Lockdown Architect Deborah Birx Admits to Using ‘Subterfuge’ and ‘Slight-of-Hand’ to ‘Hide’ Information From Trump By Debra Heine
Dr. Deborah Birx, who served as the White House Coronavirus Response Coordinator under former President Donald Trump in 2020, has admitted in her new book that she engaged in “subterfuge” and “slight-of-hand” to “hide” information in weekly reports from Trump officials so she could control the recommendations sent to states to guide their COVID mitigation efforts.
In her book, “Silent Invasion: The Untold Story of the Trump Administration, Covid-19, Birx also explains how she tricked Trump into going along with a “15 Days to Flatten the Curve” lockdown in March of 2020, knowing that it was just “a start.”
Birx explains that her recommendations—which included random testing, masking, and restricted indoor gatherings—were met with resistance in the Trump White House, especially after Dr. Scott Atlas joined the White House Coronavirus Task Force in August of 2020.
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.
Dr. Atlas knew that Birx’s “track, trace, and isolate” recommendation was unpractical, ineffective, and a massive invasion of the peoples’ privacy, so he put together a new recommendation advising that only the sick be tested. This, of course, was met with hysteria in the corporate media, and resistance from the lifelong bureaucrats behind the draconian COVID policies.
Brownstone Institute’s Jeffrey Tucker explains what happened next. “After a week-long media frenzy, the regulations flipped in the other direction.”
In her book, Birx reveals how she undermined Atlas’s recommendation, openly admitting that she and her co-conspirators were not “being transparent with the powers that be in the White House.”
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…
Birx went on to suggest that none other than former Vice President Mike Pence had given her tacit permission to subvert Atlas’s “dangerous positions.”
[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.
Although the nationwide lockdowns did not stop or control the virus, and caused immense suffering and economic devastation throughout the country, Birx appears proud of her role as the main architect of the draconian policy.
Birx explains in her book how she talked Trump into green-lighting the allegedly temporary “15 day” lockdowns that began on March 12, 2020, and turned into two years in many parts of the country.
“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.”
Birx goes on to explain how she manipulated the language as part of her effort to force a full Italian style lockdown on the nation.
“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 confesses that “15 days to flatten the curve” was never the actual plan. “I left the rest unstated: that this was just a starting point,” she admitted. “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. 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.
Cardiologist and COVID vaccine critic Dr. Peter McCullough slammed Birx for manipulating reports “to fuel the false narrative of asymptomatic spread,” and called her hurtful efforts “unlawful.”
“She reworked reports to fuel the false narrative of asymptomatic spread–sounds like she really believed this was the first illness in the history of medicine that spread between two perfectly healthy persons. Distorted, unlawful, worked to hurt so many Americans,” said McCullough on Twitter.
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