measures will most likely be used again in the future:

“We are committed to developing advanced modeling capabilities to optimize response strategies and inform the next generation of (bio)technology innovations to protect the population from biological threats. We are particularly focused on understanding the complex interplay of factors that drive outbreak spread and evaluating the effectiveness of potential interventions.” — DARPA, Advanced Disease Outbreak Simulation Capabilities RFI, May 2025.

“Identification of optimal timelines and capabilities to detect, identify, attribute, and respond to disease outbreaks, including but not limited to biosensor density deployment achieving optimal detection timelines, are of interest.” ­— DARPA, Advanced Disease Outbreak Simulation Capabilities RFI, May 2025.

With lockdowns, mass vaccination campaigns, and social distancing still on the table from the last around, it appears that AI and Machine Learning will play a much bigger role in the next.

For future innovation, the DARPA RFI asks applicants to: “Please describe any novel technical approaches – or applications of diverse technical fields (e.g., machine learning, artificial intelligence, complex systems theory, behavioral science) – that you believe would significantly enhance the state-of-the-art capabilities in this field or simulation of biological systems wholistically.”

Instead of putting a Dr. Fauci, a Dr. Birx, a replaceable CDC director, a TV doctor, a big pharma CEO, or a Cuomo brother out there to lie to your face about how they were all just following The ScienceTM, why not use AI and ML and combine them with behavioral sciences in order to concoct your “public health communications strategies?”

When you look at recently announced DARPA programs like Kallisti and MAGICS, which are aimed at creating an algorithmic Theory of Mind to model, predict, and influence collective human behavior, you start to get a sense of how all these programs can interweave:

“The MAGICS ARC calls for paradigm-shifting approaches for modeling complex, dynamic systems for predicting collective human behaviour.” — DARPA, MAGICS ARC, April 2025

On April 8, DARPA issued an Advanced Research Concepts (ARC) opportunity for a new program called “Methodological Advancements for Generalizable Insights into Complex Systems (MAGICS)” that seeks “new methods and paradigms for modeling collective human behavior.”

Nowhere in the MAGICS description does it mention modeling or predicting the behavior of “adversaries,” as is DARPA’s custom.

Instead, it talks at length about “modeling human systems,” along with anticipating, predicting, understanding, and forecasting “collective human behavior” and “complex social phenomena” derived from “sociotechnical data sets.”

Could DARPA’s MAGICS program be applied to simulating collective human behavior when it comes to the next public health emergency, be it real or perceived?

“The goal of an upcoming program will be to develop an algorithmic theory of mind to model adversaries’ situational awareness and predict future behaviour.” — DARPA, Theory of Mind Special Notice, December 2024.

In December 2024, DARPA launched a similar program called Theory of Mind, which was renamed Kallisti a month later.

The goal of Theory of Mind is to develop “new capabilities to enable national security decisionmakers to optimize strategies for deterring or incentivizing actions by adversaries,” according to a very brief special announcement.

DARPA never mentions who those “adversaries” are. In the case of a public health emergency, an adversary could be anyone who questions authoritative messaging.

The Theory of Mind program will also:

… seek to combine algorithms with human expertise to explore, in a modeling and simulation environment, potential courses of action in national security scenarios with far greater breadth and efficiency than is currently possible.

This would provide decisionmakers with more options for incentive frameworks while preventing unwanted escalation.

We are interested in a comprehensive overview of current and emerging technologies for disease outbreak simulation, how simulation approaches could be extended beyond standard modeling methods, and to understand how diseases spread within and between individuals including population level dynamics.

They say that all the modeling and simulating across programs is for “national security,” but that is a very broad term.

DARPA is in the business of research and development for national security purposes, so why is the Pentagon modeling disease outbreaks and intervention strategies while simultaneously looking to predict and manipulate collective human behavior?

If and when the next outbreak occurs, the same draconian and Orwellian measures that governments and corporations deployed in the name of combating COVID are still on the table.

And AI, Machine Learning, and the military will play an even bigger role than the last time around.

From analyzing wastewater to learning about disease spread; from developing pharmaceuticals to measuring the effects of lockdowns and vaccine passports, from modeling and predicting human behavior to coming up with messaging strategies to keep everyone in compliance – “improving preparedness for future public health emergencies” is becoming more militaristically algorithmic by the day.

“We are exploring innovative solutions to enhance our understanding of outbreak dynamics and to improve preparedness for future public health emergencies.” — DARPA, Advanced Disease Outbreak Simulation Capabilities RFI, May 2025.

Reprinted with permission from The Sociable.

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Business

Audit report reveals Canada’s controversial COVID travel app violated multiple rules

Published on June 11, 2025

By

From LifeSiteNews

By Anthony Murdoch

Canada’s Auditor General found that government procurement rules were not followed in creating the ArriveCAN app.

Canada’s Auditor General revealed that the former Liberal government under Prime Minister Justin Trudeau failed multiple times by violating contract procurement rules to create ArriveCAN, its controversial COVID travel app.

In a report released Tuesday, Auditor General Karen Hogan noted that between April 2015 to March 2024, the Trudeau government gave out 106 professional service contracts to GC Strategies Inc. This is the same company that made the ArriveCAN app.

The contracts were worth $92.7 million, with $64.5 million being paid out.

According to Hogan, Canada’s Border Services Agency gave four contracts to GC Strategies valued at $49.9 million. She noted that only 54 percent of the contracts delivered any goods.

“We concluded that professional services contracts awarded and payments made by federal organizations to GC Strategies and other companies incorporated by its co-founders were not in accordance with applicable policy instruments and that value for money for these contracts was not obtained,” Hogan said.

She continued, “Despite this, federal government officials consistently authorized payments.”

The report concluded that “Federal organizations need to ensure that public funds are spent with due regard for value for money, including in decisions about the procurement of professional services contracts.”

Hogan announced an investigation of ArriveCAN in November 2022 after the House of Commons voted 173-149 for a full audit of the controversial app.

Last year, Hogan published an audit of ArriveCAN and on Tuesday published a larger audit of the 106 contracts awarded to GC Strategies by 31 federal organizations under Trudeau’s watch.

‘Massive scandal,’ says Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre

Conservative Party leader Pierre Poilievre said Hogan’s report on the audit exposed multiple improprieties.

“This is a massive scandal,” he told reporters Tuesday.

“The facts are extraordinary. There was no evidence of added value. In a case where you see no added value, why are you paying the bill?”

ArriveCAN was introduced in April 2020 by the Trudeau government and made mandatory in November 2020. The app was used by the federal government to track the COVID jab status of those entering the country and enforce quarantines when deemed necessary.

ArriveCAN was supposed to have cost $80,000, but the number quickly ballooned to $54 million, with the latest figures showing it cost $59.5 million.

As for the app itself, it was riddled with technical glitches along with privacy concerns from users.

LifeSiteNews has published a wide variety of reports related to the ArriveCAN travel app.

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