Dr. Deborah Birx, White House Coronavirus Response Coordinator for President Trump, launched her book about her one-person attack on our form of government and our economy under the guise of saving us from the Wuhan virus. Though it has been out for a couple of months, it is only now attracting the attention it deserves. The book is called Silent Invasion and, to quote Michael Senger, “reads like a how-to guide in subverting a democratic superpower from within, as could only be told through the personal account of someone who was on the front lines doing just that.”
There are some great reviews of the book out there that I won’t attempt to match (see here and here); rather, I’ll present some selected highlights.
Birx seems to have known all along that COVID was created in a Chinese lab.
Former President Donald Trump’s adviser believes Covid-19 could have leaked from a Wuhan lab where scientists were working on vaccines for similar viruses.
Infectious diseases expert and former presidential Covid adviser Dr Deborah Birx told The Mail on Sunday that coronavirus ‘came out of the box ready to infect’ when it emerged in the Chinese city of Wuhan in December 2020.
The adviser said most viruses take months or years to become highly infectious to humans. But, Dr Birx said, Covid ‘was already more infectious than flu when it first arrived’.
She said that meant Covid was either an ‘abnormal thing of nature’ or that Chinese scientists were ‘working on coronavirus vaccines’ and became infected.
‘It happens, labs aren’t perfect, people aren’t perfect, we make mistakes and there can be contamination,’ she said.
She accused China of initially covering up how infectious Covid was.
Birx said Covid’s infectiousness was consistent with a virus which had been experimented on in a lab.
‘In laboratories you grow the virus in human cells, allowing it to adapt more. Each time it passes through human cells it becomes more adapted,’ she said.
Birx claims to have been heavily influenced by a video we now know was a Chinese information operation.
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.
Read the whole story at this link.
While she was falling for the horror videos, she also fell for the bullsh** story of a 1,000-bed hospital constructed in ten days.
15 Days to Slow the Spread was the fraud we all thought it was.
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.
While we’re talking about frauds, can we remember the sordid and stupid history of the “six-foot separation” rule? READ: Six-Foot Social Distancing Is on the Way out, but How We Got There in the First Place Is the Real Story.
The 10-person limit on gatherings was the fraud we all thought it was.
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.
I don’t think there has been any evidence that large social events have any effect on the spread of COVID. The media tried desperately to libel the Sturgis Motorcycle Rally (As the Sturgis Motorcycle Rally Begins the Same Tired People Make the Same Tired Apocalyptic Claims That It Is a ‘Superspreader’ Event) and the Super Bowl (Super Bowl Was Not a ‘Superspreader’ Event, Creating a Sad in the Pandemic Porn Industry) as “superspreader” events.
Birx wanted an Italy-style lockdown but was afraid to say it.
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.
…
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.
.We saw glimmers of Birx’s duplicity in Anthony Fauci’s own morphing statements on mask wear (President Trump Refuses to Wear a Face Mask and You Shouldn’t Either; The Case for Masks Has Taken Another Body Blow). Birx had no data or information that did not come from China that shutdowns and lockdowns worked. She knew that America would never stand for that nonsense right out of the gate, so she set about with smaller measures to build up to the lockdown.
We’ll return to the issue of duplicity in a moment.
Birx hated Dr. Scott Atlas…probably more now because he’s been proven right.
On August 10, 2020, Dr. Scott Atlas joined the COVID task force. He saw Birx’s game and fought it, ultimately being forced out of the White House. Michael Senger’s review is epic.
Birx’s apparent plan to almost singlehandedly destroy the world’s primary democratic superpower is going swimmingly until she meets the book’s leading antagonist: Dr. Scott Atlas. To Birx’s disgust, Atlas takes a strong stand for all the things she loathes most—things like human rights, democratic governance, and, most of all, freedom.
Birx lists Atlas’s “dangerous assertions”:That schools could open everywhere without any precautions (neither masking nor testing), regardless of the status of the spread in the community.
That children did not transmit the virus.
That children didn’t get ill. That there was no risk to anyone young.
That long Covid-19 was being overplayed.
That heart-damage findings were incidental.
That comorbidities did not play a critical role in communities, especially among teachers.
That merely employing some physical distance overcame the virus’s ill effects.
That masks were overrated and not needed.
That the Coronavirus Task Force had gotten the country into this situation by promoting testing.
That testing falsely increased case counts in the United States in comparison with other countries.
That targeted testing and isolation constituted a lockdown, plain and simple, and weren’t needed.That every word of Atlas’s assertions was obviously 100% true only made them all the more dangerous. As Alexandr Solzhenitsyn said, “One word of truth shall outweigh the whole world,” and nothing would derail the world’s communist destiny faster than letting these self-evident truths spread freely.
The bold-faced items are the ones in which Atlas has been vindicated. A quick glance at the list tells you who was more correct.
More from Senger on the Atlas hatred.
As Scott Atlas recalls in his own book, A Plague Upon Our House:Birx commented on the importance of testing asymptomatic people. She argued that the only way to figure out who was sick was to test them. She memorably exclaimed, “That’s why it’s so dangerous—people don’t even know they’re sick!” I felt myself looking around the room, wondering if I was the only one who had heard this.Birx spends roughly the next 150 pages of her book recalling her anguish as Atlas thwarted her plans to keep America in a near-permanent state of lockdown. As Atlas recalls:She threw a fit, right there, in front of everyone, as we stood near the door before leaving the Oval Office. She was furious, screaming at me, “NEVER DO THAT AGAIN!! AND IN THE OVAL!!” I felt pretty bad, because she was so angry. I had absolutely no desire for conflict. But did she actually expect me to lie to the president, just to cover up for her? I responded, “Sorry, but he asked me a question, so I answered it.”
Birx, not Fauci, called the shots.
Back to Senger quoting Scott Atlas’ book.
Indeed, Birx’s memoir corroborates the testimony in Atlas’s book of the outsized role he played in bringing lockdowns in the United States to an end. More than anything, this involved standing up to Birx who, contrary to popular belief, did more than even Fauci to promote and prolong lockdowns across the United States. As Atlas explains:Dr. Fauci held court in the public eye on a daily basis, so frequently that many misconstrue his role as being in charge. However, it was really Dr. Birx who articulated Task Force policy. All the advice from the Task Force to the states came from Dr. Birx. All written recommendations about their on-the-ground policies were from Dr. Birx. Dr. Birx conducted almost all the visits to states on behalf of the Task Force.
This may or may not be true. If you read Birx’s bio, it is obvious that she was Fauci’s creature. She hitched her wagon to his star. He mentored her. The odds of her acting independently, and the odds of Fauci letting a molecule of power slip from his grasp, are slim. I think the nation would be unwise to arbitrarily absolve Fauci of his role in the COVID fiasco before a jury has returned a verdict.
Birx deliberately deceived and lied to President Trump and his advisers.
Shocking, right? The idea that a privileged and entitled liberal with a terminal case of god syndrome would deceive people to get her way, I mean, smack my ass and call me Sally; what will happen next?
This is from Jeffrey Tucker’s review of the Birx book.
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.
Who covered for Birx as she disobeyed President Trump’s orders?
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.
The pigheaded stupidity based on unwarranted hubris I can understand, perhaps even sympathizes with. However, here Birx descends into what I think is criminality. Birx dishonestly and illegally changed the guidance and instructions issued by people senior to her, in particular those of President Trump. If she didn’t support what she was being told to do, she had an obligation to challenge those instructions openly and transparently and then do what she was told to do. If she didn’t like those orders, she was obligated to resign. Every person who died alone in a hospital room, every business driven into bankruptcy, and every child who lost a year of education due to Birx’s actions should be a count on a felony indictment.
Two years ago, I did this interview with Susie Moore: PODCAST: Moore to the Point With Susie Moore – Ep. 5 – Conversation With Streiff on Elite Incompetence. My thesis there was that we are ruled by idiots. The people who claim to have the answers about the crises facing us, be they Ukraine, COVID, or climate change, are f***ing morons. They are a cruel twist on the Dunning-Kruger Effect. The Dunning-Kruger Effect is defined as “a cognitive bias whereby people with limited knowledge or competence in a given intellectual or social domain greatly overestimate their own knowledge or competence in that domain relative to objective criteria or to the performance of their peers or of people in general.” Our elites claim to have knowledge and competence, but they don’t, and no one, other than guys like me, calls them out when they are shown to be incompetent morons. I also wrote this post: No Government Can Make as Many Mistakes and Errors About COVID as Ours Did; It Requires Intent.
Birx stands as a stark reminder that both of these things were true. Birx was a highly educated idiot with a sterling professional reputation mostly because she’d never been called on to do jack beyond mouthing theories. Never in her life has she run an organization that had to produce results in the real world. The stupid actions carried out by our elites were deliberate. Personally, I don’t believe those actions were necessarily science-based. I think there was a strong theme of totalitarianism in them. The “public health crisis” was a stalking horse to replace legislatures with unelected bureaucrats and crush the First Amendment.
A final point. Anyone who still claims there is no such thing as the “Deep State,” should be laughed at. Throughout the Trump administration, we saw example after example of bureaucrats making their own rules and ignoring laws and orders they didn’t like. We’ve also seen the Deep State close ranks to defend members who were exposed. A lawyer perjures himself to obtain a FISA warrant and gets probation, and has his law license restored. An FBI official attempts a coup and is allowed to retire. Former intelligence officials actively collaborated in a plot to bring down a president with no repercussions. The fact that Birx can write a book laying out her own duplicity and have it favorably greeted by much of the media shows just how deep the Deep State goes.