Rush Limbaugh called her “the scarf queen” in reference to her failed attempts to humanize herself through a common female fashion accessory – her trademark scarves that she wore when she conducted White House Coronavirus Task Force Briefings in 2020. She is Deborah Birx, who served as the White House coronavirus response coordinator under President Donald Trump in his first term, finishing in that role once Trump was safely out of office and the Biden regime had taken control.
You may remember her as the taller, handsome woman who often appeared alongside Anthony Fauci at press briefings and task force events. She was tapped to serve on that task force after serving as the U.S. Global AIDS coordinator, which was considered an ambassador-level job within the State Department.
From 2014 under President Barack Obama through 2019-2020, she had overseen American programs whose stated purpose was to counter the global spread of HIV. Before that, she ran the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's (CDC’s) global HIV/AIDS division. Only in the federal government can failure give you upward mobility.
In her memoir Silent Invasion, Birx painted herself as a heroine for what she framed as balancing Trump administration skepticism over COVID-19, politics, media narratives, the need to treat millions of Americans, and the effort to prevent or mitigate the spread of the virus.
In that book, Birx admitted that she was integral to the effort to extend the initial lockdowns beyond the “15 days to slow the spread.”
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, she wrote.
Technically, Birx was a Trump insider. He relied on her, Fauci and their team to give him the advice he relied upon to make critical national decisions. But as we’ve seen with Fauci, who clearly worked against Trump and his administration, Birx was more discreet but still a kindred spirit.
She played a major role from the outset of the COVID-19 pandemic in March 2020 with the “15 days to slow the spread” messaging theme and related policies. Those policies, which she advanced, included limiting group gatherings, social distancing, and the closure of churches, gyms, places of employment, restaurants and bars, but not, curiously, liquor stores. She pushed for policies to keep asymptomatic people trapped in their homes under lockdown.
She advocated for the quarantine of an entire household if just one member tested positive for COVID-19. And she was aggressive in her push to test everyone, including those with no symptoms.
More than anyone else on the White House task force, Birx championed mask-wearing in spite of existing evidence that the masks would prove ineffective at mitigating the spread of COVID-19. She pushed to mask indoors and even at home.
She traveled the country in the summer of 2020 to lobby governors and state health officials to institute strict guidelines on masking and reducing the sizes of indoor gatherings they would permit. She did all of this while at the same time, leftist governors like Pennsylvania’s Tom Wolf were out encouraging people to join large groups of “peaceful protestors” to support Black Lives Matter. At the time, she expressed worry, but even on pandemic grounds, she did not condemn those "peaceful protests."
Because of Birx and Fauci and their people, you couldn’t go to a funeral for a family member; you couldn’t visit loved ones in the hospital; your kids couldn’t go to school; you couldn’t go to church or work; you couldn’t gather in full for Thanksgiving or Christmas; you had to cancel that wedding and that elective health procedure because “group size.”
She took particular issue with White House advisor Scott Atlas, who took an entirely different stance on managing the pandemic. Atlas rejected the Birx/Fauci approach of masking, testing, and the arbitrary “six-feet social distancing” requirements. He correctly advocated for testing just those with symptoms or who were clearly sick. He wanted to manage the nation’s response to COVID-19 until herd immunity could take over, which is how most epidemics throughout history had been effectively handled. Isolate those with symptoms, treat them with all the means at your disposal, and get to herd immunity as quickly as possible.
More to the point, Atlas subscribed to something called the Great Barrington Declaration, which stated:
We know that vulnerability to death from COVID-19 is more than a thousand-fold higher in the old and infirm than the young. Indeed, for children, COVID-19 is less dangerous than many other harms, including influenza.
As immunity builds in the population, the risk of infection to all – including the vulnerable – falls. We know that all populations will eventually reach herd immunity – i.e. the point at which the rate of new infections is stable – and that this can be assisted by (but is not dependent upon) a vaccine. Our goal should therefore be to minimize mortality and social harm until we reach herd immunity.
The most compassionate approach that balances the risks and benefits of reaching herd immunity, is to allow those who are at minimal risk of death to live their lives normally to build up immunity to the virus through natural infection, while better protecting those who are at highest risk. We call this Focused Protection.
Medical doctors and public health professionals who openly advocated for the declaration were widely canceled by the left and the Birx/Fauci cabal. In fact, social media platforms broadly censored that declaration and those who supported it. Birx tried to get Atlas kicked off the White House task force.
None of this prevented her from showing her true hypocritical leftist colors. While millions of other Americans had to obey the dictates she played a pivotal role in instituting, limiting travel and canceling gatherings, Birx traveled to her vacation home for Thanksgiving weekend 2020.
The day after Thanksgiving, Nov. 28, 2020, she hopped into her car and drove from Washington, D.C., to her place on Fenwick Island, Del. Her husband was with her, along with her daughter, her son-in-law, and two grandchildren. You may forget, but there were also restrictions at the time on how people from different households were permitted to gather. In this instance, in defiance of her own “guidelines,” people from two different households gathered at her Delaware vacation home that weekend.
They ate, they drank, presumably they talked, and maybe even someone laughed, all while in my family’s case, my wife was mourning the loss of her father who spent the last eight months of his life in facilities surrounded by strangers with no family permitted to be by his side. We had just wrapped up a funeral where only a handful of people were permitted to attend in a huge, cavernous space, according to Birx’s and Fauci’s dictates. But no worries, most who went to the graveside service outdoors dutifully kept their masks on. For the record, not everyone at that funeral wore masks, which was encouraging at the time.
In her defense, Birx’s excuse was that she spent Thanksgiving weekend at that property to winterize it, not to celebrate the holiday with her family, even though she obviously celebrated the holiday with her family.
Leading up to that weekend, Birx had publicly urged all Americans to restrict gatherings to their immediate household and to avoid unnecessary travel. So much for “15 days to slow the spread,” right?
The Associated Press reported on all of this in mid-December, not long before Birx publicly announced her retirement from public service, scheduled to end with the end of the Trump administration, for which she shed no tears. Her stated reason for her retirement was the toll the negative press and public criticism took on her and her family.
Since then, she’s continued to work in the private sector. At the moment, she’s the CEO of Armata Pharmaceuticals, and she’s a senior fellow at the George W. Bush Institute.
President Joe Biden did not pardon Birx because he didn’t have to. She wasn’t part of his administration. She served his purposes, though, and the purposes of the Democrat Party and the left at large, well before Biden took office.
But make no mistake, she was there in lockstep with Fauci, implementing this grand experiment on how to take a nearly 250-year-old free nation and turn it into an authoritarian state overnight.
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