Pence and Dr. Birx helped Fauci betray Trump

‘Why should we believe anything the government tells us about COVID-19?’

While the Congressional limelight is focused on Dr. Fauci and his role in the COVID-19 “pandemic” and countermeasures, he was not the only one responsible for how the virus was addressed. As Jeffrey Tucker, founder of Brownstone Institute observed in mid-2022:

Even if Anthony Fauci had been the front man for the media, it was Birx who was the main influence in the White House behind the nationwide lockdowns that did not stop or control the pathogen but have caused immense suffering and continue to roil and wreck the world. 

Following her stint at the White House, Dr. Birx, who was Trump's Coronavirus Response Coordinator from 2020 to 2021, wrote a book “Silent Invasion: The Untold Story of the Trump Administration, Covid-19, and Preventing the Next Pandemic Before It's Too Late” about her time in the White House. She also testified before Congress, in June 2022 (after she had to quit her position at the White House as detailed below) about what was characterized as the Trump administration's failure in managing the pandemic. 

Regarding what the government knew about the vaccines as opposed to what it told the public, Dr. Birx admitted that agencies gave muddled, contradictory, or incomplete information to the American people, prompting Representative Jim Jordan to ask her:

Why should we believe anything the government tells us about COVID-19? 

She also admitted that the government, despite promising Americans that, if they took the the mRNA jab, they would not get or transmit COVID-19, had just “hoped that it would work in that way.” Watch as she's questioned by Jordan: 

Violating her own rules

Birx, responsible for creating and perpetuating the lockdowns, was forced to resign her position in December 2020 after revelations that, after warning Americans against celebrating Thanksgiving with other households, she joined family members from two different households in a four-generation Thanksgiving meal. The BBC reported on the incident:

Dr. Birx was forced to leave her position following a family Thanksgiving gathering of four generations despite warning the rest of America to eat only with household members. 

She had urged Americans in the days before Thanksgiving to restrict gatherings to "your immediate household".

But it emerged on Sunday she had travelled from Washington to one of her other properties, on Fenwick Island in Delaware, where she was joined by three generations of her family from two households.

While in Delaware, she did an interview with CBS in which she noted that some Americans had "made mistakes" over Thanksgiving by travelling and they "should assume they were infected". (Emphases added.) 

. . . 

Explaining her decision to gather with her husband, daughter, son-in-law and two grandchildren, she told Newsy: "My daughter hasn't left that house in 10 months, my parents have been isolated for 10 months.

"They've become deeply depressed as I'm sure many elderly have as they've not been able to see their sons, their granddaughters.

"My parents have not been able to see their surviving son for over a year. These are all very difficult things."

Birx is not the only politician who would not follow her own mandate. In a discussion about her multigenerational Thanksgiving dinner, Fox and Friends mentioned others who had done the same and the disdain for the public that may be reflected by their hypocrisy. 

No need for scientific data on lockdowns 

Tucker, quoted above, in a review of her book, focused on Birx's revelation that her recommendation of “15 days to stop the spread” was not based on any scientific data, her determination to continue the lockdowns past the fifteen days, and that she knew that what she was doing would turn into an economic disaster. Tucker quoted from her book: 

“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 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.”

Analyzing Birx's admission, Tucker concluded she was disingenuous with the president:

It was a solution in search of evidence she did not have. She told Trump that the evidence was there anyway. She actually tricked him into believing that locking down a whole population of people was somehow magically going to make a virus to which everyone would inevitably be exposed somehow vanish as a threat. 

Meanwhile, the economy was wrecked domestically and then all over the world, as most governments in the world followed what the US did. 

Where did she come up with the idea of lockdowns? By her own report, her only real experience with infectious disease came from her work on AIDS, a very different disease from a respiratory virus that everyone would eventually get but which would only be fatal or even severe for a small cohort, a fact that was known since late January. Still, her experience counted for more than science. (Emphases added.)

Public gatherings, even family gatherings had been largely curtailed by the number of people allowed to come together in one place. This turned many people's lives, including her own family's, upside down. What was the reasoning behind those numbers? Tucker continued to quote from her book:

. . . 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.

She puts a fine point on it: “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.”

Fox News's Jesse Watters and medical director Marty Makary (in the below video) discussed Birx's revelations in her book. Among the issues Makery focused on were that COVID-19 mitigation measures were indiscriminate; that if she knew the vaccines wouldn't end the pandemic she should have said so publicly; and that Fauci and Birx were both HIV researchers and since HIV doesn't work with herd immunity they brought with them biases that reflected minority opinions. 

‘Write, submit, revise, hide, resubmit’

To achieve her goals she changed the weekly reports sent to the states. She explained how she put back all the information the White Hose removed, but in different places so they wouldn't realize what she had done. Not only did she do this herself, but she had “accomplices” helping her, as well. Tucker commented and quoted:

Recall that for the remainder of the year, the White House was urging normalcy while many states kept locking down. It was an incredible confusion. The CDC was all over the map.. . . Trump would say one thing on the campaign trail but the regulations and disease panic kept pouring out of his own agencies.

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. (Emphases added.)

‘A risky move’

Birx also admitted that she did the same thing with the regulations written by Dr. Scott Atlas, a special coronavirus advisor brought in by President Trump. For this cause, Dr. Bob Redfield, former head of the CDC, assisted her. Tucker quoted:

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…

VP Pence complicit

Birx named Vice President Mike Pence as supportive of her subterfuge: 

[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. (Emphases added.)

A different perspective

The Washington Post, on the other hand, had a glowing review of her book. Whereas Tucker railed about her lack of data for lockdowns, writer Colleen M. Farrell stated that Birx was concerned about rigorous data and implied approval of her subversion and subterfuge: 

. . .  Birx offers her side of the story with a detailed account of her quest to ensure that the White House’s pandemic response was grounded first and foremost in rigorous scientific data. (Emphasis added.)

and moral:

The question at the heart of “Silent Invasion” (though Birx does not explicitly frame the book this way) is how a morally grounded and competent person like Birx made sense of her place in the administration of such a morally bankrupt and incompetent president.

. . . 

. . . . She sought impact through quiet subversion and subterfuge. When told she could not make recommendations to governors on how to limit viral spread, she took her recommendations out of attention-grabbing bullet points in her memo and put them in paragraphs that no one at the White House was diligent enough to notice. She privately told Vice President Mike Pence that the president’s message on the coronavirus was wrong and that she needed to go to the governors and contradict the president. The vice president did not object, so Birx went on a road trip to speak face to face with governors around the country. (Emphases added.)

A day before her book release, Dr. Birx was interviewed by ABC's Dr. Jennifer Ashton (video below) about her time in the White House. Birx complained of sexism, the allies she found in the White House, and of concern about White House safety protocols. The interviewer, who never questioned Birx about her ignominious departure from the White House, stated instead that Birx was replaced by the Biden White House. 

Beyond politics

The approach of mainstream media to the revelations by Birx and Fauci reveal a deep disagreement about the role of government bureaucrats, as opposed to elected leaders, in shaping public policy, in particular the policy positions of then-President Trump. In contrast to Birx and Fauci, Trump's public health position in late March 2020 was summarized by Caitlin Oprysko and Quint Forgey for Politico, as prioritizing reopening:

“Our country wasn’t built to be shut down. This is not a country that was built for this,” Trump insisted to reporters during a White House press briefing with his coronavirus task force . . .

The president complained that he didn’t want to let the “cure” to the fast-spreading pandemic — social isolation that has prompted the shuttering of businesses across the country and cratered the economy — to be worse than the disease itself. (Emphases added.)