(Atlas, who resigned in November, told the Post in an emailed statement: “I am very disappointed to see more totally false statements and patently absurd lies about me. Although I don’t intend to weigh-in on every false and defamatory story or allow myself to be endlessly used as a political piñata, I firmly deny the false accusations that, as a special advisor to the President, I advocated for ‘herd immunity’ via letting the infection spread as a scientific approach to the pandemic. Nothing could be further from the truth.”)
As for the senior adviser to the president who helped bring Atlas on, a former senior administration official explained to the Post: “The knock against Jared has always been that he’s a dilettante who will dabble in this and dabble in that without doing the homework or really engaging in a long-term, sustained, committed way, but will be there to claim credit if things go well and disappear if things go poorly. And this is another example of that.” (His wife, Ivanka Trump, apparently thinks otherwise.)
“I don’t think this has to be a politicized crisis,” Kennedy told the Post. “This pandemic is incredibly tragic and, as someone who was in the room, it was very clear it wasn’t taken seriously. It was well understood what measures could be taken to save lives, to reduce the severity of the pandemic, and the administration and Jared Kushner made an active choice not to pursue those actions.”
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