North Cook News

Since Chicago-native Scott Atlas’s selection to serve as an advisor on the White House Coronavirus Task Force in early September, it has not been easy.

Atlas, 65, a medical professor specializing in neuroradiology, was added to the group in early September.  

Atlas grew up in northern Cook County where he graduated from Niles North High School in 1974. At Niles North Atlas was a National Merit Scholarship Semifinalist, played on the golf team and was a member of the National Honor Society and Student Senate.

Scott Atlas (upper left) with the Niles North High School Student Senate. (Below) Atlas's senior photo from 1973.

Following graduation he attended the University of Illinois.  According to a July 1976 article in the Daily Herald, he earned University of Illinois dean’s list honors as a junior.

Atlas met his wife, formerly Janice Rossi, at University of Illinois. She is a native of west suburban Oak Park and a graduate of Oak Park & River Forest High School

Following graduation from the University of Illinois in 1977 with a B.S. in biology Atlas went to medical school at the University of Chicago and then on to a career as an academic physician.

From 1998 to 2012 Atlas was Professor of Radiology and Chief of Neuroradiology at Stanford University Medical Center and now serves as Robert Wesson Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution of Stanford University and is a member of the institution’s Working Group on Health Care Policy. He is known in the medical field as a national expert on public-health policy prior to Covid. Atlas also serves as the editor of the top academic book in neuroradiology.

Immediately upon the announcement Atlas would be joining the Coronavirus Task Force political opponents began picking him apart.  

Atlas’s position is Covid is being made out to be something worse than what it really is. 

“(The) appropriate strategy is to diligently protect the vulnerable and open society to end the lockdown,” he told Fox News.

Despite his career at Stanford, the most selective university in the country, Atlas’s background was questioned. 

And then an NBC reporter overheard and wrote about a conversation he overheard on an airplace in which CDC Director Robert Redfield said "Everything he says is false". Redfield, whose tenure at the CDC has been rocky, later acknowledged he was speaking about Atlas. 

Redfield and the CDC did not release the details of the other side of the conversation. 

Atlas said opponents have been aimed at “delegitimizing” him as a public health policy expert. 

“I am here because I understand how to translate complex medical science into plain English for the president of the United States and for everyone else in the White House, and derive appropriate public policy from that information,” Atlas told Fox News. 

He supports the ideal of herd immunity and has openly questioned mask usage, social distancing and the continued closure of schools.

“The facts are quite clear, if you understand how to read the medical science and keep up to date with the current science,” Atlas told Fox News.

In July, Atlas told The Hill that Covid cases were being improperly counted as that the vast majority of those hospitalized with Covid were there for another condition and improperly counted as Covid patients. 

The latest CDC figures show Covid hospitalization and death rates continue to improve. 

The CDC’s latest report reveals hospitalization rates for those under 50 years of age was less than one person out of 100,000 compared to between one and two per 100,000 in the worst days of the pandemic. 

Hospitalization rates for the 65 and older age group also decreased to five per 100,000 from a high of 35 per 100,000.

Atlas has been noted as a possible replacement for Redfield if the director were to exit the CDC.