Birx Admits -- Boasts, Actually -- That She Lied the Country Into Endless Lockdowns

Her greatest victory.

This is why the public doesn't trust "scientists" -- meaning, health bureaucrats. We all knew they were lying. She admits she was lying.

She brags that she was lying. She exults that she was lying.

She boasts about her lying. She considers her lying to be a great public service.

That's what the these "health bureaucrats" routinely do -- they decide that we Peons are too stupid to deal with the real facts and make the right decisions (meaning, the decisions the health bureaucrats want us to make) and so they lie to us to force us into a single choice situation and when we rebel against the lies they're telling -- that they know they're telling -- they say, "You're not following The Science (TM)."

"The Science (TM)" just means the tactical lies they are telling to shape public behavior in the way they wish it to be shaped. The same as any other lying politician attempts to shape public behavior with lies.

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."

She brags about more "slight-of-hand," "subterfuge," and "hid[ing]" -- all her words -- regarding the more moderate stances Scott Atlas and Trump began urging on the state, and her dishonest efforts to push alarmism as the "Administration's" stance.

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.

I can't excuse Trump's role in this. He was the President; she was his underling. Supposedly.

I got very frustrated by Trump complaining on Twitter, or at his rallies, about what his Administration was doing, while not actually firing or even just overruling the people subverting him in his Administration. That really made him look small.

posted by Ace at 12:20 PM

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