Although it is already being offered at 50% off, I feel so reluctant to put money in the pocket of Dr Birx that I will delay reading her new book until I see a remaindered copy on a charity bookstall.
Meanwhile, I recommend reading the whole of this and then also this (h/t instapundit) for some rather important information about the attitudes of one of the not-very-scientific science bureaucrats who brought lockdown to the USA. Here is a tiny sample.
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.
Decide to lockdown first, find justification later. I resist the urge to add quote after quote; read the two complementary – but very uncomplimentary 🙂 – reviews of her book at the links above!
In Britain, it was ‘three weeks to flatten the curve’, not two weeks, but in both countries somewhat reluctant chief executives were persuaded, against their instincts, to go along with it – and with extending it. (Both Trump and Boris would probably still be safely in office if they had refused.)
Birx wittingly and unwittingly reveals much. Boris will soon have some spare time for reflection and for writing another book. Will he – will anyone – tell us more about the Birxing of the UK?
The answer to Niall’s question is….
Mr Dominic Cummings.
Mr Cummings was pushing for a “lockdown” before either Chris Whitty or Patrick Valance (the medical science advisers) were doing so, and before Niall Ferguson (the Imperial College computer nutter – who broke his own lockdown regulations) was taken seriously.
And who told Mr Cummings to push for lockdowns?
Mr Cummings has kindly told us whose “advice” he was following – Mr William “Bill” Gates (who has no medical qualifications at all).
It really is that brutally simple – not a grand conspiracy, just a nasty little man by the name of Dominic Cummings, who was chief adviser to Prime Minister Johnson at the time (but was NOT working in the interests of Prime Minister Johnson or the British nation).
It will be disturbing if Mr Cummings gets to pick the next Prime Minister of the United Kingdom.
As for President Trump.
No “lockdowns” (they were State, not Federal, but there we go) then no excuse for mass-mail-in-ballots.
No mass-mail-in-ballots and the United States does not get turned into traditional Chicago (“vote early and vote often”, “in Chicago the dead vote”).
I have been involved in elections since 1979 – and if I came upon “Postal Ballots” (as we call them here) that had no clear proof that they came from real voters, I would have them blocked then-and-there.
Sadly calling the police or appealing to the courts does not work in the United States – not in cities the Democrats control, and not with courts who are terrified of “Civil War”.
And this has not ended – there is talk of mass-mail-in-ballots for the November midterm elections.
If this, and other tricks, do happen, and the courts do-nothing-about-it, then there really will be trouble.
“If you block mass-mail-in-ballots the cities will burn” the left told the American courts in 2020 – well two sides can play that game.
States that were rigged.
Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.
In each case there was massive abuse in certain key cities.
What Paul said. It sounds like Dr Birx does not even know what she convinced Trump to do.
As for Boris: AFAIK every country or US State in which excess deaths rose as fast as in Britain, had a full “lockdown” (stay-at-home mandate). Sweden is no exception, because the bodies were not piling up as fast in Sweden. I infer that, had Boris refused to implement a full “lockdown”, he’d have been promptly defenestrated — and then what would have happened to Brexit?
What i blame Boris for, is letting the death rate rise so fast. Many other countries (and US states) did better, and many of those countries did not have stay-at-home mandates. Why do you folks not hold Boris accountable for THAT?
(I am only talking about the first wave, here.)
Paul:
As you say. It only took fraud in a few counties in those five states for the election to be stolen. If this keeps happening, then the future for the USA will be very violent, and the Democrats will reap what they have sown.
You can find a copy on your favorite “open source” academic textbook site.
Had a quick scan. Utter garbage. Unreadable drivel.
All you need to know about these people is that lockdowns were never part of any official pandemic plans. Like the 2005 Federal plan. The epidemiological data for SARs Cov1 was totally fraudulent. On which her “plan” were based. Any MD who thinks that IFR = CFR (the official WHO numbers for SARs CoV 1) is a medically valid number should be stripped of their medical license immediately.
Accurate initial IFR / CFR and attack rates, pathology (same as other endemic HCOVs) was available from Taiwanese and ROK sources by March 10’th and published by March 12’th by the Taiwanese. Everything she wrote is self serving lies based on a career as a VA administrative hack with a sideline in the HTLV III scam.
Once Public Health Medical Malpractice law starts catching up with traditional Medical Malpractice law people like her will be put on trial for what they have done.
https://dailysceptic.org/2022/07/17/white-house-covid-coordinator-deborah-birx-describes-how-she-tricked-trump-and-brought-lockdowns-to-america/
It’s worth reading this medical opinion piece in Surgical Neurology International before it gets disappeared.
Full article (PDF version)
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9062939/pdf/SNI-13-167.pdf
And/or download a copy now.
@Paul
Making no excuses (just “know your enemy” perhaps), it is worth understanding that Cummings had (by then) developed
(1) a deep dislike of Whitehall Bureaucrats (in)famous for Dither, Waffle and Pants Wetting (the Do Nothing Slowly brigade)
(2) an admiration for technocrats like Gates who offered “solutions” (the Do Something Now brigade)
The big dangers, that went unnoticed(?) by Cummings were (and still are) that Mr Gates
(a) has a slight leaning towards what used to be called Eugenics
(b) rarely produced anything creative himself but did have an enormous talent for self-publicity and rebadging other people’s work as his own.
See Seattle Computer Products’ 86-DOS (which became MS-DOS) and Xerox PARC (which became MS-Windows)
It is the second time that i read this on Samizdata, and i’d like to know what WAS in the official plans if anybody can let me know. (For any country that you know of.)
I recall reading the sentiment that it would be no great loss if Dr Birx was “Isadora Duncaned” by one of her own scarves.
https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/213717/dh_131040.pdf
FAO Snorri, the UK equivalent albeit with the word Influenza which may, in some peoples eyes, compromise its relevance to your enquiry..
“The UK Influenza Pandemic Preparedness Strategy 2011 describes the government’s strategic approach for responding to an influenza pandemic. It updates the clinical, health and scientific advice and information contained in ‘Pandemic flu: a national framework for responding to an influenza pandemic 2007’ and replaces that document”.
A few extracts.
Page 28:-
It will not be possible to halt the spread of a new pandemic influenza virus, and it would be a waste of public health resources and capacity to attempt to do so.
and
Consider enhancing public health measures to disrupt local transmission of the virus as appropriate, such as localised school closures based on public health risk assessment (I include this one as I was unable to find any use of the word lockdown although I freely admit I may have missed it in a 70+ page document. Note the word localised).
Page 37:-
Although there is a perception that the wearing of facemasks by the public in the community and household setting may be beneficial, there is in fact very little evidence of widespread benefit from their use in this setting.
It’s a long old read drawing largely on the experiences of dealing with H1N1 but also to a lesser extent H5N1 and SARS. Too bad it was pretty much ignored, especially as it must have cost a lot to produce.
Snorri – in same cases it was especially tragic.
Many areas rejected Early Treatment – believing the lies the “liberal” world order told about it. Remember most doctors in the United States are no longer self employed – they work for corporations and they are “licensed” by State boards.
In one case I know of (in California) a doctor saved thousands of lives – and he was so disgusted by the lack of Early Treatment in other areas, that he decided to run for Congress. He got only 10% of the vote in the qualifying primary.
Why?
I read the negative comments (I forced myself to do so) – the most popular one was “you divided our community”, that was the comment the leftist hivemind had decided on.
And it was TRUE – he had “divided the community” by saying something different to the official line. The fact that what he was saying was true (and the official line was a pack of lies) was not relevant – he had “divided the community”, which is the worst possible crime to a Collectivist.
Rudolph Hucker – yes. You have summed it up – there is nothing useful I can add.
John K.
The left know their policies do not work. And they know that, eventually, even the education system and media will not be able to brainwash people into voting for them.
So election fraud is the only option – and they are prepared for a violent response, that would give them the excuse for the “crack down” they long to do anyway.
The good news (there is good news) is that it MAY be much harder to rig the midterms than it was to rig 2020 – as the courts have stopped ignoring Election Laws.
In 2020 it was “we are just getting rid of Trump” – and John Roberts (Chief Justice of the Supreme Court) and others were “cool” with that – but this time it is “we want perpetual power – via rigging elections”.
That is a bit much for at least some judges to accept.
@snorri
Here is the overview of the 2005/2006 Federal Plans.
https://www.cdc.gov/flu/pandemic-resources/planning-preparedness/national-strategy-planning.html
There is a beefier document that goes into far more detail.
Basically influenza and all likely respiratory infection pandemics have the same kind of epidemiology and pathology but the plans were very brittle. The Action Plan points for the Federal Plan basically fell apart in the first paragraph in Feb 2020 when the CDC totally screwed up the RT/PCR reagents needed to track the initial outbreak. There were no “approved” reagents for almost 6 weeks and the CDC made serious threats against the people in Washington state because they were tracking and treating using non “approved” tests. The WA state outbreak was stomped but the idiots in NY state Dept of Health then let it spread uncontained from European sources. The US epidemic spread from East to West.
Add to that the fact that US intel told the WH and CDC from the getgo that the source was a Chinese bio-warfare lab (the French built it) and you can see why it was total panic from mid Feb 2020 onwards. All previous public health science and all previous medical science was set aside and it was purely political coverup and disaster management from then on in.
Although the final data sets are not all in based on initial data sets apart from a blip in Q2 2020 death rates / 100K for the last 30 month stayed within the 10 year range in all western countries. By historical public health epidemiological standards there was no actual pandemic. There was none of the extended out of 10 year range deaths rates seen in 1968/1969 or 1957/58. The last two actual pandemics.
Snorri, keep reading the first of the two links in my OP till you reach
Then just keep reading. Then go to the second of the two reviews (also from the Brownstone institute, but by another reviewer). After some interesting stuff not in the first review, you will meet some quotes common to both. Then you will reach
In this way she kept on giving the states federal-advisory cover after the Trump white house had decided to withdraw it.
Then just keep reading. I meant what I said – read right through both reviews. As Hannah Arendt said of Nazi propaganda, Birx’ book is as honest as it is mendacious.
Many thanks to John and jmc for the links.
What i’ll look for, is whether clear guidance is provided therein wrt at what point the recommended measures should be taken, because clearly they are not to be taken every winter!
— Paul Marks is right to insist on early treatment. There should be a Nuremberg-style trial of people who blocked early treatment.
And incidentally, that is why it is normally most important to be cautious in the 1st wave: in the 2nd wave, there will be a weaker virus and, normally, medicines against it.
— Niall: what i objected to was this sentence quoted in the OP:
She does sound like she thinks that it was the Trump admin that implemented the lockdowns.
@Snorri Godhi
There are no clear guidance because this is not hard science. Medical science and especially public health science is basically a collection of craft skills and heuristics bolstered by a reasonably large but far from definitive data set going back about 150 years.
Swine flu in 2009 being a great example. It was a reappearance of H1N1. Which caused the Spanish flu in 1918-21. Which killed tens of millions. I got it in 2009. It was really nasty. But it turned out it did not trigger catastrophic cytokine storms in young people like in 1918 (most of the dead) and the population cohort who account for most of the dead in a new vigorous influenza variant, the over 65’s, had unusually high cross immunity to H1N1. Basically the first pandemic flu you are exposed to primes your immune system. Older people in was Chinese Flu in 1958, younger people (like me), Hong Kong flu in 1968. So H2N2 gave good cross immunity, but H3N2 did not.
One way of looking at the difference between SAR CoV 1 in 2003 and SARs CoV 2 in 2020 is that the people who mostly died from SARs Cov 2 pneumonia in Q2 2020 were the people who had the unusually low mortality rate from H1N1 in 2009. So an exceptionally high population of high risk old people in 2020..
Thats why there are no fixed step guidelines for dealing with pandemics. Every epidemic is subtly different. As is the politics. In 2003 the world media was distracted by the invasion of Iraq. In January 2020 the MSM was in hysterics about a nuclear WW3 because a vicious senior Iranian politician had been assassinated by the US. Much to the the satisfaction of a lot of senior people in Iran as it turned out. The risk of WW3 was less than zero. But of you read the MSM at the time..
So the world media was primed for mass hysteria. Which is exactly what happened a few weeks later.
[…] a lot longer. Here again, I must modestly disclaim all inventiveness of my own. I owe the idea of banning briefly, then using that time to get the ban extended to Dr Deborah […]