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Dr. Birx Praises Herself While Revealing Ignorance, Treachery, & Deceit

https://brownstone.org/articles/dr-birx-praises-herself-while-revealing-ignorance-treachery-and-deceit/
https://brownstone.org/articles/deborah-birxs-guide-to-destroying-a-country-from-within/
https://brownstone.org/articles/dr-deborah-birxs-failed-attempt-to-flip-the-script/
https://brownstone.org/articles/donald-trumps-march-16-2020-press-conference-that-kicked-off-this-catastrophe-transcribed/
https://brownstone.org/articles/what-happened-on-the-junket-to-china-in-february-2020/

by Jeffrey Tucker via The Brownstone Institute

The December 2020 resignation of Dr. Deborah Birx, White House
Coronavirus Response Coordinator under Trump, revealed predictable
hypocrisy.

Like so many other government officials around the world, she was
caught violating her own stay-at-home order.

Therefore she finally left her post following nine months of causing
unfathomable amounts of damage to life, liberty, property, and the
very idea of hope for the future.

Even if Anthony Fauci had been the front man for the media, it was
Birx who was the main influence in the White House behind the
nationwide lockdowns that did not stop or control the pathogen but
have caused immense suffering and continue to roil and wreck the
world. So it was significant that she would not and could not comply
with her own dictates, even as her fellow citizens were being hunted
down for the same infractions against “public health.”

In the days before Thanksgiving 2020, she had warned Americans to
“assume you’re infected” and to restrict gatherings to “your immediate
household.” Then she packed her bags and headed to Fenwick Island in
Delaware where she met with four generations for a traditional
Thanksgiving dinner, as if she were free to make normal choices and
live a normal life while everyone else had to shelter in place.

The Associated Press was first out with the report on December 20, 2020.

    Birx acknowledged in a statement that she went to her Delaware
property. She declined to be interviewed.

    She insisted the purpose of the roughly 50-hour visit was to deal
with the winterization of the property before a potential sale —
something she says she previously hadn’t had time to do because of her
busy schedule.

    “I did not go to Delaware for the purpose of celebrating
Thanksgiving,” Birx said in her statement, adding that her family
shared a meal together while in Delaware.

    Birx said that everyone on her Delaware trip belongs to her
“immediate household,” even as she acknowledged they live in two
different homes. She initially called the Potomac home a “3 generation
household (formerly 4 generations).” White House officials later said
it continues to be a four-generation household, a distinction that
would include Birx as part of the home.

So it was all a sleight-of-hand: she was staying home; it’s just that
she has several homes! This is how the power elite comply, one
supposes.

The BBC then quoted her defense, which echo the pain experienced by
hundreds of millions:

    “My daughter hasn’t left that house in 10 months, my parents have
been isolated for 10 months. They’ve become deeply depressed as I’m
sure many elderly have as they’ve not been able to see their sons,
their granddaughters. My parents have not been able to see their
surviving son for over a year. These are all very difficult things.”

Indeed. However, she was the major voice for the better part of 2020
for requiring exactly that. No one should blame her for wanting to get
together with family; that she worked so hard for so long to prevent
others from doing so is what is at issue.

The press piled on and she announced that she would be leaving her
post and not seeking a position at the Biden White House. Trump
tweeted that she will be missed. It was the final discrediting – or
should have been – of a person that many in the White House and many
around the country had come to see as an obvious fanatic and fake, a
person whose influence wrecked the liberties and health of an entire
country.

It was a fitting end to a catastrophic career.

So it would make sense that people might pick up her new book to find
out what it was like to go through that kind of media storm, the real
reasons for her visit, what it was like to know for sure that she must
violate her own rules in order to bring comfort to her family, and the
difficult decision she made to throw in the towel knowing that she has
compromised the integrity of her entire program.

One slogs through her entire book only to find this incredible fact:
she never mentions this. The incident is missing entirely from her
book.

Instead at the moment in the narrative at which she would be expected
to recount the affair she says almost in passing that “When former
vice president Biden was declared the winner of the 2020 election, I’d
set a goal for myself—to hand over responsibility for the pandemic
response, with all its many elements, in the best possible place.”

At that point, the book skips immediately to the new year. Done. It’s
like Orwell, the story, even though it was reported for days in the
world press and became a defining moment in her career, is just wiped
out from the history book of her own authorship.

Somehow it makes sense that she would neglect to mention this. Reading
her book is a very painful experience (all credit to Michael Senger’s
review) simply because it seems to be weaving fables on page after
page, strewn with bromides, completely lacking in self awareness,
punctuated by revealing comments that make the opposite point of what
she is seeking. Reading it is truly a surreal experience, astonishing
especially because she is able to maintain her delusionary pose for
525 pages.

Recall that it was she who was tasked – by Anthony Fauci – with doing
the really crucial thing of talking Donald Trump into green-lighting
the lockdowns that began on March 12, 2020, and continued to their
final hard-core deployment on March 16. This was the “15 Days to
Flatten the Curve” that turned into two years in many parts of the
country.

Her book admits that it was a two-level lie from the beginning.

    “We had to make these palatable to the administration by avoiding
the obvious appearance of a full Italian lockdown,” she writes. “At
the same time, we needed the measures to be effective at slowing the
spread, which meant matching as closely as possible what Italy had
done—a tall order. We were playing a game of chess in which the
success of each move was predicated on the one before it.”

Further:

    “At this point, I wasn’t about to use the words lockdown or
shutdown. If I had uttered either of those in early March, after being
at the White House only one week, the political, nonmedical members of
the task force would have dismissed me as too alarmist, too
doom-and-gloom, too reliant on feelings and not facts. They would have
campaigned to lock me down and shut me up.”

In other words, she wanted to go full CCP just like Italy but didn’t
want to say that. Crucially, she knew for sure that two weeks was not
the real plan. “I left the rest unstated: that this was just a
starting point.”

“No sooner had we convinced the Trump administration to implement our
version of a two-week shutdown than I was trying to figure out how to
extend it,” she admits.

    “Fifteen Days to Slow the Spread was a start, but I knew it would
be just that. I didn’t have the numbers in front of me yet to make the
case for extending it longer, but I had two weeks to get them. However
hard it had been to get the fifteen-day shutdown approved, getting
another one would be more difficult by many orders of magnitude. In
the meantime, I waited for the blowback, for someone from the economic
team to call me to the principal’s office or confront me at a task
force meeting. None of this happened.”

It was a solution in search of evidence she did not have. She told
Trump that the evidence was there anyway. She actually tricked him
into believing that locking down a whole population of people was
somehow magically going to make a virus to which everyone would
inevitably be exposed somehow vanish as a threat.

Meanwhile, the economy was wrecked domestically and then all over the
world, as most governments in the world followed what the US did.

Where did she come up with the idea of lockdowns? By her own report,
her only real experience with infectious disease came from her work on
AIDS, a very different disease from a respiratory virus that everyone
would eventually get but which would only be fatal or even severe for
a small cohort, a fact that was known since late January. Still, her
experience counted for more than science.

    “In any health crisis, it is crucial to work at the personal
behavior level,” she says with the presumption that avoidance at all
costs was the only goal. “With HIV/AIDS, this meant convincing
asymptomatic people to get tested, to seek treatment if they were
HIV-positive, and to take preventative measures, including wearing
condoms; or to employ other pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP) if they
were negative.”

She immediately hops to the analogy with Covid. “I knew the government
agencies would need to do the same thing to have a similar effect on
the spread of this novel coronavirus. The most obvious parallel with
the HIV/AIDS example was the message of wearing masks.”

Masks = condoms. Remarkable. This “obvious parallel” remark sums the
whole depth of her thinking. Behavior is all that matters. Just stay
apart. Cover your mouth. Don’t gather. Don’t travel. Close the
schools. Close everything. Whatever happens, don’t get it. Nothing
else matters. Keep your immune system as unexposed as possible.

I wish I could say her thought is more complex than that but it is
not. This was the basis for lockdowns. For how long? In her mind, it
seems like it would be forever. Nowhere in the book does she reveal an
exit strategy. Not even vaccines qualify.

>From the very beginning, she revealed her epidemiological views. On
March 16, 2020 at her press conference with Trump, she summarized her
position: “We really want people to be separated at this time.”
People? All people? Everywhere? Not one reporter raised a question
about this obviously ridiculous and outrageous statement that would
essentially destroy life on earth.

But she was serious – seriously deluded not only about how society
functions but also about infectious disease of this sort. Only one
thing mattered as a metric to her: reducing infections through any
means possible, as if she on her own could cobble together a new kind
of society in which exposure to airborne pathogens was made illegal.

Here is an example. There was a controversy about how many people
should be allowed to gather in one space, as in home, church, store,
stadium, or community center. She addresses how she came up with the
rules:

    The real problem with this fifty-versus-ten distinction, for me,
was that it revealed that the CDC simply didn’t believe to the degree
that I did that SARS-CoV-2 was being spread through the air silently
and undetected from symptomless individuals. The numbers really did
matter. As the years since have confirmed, in times of active viral
community spread, as many as fifty people gathered together indoors
(unmasked at this point, of course) was way too high a number. It
increased the chances of someone among that number being infected
exponentially. I had settled on ten knowing that even that was too
many, but I figured that ten would at least be palatable for most
Americans—high enough to allow for most gatherings of immediate family
but not enough for large dinner parties and, critically, large
weddings, birthday parties, and other mass social events.

She puts a fine point on it: “if I pushed for zero (which was actually
what I wanted and what was required), this would have been interpreted
as a ‘lockdown’—the perception we were all working so hard to avoid.”

What does it mean for zero people to gather? A suicide cult?

In any case, just like that, from her own thinking and straight to
enforcement, birthday parties, sports, weddings, and funerals came to
be forbidden.

Here we gain insight into the sheer insanity of her vision. It is
nothing short of a marvel that she somehow managed to gain the amount
of influence she did.

Notice her above mention of her dogma that asymptomatic spread was the
whole key to understanding pandemic. In other words, on her own and
without any scientific support, she presumed that Covid was both
extremely fatal and had a long latency period. To her way of thinking,
this is why the usual tradeoff between severity and prevalence did not
matter.

She was somehow certain that the longest estimates of latency were
correct: 14 days. This is the reason for the “wait two weeks”
obsession. She held onto this dogma throughout, almost like the
fictional movie “Contagion” had been her only guide to understanding.

Later in the book, she writes that symptoms mean next to nothing
because people can always carry around the virus in their nose without
being sick. After all, this is what PCR tests have shown. Instead of
seeing that as a failure of PCR, she saw this as a confirmation that
everyone is a carrier no matter what and therefore everyone has to
lock down because otherwise we’ll deal with a black plague.

Somehow, despite her astonishing lack of scientific curiosity and
experience in this area, she gained all influence over the initial
Trump administration response. Briefly, she was godlike.

But Trump was not and is not a fool. He must have had some sleepless
nights wondering how and why he had approved the destruction of that
which he had seen as his greatest achievement. The virus was long here
(probably from October 2019), it presented a specific danger to a
narrow cohort, but otherwise behaved like a textbook flu. Maybe, he
must have wondered, his initial instincts from January and February
2020 were correct all along.

Still, he very reluctantly approved a 30-day extension of lockdowns,
entirely on Birx’s urging and with a few other fools standing around.
Having given in a second time – still, no one thought to drop an email
or make a phone call for a second opinion! – this seemed to be the
turning point. Birx reports that by April 1, 2020, Trump had lost
confidence in her. He might have intuited that he had been tricked. He
stopped speaking to her.

It would still take another month before he would fully rethink
everything that he had approved at her behest.

It made no difference. The bulk of her book is a brag fest about how
she kept subverting the White House’s push to open up the economy –
that is, allow people to exercise their rights and freedoms. Once
Trump turned against her, and eventually found other people to provide
good advice like the tremendously brave Scott Atlas – five months
later he arrived in an attempt to save the country from disaster –
Birx turned to rallying around her inner circle (Anthony Fauci, Robert
Redfield, Matthew Pottinger, and a few others) plus assembling a realm
of protection outside of her that included CNN reporter Sanjay Gupta
and, very likely, the virus team at the New York Times (which gives
her book a glowing review).

Recall that for the remainder of the year, the White House was urging
normalcy while many states kept locking down. It was an incredible
confusion. The CDC was all over the map. I gained the distinct
impression of two separate regimes in charge: Trump’s vs. the
administrative state he could not control. Trump would say one thing
on the campaign trail but the regulations and disease panic kept
pouring out of his own agencies.

Birx admits that she was a major part of the reason, due to her sneaky
alternation of weekly reports to the states.

    After the heavily edited documents were returned to me, I’d
reinsert what they had objected to, but place it in those different
locations. I’d also reorder and restructure the bullet points so the
most salient—the points the administration objected to most—no longer
fell at the start of the bullet points. I shared these strategies with
the three members of the data team also writing these reports. Our
Saturday and Sunday report-writing routine soon became: write, submit,
revise, hide, resubmit.

    Fortunately, this strategic sleight-of-hand worked. That they
never seemed to catch this subterfuge left me to conclude that, either
they read the finished reports too quickly or they neglected to do the
word search that would have revealed the language to which they
objected. In slipping these changes past the gatekeepers and
continuing to inform the governors of the need for the big-three
mitigations—masks, sentinel testing, and limits on indoor social
gatherings—I felt confident I was giving the states permission to
escalate public health mitigation with the fall and winter coming.

As another example, once Scott Atlas came to the rescue in August to
introduce some good sense into this wacky world, he worked with others
to dial back the CDC’s fanatical attachment to universal and constant
testing. Atlas knew that “track, trace, and isolate” was both a
fantasy and a massive invasion of people’s liberties that would yield
no positive public-health outcome. He put together a new
recommendation that was only for those who were sick to test – just as
one might expect in normal life.

After a week-long media frenzy, the regulations flipped in the other direction.

Birx reveals that it was her doing:

    This wasn’t the only bit of subterfuge I had to engage in.
Immediately after the Atlas-influenced revised CDC testing guidance
went up in late August, I contacted Bob Redfield…. Less than a week
later, Bob [Redfield] and I had finished our rewrite of the guidance
and surreptitiously posted it. We had restored the emphasis on testing
to detect areas where silent spread was occurring. It was a risky
move, and we hoped everyone in the White House would be too busy
campaigning to realize what Bob and I had done. We weren’t being
transparent with the powers that be in the White House…

One might ask how the heck she got away with this. She explains:

    [T]he guidance gambit was only the tip of the iceberg of my
transgressions in my effort to subvert Scott Atlas’s dangerous
positions. Ever since Vice President Pence told me to do what I needed
to do, I’d engaged in very blunt conversations with the governors. I
spoke the truth that some White House senior advisors weren’t willing
to acknowledge. Censoring my reports and putting up guidance that
negated the known solutions was only going to perpetuate Covid-19’s
vicious circle. What I couldn’t sneak past the gatekeepers in my
reports, I said in person.

Most of the book consists of her explaining how she headed a kind of
shadow White House dedicated to keeping the country in some form of
lockdown for as long as possible. In her telling, she was the center
of everything, the only person truly correct about all things, given
cover by the VP and assisted by a handful of co-conspirators..

Largely missing from the narrative is any discussion of the science
gathering outside the bubble she so carefully cultivated. Whereas
anyone could have noted the studies pouring out from February onward
that threw cold water on her entire paradigm – not to mention 15
years, or make that 50 years, or perhaps 100 years of warnings against
such a reaction – from scientists all over the world with vastly more
experience and knowledge than she. She cared nothing about it, and
evidently still does not.

It’s very clear that Birx had almost no contact with any serious
scientist who disputed the draconian response, not even John Iaonnidis
who explained as early as March 17, 2020, that this approach was
madness. But she didn’t care: she was convinced that she was in the
right, or, at least, was acting on behalf of people and interests who
would keep her safe from persecution or prosecution.

For those interested, Chapter 8 provides a weird look into her first
real scientific challenge: the seroprevalence study by Jayanta
Bhattacharya published April 22, 2020. It demonstrated that the
infection fatality rate – because infections and recovery was far more
prevalent than Birx and Fauci were saying – was more in line with what
one might expect from a severe flu but with a much more focused
demographic impact. Bhattacharya’s paper revealed that the pathogen
eluded all controls and would likely become endemic as every
respiratory virus before. She took one look and concluded that the
study had unnamed “fundamental flaws in logic and methodology” and
“damaged the cause of public health at this crucial moment in the
pandemic.”

And that’s it: that’s Birx grappling with science. Meanwhile, the
article was published in the International Journal of Epidemiology and
has over 700 citations. She saw all differences of opinion as an
opportunity to go on the attack in order to intensify her cherished
commitment to the lockdown paradigm.

Even now, with scientists the world over in outrage, with citizens
furious at their governments, with governments falling, with regimes
toppling and anger reaching a fevered pitch, while studies pour out by
the day showing that lockdowns made no difference and that open
societies at least protected their educational systems and economies,
she is unmoved. It’s not even clear she is aware.

Birx dismisses all contrary cases such as Sweden: Americans could not
take that route because we are too unhealthy. South Dakota: rural and
backwater (Birx is still mad that the brave Governor Kristi Noem
refused to meet with her). Florida: oddly and without evidence she
dismisses that case as a killing field, even though its results were
better than California while the population influx to the state sets
new records.

Nor is she shaken by the reality that there is not one single country
or territory anywhere on the planet earth that benefitted from her
approach, not even her beloved China which still pursues a zero-Covid
approach. As for New Zealand and Australia: she (probably wisely)
doesn’t mention them at all, even though they followed the Birx
approach exactly.

The story of the lockdowns is a tale of Biblical proportions, at once
evil and desperately sad and tragic, a story of power, scientific
failure, intellectual insularity and insanity, outrageous arrogance,
feudalistic impulses, mass delusion, plus political treachery and
conspiracy. It is real-life horror for the ages, a tale of how the
land of the free became a despotic hellscape so quickly and
unexpectedly. Birx was at the center of it, confirming all of your
worst fears right here in a book anyone can buy. She is so proud of
her role that she dares to take all credit, fully convinced that the
Trump-hating media will love and protect her perfidies from exposure
and condemnation.

There is no getting around Trump’s own culpability here. He never
should have let her have her way. Never. It was a case of fallibility
matched by ego (he has still not admitted error), but it is a case of
enormous betrayal that played off presidential character flaws (like
many in his income class, Trump had always been a germaphobe) that
ended up wrecking hope and prosperity for billions of people for many
years to come.

I’ve tried for two years to put myself in that scene at the White
House that day. It’s a hothouse with only trusted souls in small
rooms, and the people there in a crisis have the sense that they are
running the world. Trump might have drawn on his experience running a
casino in Atlantic City. The weather forecasters come to say a
hurricane is on the way, so he needs to shut it down. He doesn’t want
to but agrees in order to do the right thing.

Was this his thinking? Perhaps. Perhaps too someone told him that
China’s President Xi Jinping managed to crush the virus with lockdowns
so he can too, just as the WHO said in its February 26 report. It’s
also difficult in that environment to avoid the rush of omnipotence,
temporarily oblivious to the reality that your decision would affect
life from Maine to Florida to California. It was a catastrophic and
lawless decision based on pretense and folly.

What followed seems inevitable in retrospect. The economic crisis,
inflation, the broken lives, the desperation, the lost rights and lost
hopes, and now the growing hunger and demoralization and educational
losses and cultural destruction, all of it came in the wake of these
fateful days. Every day in this country, even two and a half years
later, judges are struggling to regain control and revitalize the
Constitution after this disaster.

The plotters usually admit it in the end, taking credit, like
criminals who cannot resist returning to the scene of the crime. This
is what Dr. Birx has done in her book. But there are clearly limits to
her transparency. She never explains the real reason for her
resignation – even though it is known the world over – pretending like
the entire Thanksgiving fiasco never happened and thus attempting to
write it out of the history book that she wrote.

There is so much more to say and I hope this is one review of many
because the book is absolutely packed with shocking passages. And yet
her 525-page book, now selling at a 50% discount, does not contain a
single citation to a single scientific study, paper, monograph,
article, or book. It has zero footnotes. It offers no go-to
authorities and displays not even a hint of humility that would
normally be part of any actual scientific account.

And it nowhere offers an honest reckoning for what her influence over
the White House and the states foisted on this country and on the
world. As the country masks up yet again for a new variant, and is
gradually being groomed for another round of disease panic, she can
collect whatever royalties come from sales of her book while working
at her new gig, a consultant to a company that makes air purifiers
(ActivePure). In this latter role, she makes a greater contribution to
public health than anything she did while she held the reins of power.