Private Emails Reveal Deborah Birx Refused to Participate in Trump Covid Pressers Selling Herd Immunity: ‘I Just Can’t’
newly-released email indicates Dr. Deborah Birx was alarmed by the Donald Trump administration’s handling of the coronavirus pandemic, but she still offered to run “cover” for their policy deliberations.
The House Select Committee released a trove of emails containing insights on how Trump and the CDC were formulating their responses to Covid. This trove included a message from August 2020 ing Birx was responding to an upcoming roundtable of outside medical experts — including her old nemesis, Dr. Scott Atlas — who were pushing for a herd immunity strategy for the pandemic.
In Trump’s prepared remarks for the roundtable, he was primed to urge healthy Americans to come out of lockdown, and he decried “unending lockdowns” as a non-scientific approach that “would inflict grave harm on our children and our entire society.” Birx responded by saying she “can’t be part of this with these people,” and she believed their strategy would lead to an “unacceptable death toll” among minorities and people with co-morbidities. She warned that America would’ve seen “twice as many deaths” by that point if not for masks and social distancing, but then she offered to “go out of town or whatever gives the WH cover for Weds,” while she did a separate event with Larry Hogan and Anthony Fauci.
I can’t be part of this with these people who believe in herd immunity and believe we are fine with only protecting the 1.5M Americans in LTCF and not the 80M + with co-morbidities in the populations included the unacceptable death toll among Native Americans, Hispanics and Blacks. With our current mitigation scenario we end up near 300K by Christmas and 500K by the time we have vaccine – close to the 600K live lost with 1918 Flu. We have worked to find a path that is the least disruptive to the economy but moves us under R1 and saves both the economy and American lives. Without masks and social distancing in public and homes we end up with twice as many deaths – we are a very unhealthy nation with a lot of obesity etc — we will never look as good as even Sweden due to our co-morbidities. These are people who believe that all the curves are predetermined and mitigation is irrelevant – they are a fringe group without grounding in epidemics, public health or on the ground common sense experience. I am happy to go out of town or whatever gives the WH cover for Weds. Perhaps do Annapolis and meet with Hogan. Fauci and I could probably do it together — I am open to options.
Birx sent her email to Mike Pence’s former chief of staff Marc Short, but she also passed the email to Fauci, former FDA Director Stephen Hahn, and former CDC Director Robert Redfield, adding “I just can’t.”
The post Private Emails Reveal Deborah Birx Refused to Participate in Trump Covid Pressers Selling Herd Immunity: ‘I Just Can’t’ first appeared on Mediaite.
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