From Dr. Birx: I fooled that stupid poopeyhead Trump and idiot Pence, and the American people
I missed this at the time Birx’s memoir came out, but it was highlighted on “X” recently. Birx must think this is something to brag about – otherwise, why would she be admitting it in her memoir?:
On Monday and Tuesday [March 9th and 10th, 2020] … 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. … 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.
I don’t know if lying about this is actionable, but it’s certainly abominable. She freely admits to hiding the fact that she had a long-term lockdown in mind right from the start, and that the “two weeks” thing was just a ploy to get the administration to fall into her trap.
What may be just as bad is this part: “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.” Let’s just start with a conclusion, and cherry-pick the data to fit that conclusion. The consequence – long-term lockdowns – were absolutely devastating and we are still feeling their pernicious effects on society, the economy, child development, mental health, and social interaction.
And this is from today:
“The messenger RNA vaccine should have been rolled out for the people that were at risk for severe disease because that’s what the vaccine was developed for,” Birx said.
She also confessed the COVID shot was never “designed” to prevent infection:
“That is not what the COVID vaccine was designed to do. It wasn’t designed against infection.”
Now you tell us – now that people lost jobs, were censored, were coerced, and were misled into believing if they got the shot they’d have a low chance of COVID infection.
We have always been at war with Eurasia.
Let the civil suits begin. What an idiot. Don’t these people have anyone to read their crap and say “you should leave that bit out?”
I knew she was full of **it when she first said it. Now she confesses her malfeasance. Typical Federalista.
An evil woman, searching for personal power. If people died as a result, then people die.
I think it is important to remember that at the time we didn’t know COVID wasn’t going to involve mass deaths. We have the benefit of hindsight now.
It’s not at though Birx knew at the time that millions of people wouldn’t die. In the very beginning of the pandemic no one knew, but they had to make decisions in the moment anyway.
I don’t fault people for being overcautious in the beginning, I do fault them for trying to spinout the lockdowns and the firehose of government money long after the pandemic was shown to be not as serious as was initially feared.
Niketas
I think “we: didn’t know. But Birx, among others, said no family gatherings at Thanksgiving. Would be spreading events. Got caught at a family gathering.
She said, early on, that a death WITH Covid be coded as a death BY or OF Cocid. So you go in to the hospital with a heart issue, the crank the PCR machine up to 90 and you show Covid. You died of Covid.
Newsom’s famous luncheon after imposing various draconian issues on California.
Pretty sure they knew.
It follows that they knew the shots would not prevent spread of the infection either, yet they went along with the mandates that prevented millions of people from working and other activities unless they got the shots. And this went on for two years. Criminal.
@Ricahrd Aubrey: Pretty sure they knew.
You’re compressing things that happened over a span of months into a few sentences. At the time of “two weeks to slow the spread” no one knew, except there were a lot of horror stories out of China. Thanksgiving and the French Laundry and the COVID kicker payments came much later. And a lot of stuff I saw, in health insurance, that a lot of the public didn’t notice.
Niketas:
Actually, by March 9 and 10, 2020, when Birx was contemplating a lengthy lockdown, there was already strong evidence that COVID was not all that terrible except to the vulnerable elderly and people who were already sickly. Take a look at this post I wrote on February 29, 2020. I crunched the Diamond Princess (cruise ship) numbers, which were already available and an excellent test case. An excerpt:
And then on May 4, 2020, I wrote this post. Here’s an excerpt:
And then I go on to quote my post from February 29, 2020, about the cruise ship numbers.
And then in that May 4, 2020, post I added this:
So no, I don’t let her off the hook at all. She continued lockdowns when there was already good evidence that the disease was not so lethal to warrant a continued lockdown, and that the main people to be protected were the very elderly especially with pre-existing conditions.
@neo:I crunched the Diamond Princess (cruise ship) numbers, which were already available and an excellent test case.
I remember you doing that in February, but you weren’t asked to make a decision that, if you were wrong, could have cost millions of lives. State governors were, and they were relying on people like Birx to advise them about what was the safer call. A cruise ship was not exactly an environment typical of the general population, and there certainly could have been reasons for that experience to have been a fluke.
By May, of course, it was becoming obvious to those willing to see that COVID was not as deadly as feared except to the most vulnerable. And I shudder to remember the people killed by ventilators that were thought to be helping.
I think the biggest lapse in the early days was not contemplating the cost of a prolonged lockdown in terms of people’s lives. A few people close to me had really negative health impacts because they could not see doctors or get procedures done in the lockdown period.
The next biggest lapse was the obvious bias in what got closed. Churches: closed. Casinos: open. Casino allowing a church to meet there: fined. For me that was one of the clinchers that public health was no longer the primary concern, because that made no sense whatever except in terms of government revenue.
Another culprit who seems to have been forgotten is the professor over in the UK (Edinburgh, maybe?) who had this huge study with computer simulations showing how lockdowns would slow the spread and save millions of lives. I can’t even remember his name now, but his computer models were as bad as the climate models, and very influential at the time. Throw him in the same cell with Birx.
“…overcautious in the beginning…”
Fine.
But how long did that “beginning” last?
First “booster”?
Second?
Third?
Etc.
When they started to mock hydrochloraquine, which was pretty early on, I started to wonder what really was going on.
This question was further reinforced by the fierce rejection of cheaper alternative treatments, the advice experts who did not tie THEIR line and THEIR absolute resistance to the concept of natural immunity.
Mocking Ivermectin as a “horse remedy” should have made the entire op absolutely clear…for anyone not yet convinced.
The non-stop lying and crisis fomentation is the MO.
PLUS, after all the revelations regarding the huge “Biden” government and Fed-agency slush funds, the question must now be: how much MONEY did “Biden” make on kickbacks, etc. from the Pharmaceuticals?
(We know that Dr. “I AM THE SCIENCE” made off like a bandit…)
I watched the Covid briefings every day during the early days. Pence was very much under Birx’s control. Scott Atlas was brought in, but Birx and Fauci managed to freeze him out in a few months. Too bad.
I became convinced after the George Floyd riots in the summer of 2020 didn’t produce large outbreaks of Covid, that the virus was not very contagious when people were outdoors.
I laugh when I think about our getting vaxed in February of 2021, and thinking that we ware bullet proof. The authorities said it would prevent infection. We traveled to Colorado and a big family reunion in Augustof2021. Lots of close contact with members of our extended family. No problem! 🙂
Then in the fall of 2021 I watched with concern the fact that Israel had the highest vax rate in the world and yet they were having a big second wave. I knew then that the vax was not a preventative, only a potential help for not getting seriously ill.
Then the Omicron wave hit here in WA. in late 2021/22. It was far larger than the earlier waves. But it was a mild sickness in most people. That’s when my wife and I caught it. It was basically a two-day period of aches and pains for me. My wife was sicker and took Paxlovid, which cleared her symptoms nicely.
What’s maddening to me is that the government under Biden made so many false claims and bad decisions which they have stood by.
Yet, sates like South Dakota, Georgia, and Florida; that never closed their schools and were mostly open, didn’t fare worse than locked down states like California and New York.
I hope that RFK Jr will do a study of all this and provide an explanation for it. Hopefully, a road map for doing a better job when the next pandemic shows up can be set up.
Birx and Fauci should hide their faces in shame.
Golly gee the Swedes seem to have come to the right answer at the time with the same information.
I give the COVID fascists in the medical and political community no slack, no benefit of the doubt what so ever. None.
Niketas:
Birx had reason to know it was not bad enough to justify a lockdown, almost from the beginning. The Diamond Princess cruise ship was a great test case, because it had over 3K people, they all were tested, and they were in a closed environment for weeks, and many were old and especially susceptible. Three thousand is a pretty big “n.”
Maybe a 2-week lockdown order to “flatten the curve” wouldn’t have been damaging. But in fact it went far far far beyond that, with little to no justification. It wasn’t hard to see that even for laypeople, looking at the figures. But fear was purposely drummed up, and Birx – who should have known better – was a big part of it.
The fact that I didn’t have to make the decisions is irrelevant.
Please see also this post of mine from March 14, 2020.
Plenty of people knew lockdowns would hurt. It wasn’t rocket science to predict that people would fail to get screening tests, etc., and that health would suffer. It was clear almost from the very start that children were not at risk for serious illness. And yet schools were closed in many states for a long long time. Public officials are supposed to weigh cost and benefits to an action. They failed to properly do that, at great cost.
The Diamond Princess numbers were very suggestive, but I figured the lethality claims were a fraud (real disease, fake recommendations) because cities were not shoveling the homeless into mass graves.
‘Golly gee the Swedes seem to have come to the right answer at the time with the same information.’ — om
So, slightly later, did Florida under ‘Deathsantis’. Missouri never shut down, either, except for a few weeks in April.
The ‘flatten the curve’ thing was defensible at the time, given what was known. That’s why they used it. But the subsequent hysterical overreaction was _not_ . The subsequent claim that the BLM protests were important enough to justify exceptions utterly destroyed their credibility, for those willing to see it.
In March 2020, even as my husband was in the ICU having gone into cytokine storm due to the perfect storm of circumstances, that included being sent home and not admitted into the hospital during the “2 week lockdown so the sick can be treated”, my son and I knew the shutdown was nonsense based on my own recovery within 3 days and NEVER having seen a homeless person sick or dead though Los Angeles and San Francisco where he lives were (are) everywhere you look. Restaurants were closed but makeshift tents with coolers in the sun, serving food (still around) were allowed to do business.
I still carry in my purse a Table from the October 2020 British Medical Journal article that showcased the data that proffered EUA for the vaccines. Even now Birx lies because the immunocompromised and elderly were not included in the clinical trial. Nor were children and pregnant or breastfeeding women. The 3 year trial was compromised upon approval as the Control Group was immediately allowed to get the vaccine. Science in 2020 was upended everywhere one looked. If you read RFK Jr’s book and discover what our government did with hydroxychloroquine , you would be shocked. Information like the lab leak was excoriated but everything now being recognized was even in October 2020, known by many of us as evidenced by our personal information files from that time, but fear-mongering and propaganda carried the day.
I would link to the article but it has been altered since it’s original publication. The chart I carry with me is not included, only an abbreviated Table. I have a pdf I made of the original article in my email folder. I’m going to send it to Neo.
They had guidelines considered and written before Covid. Schools remain open, no lockdowns, focus on the vulnerable. These were specifically written to avoid politics and panic.see. Michael Osterholm’s book that predicted the course.
And everywhere gurus emerged that junked the plans in favor of authoritarian structures that made the gurus weàlthy.
Even Osterholm fell into it, and trashed his own credibility by accepting a political job in the Biden campaign. I believe he was promised CDC, in that way rewards are sort of promised in politics. But he was the wrong sex and color.
2020 Covid over-reactions were almost all political decisions about what favored a Dem victory in November. After blue state governors, like mine here in MN, got a taste of total power, they kept it as long as possible.
Look at 2020 Tubingen, Germany, sometime. Great Barrington before Barrington was great.
My sister, a retired nurse, is on me to get the flu vaxx. She tell me this is a bad year for flu. I look up the standard spiel, which is that it is 40-60% effective and will reduce the severity of symptoms.
Sounds familiar.
It could well be worth it. Somehow I’m less trusting of medical authorities these days.
Feely Ferguson i dubbed him, they had already gamed out the strategy in october in davos
In the anglosphere from London to Ottawa to Sydney in the blue metropoles they conducted this experiment even in red texas they let this go on to long
They knew how it spread and what worked but to maximize social distress and excess deaths they did it anyway and excess profits was the cherry on top
“They had guidelines considered and written before Covid. Schools remain open, no lockdowns, focus on the vulnerable. These were specifically written to avoid politics and panic.” Mhmm! Read some of Julius Ruechel’s awesome work on the pandemic. What happened in 2020 was NEVER supposed to happen, even by prior WHO guidelines.
It was Chinese propaganda that convinced the world to “lock down.” https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/masked-ball-cowardice
It is distressing to think about how the bigs were playing to the audience. Or, more accurately, the size and energy of the audience.
Who demanded to be made to do stupid stuff. Who demanded others be made to do stupid stuff.
Four governors put the infected into nursing homes with utterly predictable results. The utterly predictable results were appalling.
Who was the villain? DeSantis, who didn’t make people do stupid stuff.
But Authority was deliciously arbitrary. Church would kill you. But demonstrations, with a thousand people standing on each others’ feet, yelling, no problem.
No science behind the six foot rule, but the little Hitlers were out there with their yardsticks. Some friends were in a subdivision where the little Hitlers took pictures of others not social distancing and put them on social media.
Walz’ neighbor snitch line was busy.
Wouldn’t think the Franks would have lasted a month in this atmosphere.
But it was odd. Physicians reporting good result from HCQ were not asked for their good results. No, it was, shut up you stupid quack or we’ll take you license away. And people who couldn’t pronounce it were 200% sure it was almost poison. Seem odd to you?
I’d hate to say the government got normal people to do this crazy stuff. But it’s worse to think the tinder was dry and eagerly awaiting a match.
“Diamond Princess”? “All lies,” Because if it were true there’d be no basis for making people do stupid stuff. FORCING them to do stupid stuff.
Used to think you had to be a risk taker and independent thinker to leave home and come to America. And that was, if not heritable, culturally transmissible.
Very disappointing.
Note. My wife insisted we get the vaxes until we got Covid. So we did our civic duty, I suppose.
Ian ferguson, of imperial college, he and chris murray of u washington, generated the model that underlay the lockdowns, I dubbed him feely, because he broke his own rules, for some companionship, this probably doomed boris johnson’s term of office as the lockdowns crushed middle England, and empowered the City, most everybody in the Tory establishment went along including Truss and that other fellow, interestingly outliers like Jeremy Corbyn, who is inveterately wrong about every other thing, as a good Trotskyite, was right about this procrustean protocol
one wonders if Christopher Hitchens, iconoclast on many things, would have gone along, on this particular measure
the Anglosphere largely collapsed all around, with the red portion of the Country willing to challenge the Sysgy
Australian and New Zealand were among the worst, with the UK and Canada in close proximity,,
they had really worked on the narrative, blaming the suspension of the epidemic tracking taskforce as the reason,
they made sure that HCQ tests were done without the zinc catalyst, or the dosage was too high or too low, so they could say, ‘see it doesn’t work,’ so we need an EUA, of course all the institutions memtioned above Imperial UW add the CDC, WHO, were in ot he game,
now did they intend the blood price of this measure to bt this high, well they needed to get rid of
Orange Man, and BIbi
that they did for a spell, Johnson came later, in oart because they indulged in hypocrisy
like Harry Lime they didn’t really care what happened to the ‘little dots
@neo: Three thousand is a pretty big “n.”
Not for a non-random sample. Cruise ship passengers are not a representative cross-section of the public. Much older, much more affluent, and (for their age) much healthier.
Sweden got it right, our bozos, not so much.
The go along get alongs in the medical establishment, the universities, the media, and our public servants fomented an unnecessary catastrophy. Unnecessary excess morbidity and mortality. Eggs and omelettes.
While I agree it’s not an ideal sample, I don’t believe it’s so far off from a random cross-section of the general public that it need be either downplayed or dismissed outright. Also, while I agree that typical cruise ship patrons are likely much older on average relative to the general public, I’d be hestitant to conclude that they’d necessarily healthier or perhaps even much more affluent than the average among broader public.
Obviously using a cruise ship population as a test case is nowhere near rigorous enough to meet the standards of a true, publishable scientific study. But despite that I think this case strongly indicated certain patterns in terms of those who were infected and the results of the infections. And if anything, the fact that the cruise ship sample skewed older ended up being instructive in and of itself.
huxley,
Some doc on FoxNews just said that the effectiveness of the flu vax in the current situation is lower than normal. He claimed 35% effective. I’ve never gotten it. Though I just hit the age of 70. I maybe should rethink some of these things.
______
The Diamond Princess was certainly not going to be some nearly perfect laboratory of understanding. But it was a hell of a lot better than the ignorance, lies, panic, and hysteria that we went through. Just as neo stated, all the presumptions and conclusions that one might have drawn from DP turned out to be basically correct.
_______
I consider myself to have some skill in detecting liars and frauds, but I’m far from perfect. I was sucked in by Birx’s “friendly mom” demeanor.
huxley, I am susceptible to respiratory viruses, and I get the flu shots every year — but I don’t suffer side effects from them. My husband often gets sick from the shots and has refused them for several years (but he’s not as susceptible to respiratory viruses). So far, neither of us has had the flu this year. Who knows if the shots make a difference for us?
But I won’t get another mRNA shot unless for very serious good reasons. Information coming out now makes us glad we got the original shots but no boosters.
She is as culpable for crimes against humanity as Fauci.
In a just world both would be prosecuted.
I believe in the afterlife they will, no questions asked.
The herd instinct caused people to stampede. The gov’t and “The News” breathlessly reported numbers of “cases” in the thousands, so it must be serious, right? Overprotective parents were scared to send their kids to school, even though the kids were all but immune. A friend posited that the parents were afraid of catching the Wu Flu from their kids.
TommyJay, Kate:
Thanks for your takes. I’m in very good shape for my age, so I don’t worry too much. Knock on wood.
But boy, for me Vaxx in the Time of Covid knocked a few holes below the waterline in the Good Ship Medical Science.
huxley, I’m certainly more skeptical of health “authorities” than I used to be. I’m also a lot more skeptical of our intelligence services, and some other governmental authorities.
Alex Berenson has been reporting for some time on studies which show that some people who got the COVID vax, and especially the boosters, have damaged immune systems and may therefore be contributing to the seriousness of this flu season. Could be. As he points out, since the “authorities” pushed practically everyone to get the COVID shots, it’s hard to prove with a high degree of confidence, since there is not a control group.
Flu can be very serious. There’s a treatment for it called Tamiflu. However, you need to take it very early, and you must first get a doctor’s diagnosis of flu before getting the prescription. Not easy to do in time for Tamiflu to work. Based on that, the flu shots make some sense.
Covid is treatable with Paxlovid within five days of symptom onset. There’s a simple home test for Covid. It’s pretty easy to test yourself and get Paxlovid within five days. So, why get a Covid booster?
That’s the explanation I have given my doctor when he asks why I haven’t gotten my Covid booster. So far, he has smiled and said it makes sense to him.
The flu is nothing to sneeze at. There have been 29 million illnesses, 370,000 hospitalizations and 16,000 deaths from influenza this season, according to CDC estimates.
During the 1998-99 flu season, it’s estimated 65,000 people died from the flu apparently due to a mutation that left the vaccine less effective.
According to Grok, Globally: Approximately 290,000 to 650,000 deaths annually from respiratory diseases linked to seasonal influenza.
In the United States: The average annual number of flu-related deaths has been estimated to range from around 12,000 to 52,000 people, with the CDC’s estimates over the past decade showing a variation from about 6,300 to 52,000 deaths per flu season.
For the most part, European countries kept their schools open, and a European CDC report showed that young people weren’t at risk from COVID and the schools weren’t a vector for infections in the communities they served.
We knew this and yet experts ignored the data.
Ivermectin is also now available and effective for COVID.
Good Ship Placebo
I live in relatively close proximity to 2 freeways, close enough to hear the traffic when the wind blows in the right direction. Anyway, I’ll never forget how eerily quiet they became during “15 days to flatten the curve”.
I reluctantly wore a mask when shopping. Still have a phone photo of the lines of people buying food like it was the last day before Thanksgiving.
I lost all trust in the medical, science, news, and government institutions during this period of infamy. I wouldn’t be disappointed if Dr Birx was sued into bankruptcy, but I doubt anything will come from her admissions.
Well over 200,000 small businesses were destroyed because of Birx and her comrades. Small businesses can’t be controlled as easily as corporations, many of which made bank on the whole debacle. Pure evil from where I sit.
The COVID-Birx-Fauci story shows how terribly tenuous our “scientific” management approach is. We are a nation of sheep, herded by our propaganda-using”betters”.
One thing, among many, that puzzled me was the low incidence of flu cases during the pandemic. Was this a case of misdiagnosis? Did the flu show itself to be covid?
brinstner.
It’s been said that if you run the PCR test enough cycles, you’ll get Covid traces out of dry wall dust. And the number of people who had Covid and didn’t know it would be adding to the count when they died of something else.
And then there was this reimbursement thingy…maybe hospitals just lied?
Seen reports that Covid admits to hospitals were, “incidental” from 30% of the time to 70%, IOW, guy’s in for something else and they crank up the PCR machine.
“She is as culpable for crimes against humanity as Fauci.” Skip
Bingo.
brinster: The person I brought up before, Julius Ruechel, has a couple of interesting articles about how COVID-19 displaced the flu:
https://www.juliusruechel.com/2022/01/who-do-you-trust-if-you-cant-trust.html
https://www.juliusruechel.com/2022/01/the-false-god-of-central-planning.html
“Ian ferguson, of imperial college, he and chris murray of u washington, generated the model that underlay the lockdowns”
Yes, thanks, Miguel, he’s the one. I couldn’t believe how many people took his models seriously and made policy decisions that ruined millions (maybe billions) of lives. I couldn’t even find it on Google—he must be in hiding.
And I credit Neo, I still remember her post linking an article about some earlier pandemic in the 50s or 60s showing how rational the response was then versus what happened in 2020.
Speaking of fooling stupid poopy-heads, Birx also writes in her book that she was determined to get lockdowns due to SEEING THOSE INITIAL CHINESE VIDEOS.
You know, the totally phony ones that showed bodies just laying around in the streets? The ones that 1) should have immediately set off everyone’s BS detector, and 2) had already been fully discredited by the time Birx was implementing her lockdown dreams.