"He listens to people both inside government--public health officials--and . . . from the academic science, medical scientists, epidemiologists . . ."

Many of the attacks against Trump's handling of the Coronavirus and lockdown are designed to distract from who has the real authority to turn the lockdowns on and off.  When folks claim that Trump isn't following the evidence or the science or the experts, that's a pretty hard one to defend because none of are reporters auditing White House meetings of C-19 Task Force personnel, like Fauci, Redfield, Atlas, and others.  We don't know specifically who Trump is reading or following.  In the clip below, however, Atlas tells us that Trump listens to experts and gets information from scientific journals.  How you can track his decision-making process beyond that is, well, beyond me.  Atlas points to Trump advocating for reopening, but where is that happening?  Why isn't it statewide or country-wide?  If herd immunity is so great, which I am in agreement with its proponents, why are we still hearing about testing and screening badges which is only the preliminary stages for vaccine passports if one ever wants to fly?  It must be a case that there are too many fingers in the pot of COVID with each one profit-seeking on the backs of a crushed economy.  

Atlas says that "Trump stated presciently that the cure cannot be worse than the problem."  

Okay, so that sounds like Trump was a sound, astute advisor to public policymakers on COVID, but was he really?  I like Atlas.  His voice on the White House COVID Task Force is a breath of fresh air against the vaccine-only narrative that Fauci is nursing.  And yet I hear Atlas parrot the same remarks regarding vaccine.  At the 4:02 mark, Atlas says

This is a national strategy the President articulated.  He says it all the time, and in the meantime, he's doing a lot of great things, like as a patient he's showed recently like Operation Warpspeed with new drug development, facilitating the record timing of a safe and effective vaccine that we anticipate very soon. 

"Stopping COVID-19 at all costs is highly destructive."  Atlas is right on this.  

Dr. Scott Atlas:
These lockdowns are a luxury of the rich. The President understands that people need to work, the working-class need their jobs, children need to go to school, it's harmful to do otherwise. || #IngrahamAngle #Covid19 pic.twitter.com/1VTOUHS2OQ

— Laura Ingraham (@IngrahamAngle) October 7, 2020

He continues, 

46% of the top 6 cancers went undiagnosed during the first 3 months of this lockdown.  And what that means is more than half of breast cancers, by the way.  This is just the tip of the iceberg.  It's not just that hospitals were closed, it was that fear was instilled, sort of a frenzy of fear in the American public and all over the world.  What we see is that of the 650,000 people on chemotherapy, half didn't get their chemo.  We had 2/3 of cancer screenings not get done.  Half of child immunizations weren't getting done.  And the other impacts are even more harmful.  25% of kids in the United States, 18-24, one-fourth had suicidal ideation, meaning that they thought of suicide, during the month of June.  I mean this is so destructive, not just to our children who are being harmed by the school closures but really this lockdown would be what I'd call the luxury of the rich.  This is really a class problem here, where the affluent elites don't understand--the President understands--that people need to work.  The working class needs their jobs.  Children need to go to school.  And it's very harmful to do otherwise.  

Ingraham interrupts him, saying

Working-class people are doing better in the states that did not lockdown or already reopened.  What does Biden mean by "national strategy"?  There's a complete fallacy that President Trump is not following the science.  President Trump follows the science.  He listens to people both inside government--public health officials--and he also gets information from the academic science, medical scientists, epidemiologists, from places like Harvard and Stanford and Oxford, top people in the world, and these people agree very much with his strategy--protect the vulnerable as much as we can, and open up because of the harms of that.  This is a national strategy the President articulated.  He says it all the time, and in the meantime, he's doing a lot of great things, like as a patient he's showed recently like Operation Warpspeed with new drug development, facilitating the record timing of a safe and effective vaccine that we anticipate very soon.  

NIH policy regarding COVID is to wear a mask when you cannot social distance? 

So now I have my doubts about Atlas.