Tuesday, August 09, 2022


Deborah Birx's Guide to Destroying America

Deborah Birx, White House coronavirus response coordinator under President Donald Trump, was one of the "trifecta" of three leading public officials who successfully pushed COVID lockdowns in the United States. Virtually every page of Birx's new book, Silent Invasion: The Untold Story of the Trump Administration, Covid-19, and Preventing the Next Pandemic Before It's Too Late, reads like a how-to guide from the front lines of subverting a democratic superpower from within. It bears repeating, from the outset, that lockdowns were never part of any democratic country's pandemic preparedness plan prior to Xi Jinping's lockdown of Wuhan, China.

The lockdowns that Xi pioneered and Birx so zealously advocated for reportedly led to over 170,000 non-COVID excess deaths among young Americans while failing to meaningfully slow the spread of COVID anywhere they were tried. It would have been impossible for an enemy agent armed with anything less than nuclear weapons to have inflicted so much damage on America's economy, social fabric, and historical freedoms in such a short period of time.

Notably, though Birx's memoir has earned relatively few reviews from human readers on Amazon, it's earned rave reviews from Chinese state media, a feat not shared even by the far more popular pro-lockdown books of professional genuflectors to power like Lawrence Wright.

The glowing response from Chinese state media should come as no surprise. Nearly every sentence of Birx's book faithfully parrots the Chinese Communist Party's foreign and domestic propaganda, which helped facilitate Xi's weaponization of the COVID response to eliminate the independence of the CCP's private sector rivals.

Chapter 1 opens with what Birx claims was her first impression of the virus:

I can still see the words splashed across my computer screen in the early morning hours of January 3. Though we were barely into 2020, I was stuck in an old routine, waking well before dawn and scanning news headlines online. On the BBC's site, one caught my attention: "China Pneumonia Outbreak: Mystery Virus Probed in Wuhan."
Indeed, that BBC article, which was posted at approximately 9:00 a.m. EST on Jan. 3, 2020, was the first in a Western news organization to discuss the outbreak of a new virus in Wuhan. Apparently, Birx was scanning British news headlines just as it appeared. Birx then tells us where she got her philosophy of disease mitigation, recalling how she immediately believed Chinese citizens "knew what had worked" against SARS-1: masks and distancing:

Government officials and citizens across Asia knew both the pervasive fear and the personal response that had worked before to mitigate the loss of life and the economic damage wrought by SARS and MERS. They wore masks. They decreased the frequency and size of social gatherings. Crucially, based on their recent experience, the entire citizenry and local doctors were ringing alarm bells loudly and early. Lives were on the line-lots of them. They knew what had worked before, and they would do it again.
Birx spends several pages tut-tutting the CCP for its "cover-up" of the virus (which Chinese state media pointedly didn't mind), then tells us:

On January 3, the same day the BBC piece ran, the Chinese government officially notified the United States of the outbreak. Bob Redfield, the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, was contacted by his Chinese counterpart, George F. Gao.
Note that Jan. 3 was also the same day that heroic Chinese whistleblower Li Wenliang was reportedly admonished by Chinese authorities for sending a WeChat message about a "cover-up" of the outbreak. In other words, on the same day Li was "admonished," the head of China's CDC personally called U.S. CDC Director Robert Redfield to share the same information Li supposedly shared. Some cover-up.

From here, it gets worse. One page later, Birx tells us how traumatized she still is from having watched videos of Wuhan residents collapsing and falling dead in January 2020, and praises the "courageous doctor" who shared them online:

The video showed a hallway crowded with patients slumped in chairs. Some of the masked people leaned against the wall for support. The camera didn't pan so much as zigzag while the Chinese doctor maneuvered her smartphone up the narrow corridor. My eye was drawn to two bodies wrapped in sheets lying on the floor amid the cluster of patients and staff. The doctor's colleagues, their face shields and other personal protective equipment in place, barely glanced at the lens as she captured the scene. They looked past her, as if at a harrowing future they could all see and hoped to survive. I tried to increase the volume, but there was no sound. My mind seamlessly filled that void, inserting the sounds from my past, sounds from other wards, other places of great sorrow. I had been here before. I had witnessed scenes like this across the globe, in HIV ravaged communities-when hospitals were full of people dying of AIDS before we had treatment or before we ensured treatment to those who needed it. I had lived this, and it was etched permanently in my brain: the unimaginable, devastating loss of mothers, fathers, children, grandparents, brothers, sisters.

Staring at my computer screen, I was horrified by the images from Wuhan, the suffering they portrayed, but also because they confirmed what I'd suspected for the last three weeks: Not only was the Chinese government underreporting the real numbers of the infected and dying in Wuhan and elsewhere, but the situation was definitely far more dire than most people outside that city realized. Up until now, I'd been only reading or hearing about the virus. Now it had been made visible by a courageous doctor sharing this video online.
Birx's book was published in April 2022. The early videos she recounts as the source of her trauma were exposed as fake by the Associated Press and other outlets in February of 2020.

In the next paragraph, Birx tells us how she grew even more determined after seeing that the Chinese had built a hospital in 10 days to fight the virus:

Dotting it were various pieces of earth-moving equipment, enough of them in various shapes and sizes that I briefly wondered if the photograph was of a manufacturing plant where the newly assembled machines were on display. Quickly, I learned that the machines were in Wuhan and that they were handling the first phase of preparatory work for the construction of a one-thousand-bed hospital to be completed in just ten days' time . The Chinese may not have been giving accurate data about the numbers of cases and deaths, but the rapid spread of this disease could be counted in other ways-including in how many Chinese workers were being employed to build new facilities to relieve the pressure on the existing, and impressive, Wuhan health service centers. You build a thousand-bed hospital in ten days only if you are experiencing unrelenting community spread of a highly contagious virus that has eluded your containment measures and is now causing serious illness on a massive scale.
BuzzFeed had proved that images of rapid hospital construction in China were faked on Jan. 27, 2020.

To recap, Deborah Birx-the woman who did more than almost any other person in the United States to promote and prolong COVID lockdowns, and attempted, with the support of mainstream media outlets, to silence anyone who disagreed with her-tells us in 2022 that she'd been inspired in her work by images that were widely known to have been faked (as if the real images of old age homes in Italy and elsewhere weren't bad enough) before the lockdowns even started.

That's Chapter 1.

Birx then spends hundreds of pages recounting what appears to be political maneuvering to intentionally deceive as many Americans as possible into willingly locking down for as long as possible, without making it seem like a "lockdown":

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.
Birx recalls using "flatten-the-curve guidance" to manipulate the "political, nonmedical members" of the government into consenting to lockdowns that were stricter than they realized:

On Monday and Tuesday, while sorting through the CDC data issues, we worked simultaneously to develop the flatten-the-curve guidance I hoped to present to the vice president at week's end. Getting buy-in on the simple mitigation measures every American could take was just the first step leading to longer and more aggressive interventions. We had to make these palatable to the administration by avoiding the obvious appearance of a full Italian lockdown. 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.
She also admits that her guidance regarding the maximum allowable size of social gatherings-10 people-was arbitrary, because her real goal was zero-no social contact of any kind, anywhere:

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. . Similarly, 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.
Birx then divulges her strategy of using federal advisories to give cover to state governors to impose mandates and restrictions:

The White House would "encourage," but the states could "recommend" or, if needed, "mandate." In short, we were handing governors and their public health officials a template, a state-level permission slip they could use to enact a specific response that was appropriate for the people under their jurisdiction. The fact that the guidelines would be coming from a Republican White House gave political cover to any Republican governors skeptical of federal overreach.
The White House advisor recalls with relish that her strategy led states to shut down one by one, destroying the livelihoods of millions of Americans and devastating the country's elementary and high school education systems without any public health benefit to show for it:

[T]he recommendations served as the basis for governors to mandate the flattening-the-curve shutdowns. The White House had handed down guidance, and the governors took that ball and ran with it . With the White House's "this is serious" message, governors now had "permission" to mount a proportionate response and, one by one, other states followed suit. California was first, doing so on March 18. New York followed on March 20. Illinois, which had declared its own state of emergency on March 9, issued shelter-in-place orders on March 21. Louisiana did so on the twenty-second. In relatively short order by the end of March and the first week of April, there were few holdouts. The circuit-breaking, flattening-the-curve shutdown had begun.
Cue the maniacal laughter.

In what may be her most damning remark about the entire U.S. response to COVID, Birx tells us that she'd always known "two weeks to slow the spread" was a lie and knew in advance that she wanted the timeframe extended, despite having no data to support why such a step was scientifically sensible:

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. 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.
This is one of several quotes in which Birx refers to "our version" of a lockdown, though she never makes it clear what the original "version" of a lockdown was (read: China's). In fact, though Birx spends hundreds of pages boasting about her crusade for lockdowns across America, she never once explains why she wanted them or why she felt they were a good idea, other than the aforementioned brief asides about China's supposed success using social distancing to combat SARS-1.

Birx then says that she had a regular system for surreptitiously revising and hiding information from her bosses (whom she calls "gatekeepers") after they reviewed her guidance to the states, in order to keep lockdown measures in place for as long as possible against the wishes of the White House:

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.
Birx's plans seem to be going quite well for her until she meets the book's leading antagonist: Scott Atlas, the former Stanford University neuroradiology professor serving as an adviser to the Task Force. To Birx's disgust, Atlas took a strong stand against school closures, treating children as unique vectors of disease, and other heresies.

More here:

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Also see my other blogs. Main ones below:

http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)

http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)

http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)

http://australian-politics.blogspot.com/ (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)

http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)

https://immigwatch.blogspot.com/ (IMMIGRATION WATCH)

https://awesternheart.blogspot.com/ (THE PSYCHOLOGIST)

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