Midwest Chick's Place

 So it turns out that, although Fauxi was the face of the pandemic, Dr. Birx (the scarf lady), a member of Trump’s covid response team was actually pulling the strings, by her own admission.

She describes re-writing guidance, to hiding or minimizing data, and to pushing her meme, which included masking, social distancing and limiting, and testing (all three of which were unmitigated disasters).  From her book (via RedState):

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.

She and Fauxi were the ones who brought about lockdowns.

 “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.”

She admits to, actually brags about, subterfuge and keeping her bosses in the dark.  She disagreed with Scott Atlas’ approach (testing only if symptomatic) and went around him or over him. 

I’ve had employees like her.  They are a cancer.  In this case, nobody ran herd on her, even after they recognized what she was doing.

“On September 18, I was still on the road—in Arizona again, for a meeting with those conducting proactive testing at the University of Arizona—when Mark Meadows’s name and number flashed across my White House–issued smartphone.

“What the hell do you think you’re doing? You rewrote and posted the CDC testing stuff.”

“Yes, I did, but—” “There’s no ‘buts’ here. You went over my head.”

I explained why I had done it. We’d already seen the drop in testing numbers resulting from Scott Atlas’s dangerous guidelines. Those few pages we’d rewritten would change how states could test, and we’d prevent even more community spread going into the dangerous winter ahead. Mark Meadows took this in and then, biting off each of his words, said, “You went over everyone else on the task force’s heads. You went around the whole approval process. You do not make unilateral decisions. It’s that simple. Period. End of sentence. Understood? Don’t ever do this again.”

What she did was allowed to fly.  And set the stage to weaken the country to allow Brandon and company to begin its destruction.  Power hungry maniacs come in many forms. 

 It would be nice to think that she could be punished for her actions--I mean she didn’t obey the rules that she was ruthlessly setting out to create.  Without her, Fauxi never could have accomplished what he did.  There’s a special place in hell for both of them.