The great lockdown reversal, part 2

The dark forces unleashed--but not created--by Deborah Birx

Deborah Birx, alongside Anthony Fauci, was the core architect of America’s lockdown policy.

Deborah Birx, Trump’s White House Coronavirus Response Coordinator, was the official in the United States most responsible for the replacement of science by a radical ideology. Her achievement occurred just one week after the Pence letter discussed in part 1.

She had won Trump over to her idea of “two weeks to flatten the curve”.

But the way this happened is shocking.

As I have mentioned in earlier posts, Birx’s 2022 memoir reveals the disturbing truth. She wrote:

“On Monday and Tuesday [March 9th and 10th]… 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.”

This revealed the famous “two weeks to flatten the curve” for what it was. A deception. A ruse. Dr. Birx didn’t believe that ordinary Americans would do what she wanted them to do—or even Trump himself—so she lied to them. She wanted Americans to do what she thought was best, not what they thought was best. And she admitted that she would search for whatever data would justify the decision she had already made.

Dr. Birx’s statements reveal several of the values that were at the heart of the replacement of science by ideology that took place over the course of the pandemic: deceit (and the rejection of informed consent), paternalism, and dogmatic thinking with a preordained conclusion.

Yet this hardly answers our questions. Why did Birx’s views depart so strongly from consensus? Why was this departure so broadly accepted by the public health establishment? How did public health officials go from decades of consensus to denouncing that very same consensus across multiple domains of science as misinformation–in just a matter of weeks? And why was Deborah Birx so emboldened to manipulate, and deceive–and then brag about it? What explains such a brazenly unethical approach to pandemic management? What forces protected and still protect her? And why did she put preordained conclusions ahead of data? What encouraged her to do so?

These are some of the most perplexing questions of the pandemic.

A 2019 report on pandemic science from researchers at Johns Hopkins hints at the answer:

“Some NPIs [non-pharmaceutical interventions], such as travel restrictions and quarantine, might be pursued for social or political purposes by political leaders, rather than pursued because of public health evidence.”

This–how science became replaced by politics, how honesty became replaced by deception, and how cooperation became replaced by coercion and force–is what we shall begin to discuss in the next part of this mini-series on lockdowns.

Birx was the enthusiastic steward of these dark forces, but she did not create them.