Atlas Slinks

And apparently, as with virtually all of Trump’s most abject sycophants, he was pushed more than he jumped:

Scott Atlas, President Trump’s pandemic adviser who embraced a controversial strategy of urging Americans to return to work and school with little restriction, and spent months feuding with the White House coronavirus task force’s other doctors, resigned on Monday, according to a letter he posted to his Twitter account.

Atlas had become widely disliked in the White House — even among aides who shared his view that the country should reopen and that officials should not worry about young, healthy people contracting the virus, according to two senior administration officials, who like others spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss personnel matters.

It’s time to shut down the Hoover Institution and use the land for affordable housing.

Having said that, Atlas ultimately got his wish of avoidable mass illness and death despite what by all appearances is the remarkably fast development of an effective vaccine:

Each week, good news about vaccines or antibody treatments surfaces, offering hope that an end to the pandemic is at hand.

And yet this holiday season presents a grim reckoning. The United States has reached an appalling milestone: more than one million new coronavirus cases every week. Hospitals in some states are full to bursting. The number of deaths is rising and seems on track to easily surpass the 2,200-a-day average in the spring, when the pandemic was concentrated in the New York metropolitan area.

Our failure to protect ourselves has caught up to us.

The nation now must endure a critical period of transition, one that threatens to last far too long, as we set aside justifiable optimism about next spring and confront the dark winter ahead. Some epidemiologists predict that the death toll by March could be close to twice the 250,000 figure that the nation surpassed only last week.

“The next three months are going to be just horrible,” said Dr. Ashish Jha, dean of Brown University’s School of Public Health and one of two dozen experts interviewed by The New York Times about the near future.

“Just horrible” is pretty much the only epitaph the Bush administration requires.

In sheer number of lives, one of the most destructive, deadly policy adivsors in recent American history. https://t.co/dfq5kX7LcW— Chris Hayes (@chrislhayes) December 1, 2020