Remember Dr Birx?

One of the names that's faded in the COVID-Wuhan story is Dr Deborah Birx, who was something of a co-spokesperson for the public health elite with Dr Fauci until she was caught traveling to Delaware to celebrate Thanksgiving with extended family, in violation of CDC guidelines. After a few days of trying to scold the plebs about it, she announced her retirement.

This is unusual for public figures caught in hypocrisy during the crisis. Others, like Govs Newsom, Whitmer, and Cuomo, have simply had their flacks make oopsie-type statements and scolded the plebs about their own mask wearing -- "the governor's inadvertent oversight is a reminder to all of us" blah blah blah -- but nobody remotely thinks of retiring. And it appears that for Dr Birx, this was no empty promise, she did retire and has taken a new corporate sinecure.

Although she turned 65 just this past April, It's worth noting that her colleagues Drs Fauci and Collins never saw any particular urgency to retire at 65 and have stayed at their jobs well past that age. (And I would guess that Dr Birx's duties were less than demanding even before she retired.) So why did she cash out?

Here's my theory. We can make a pretty good inference from the heavily redacted e-mail exchanges between Collins and Fauci that both knew by late January 2020 that there had been a lab leak in Wuhan. By late February 2020, when both Birx and Fauci were appointed to the White House Coronavirus Task Force, we must assume that she had been briefed to the same level as Fauci, and their walking orders were to deflect as much as possible from any mention that Wuhan COVID could have been manufactured by a Chinese lab, or that it had leaked from such a lab.

Their job was to keep the focus on masks, social distance, ventilators, hospital ships, and lockdowns. They certainly played a part in what's beginning to emerge as a coordinated media narrative that to refer to the virus as coming from China, or to refer to it as the Wuhan flu, was racist. Instead, they led a charade that masks and lockdowns were the answer, when Dr Birx's own conduct made it clear that she saw no particular danger in violating the CDC's guidelines.

But it's also worth stressing that although Fauci is clearly compromised at this point, and Birx must be equally so by association, neither originated any plan to dismiss the Wuhan lab leak as a conspiracy theory. This came from higher up. Their boss Francis Collins was clearly aware of it, and his interviews last week are a careful attempt to minimize NIH's involvement in the much more widespread deep state funding of the Wuhan lab. There almost certainly had to be a consensus among deep-state actors at Collins's level -- but also not at the cabinet level -- on how to limit the potential scandal. Fauci and Birx were doing what they were told, which included building a narrative that the virus was Trump's fault.

Birx continued to reinforce this narrative even after she left the White House task force. According to Wikipedia,

On January 20, 2021, her term ended. Afterwards, Birx stated that she often considered quitting her position as White House coronavirus response coordinator under the Trump administration due to the administration's hyper-partisanship, especially during the 2020 presidential election. Birx also asserted that the Trump administration "censored" her "science-based guidance" and that she was also "being deliberately blocked from appearing on national media outlets for a time."

We're learning, though, that the "science based guidance" she and Fauci issued varied simply by who was asking for it, and Birx herself didn't take the guidance seriously. Once the game became uncomfortable, she simply dropped out.

Birx was doing only what she'd been told. She didn't like that, to be sure, and she ducked out of it as quickly as she could, although her post-retirement statements, and her revolving-door sinecure with a company with business before the COVID establishment, suggest this had nothing to do with the promptings of conscience. Dr Birx is definitely still with the program, but I suspect she had an inkling that the charade was going to be harder and harder to maintain.

The question that needs to be investigated is who cooked up the underlying frammis? Who thought it would be a good idea to create a myriad of separate gain-of-function grants, bundle them into a single pool, and hand that pool over to the EcoHealth Alliance and send it all to China? And why? Birx was a bit player in a much bigger game, and she left it only because she didn't want to work that hard at it.