Anthony Fauci was the face of the pandemic tyranny, but documentarian Rob Montz argues that Deborah Birx was the real power behind the pandemic policy disasters. 

He makes a compelling case. 

I learned a lot about what went on behind the scenes during 2020, but most startling was the fact that Deborah Birx simply ignored President Trump's policy decisions and conducted a nationwide policy campaign that contradicted Trump's decisions later on during the pandemic. 

The film is great about bringing the receipts. It is filled not just with second-hand stories, but also audio from Birx bragging about how she subverted Trump and his advisors. Not that his advisors did a good job even trying to keep her in check; they let her run wild and didn't monitor closely what she was doing. 

When directed to change guidance, she simply changed the order in which directives were given--burying her policies deeper in the memos to states because Trump's aids didn't read her recommendations closely. When she told Pence that she was ignoring and even contradicting Trump's policy choices, he encouraged her to do so. He even gave her Air Force 2 to fly around the country to promote school closures after the president insisted that schools reopen. 

She wrote the White House policies, and nobody stopped her. 

I learned about this documentary (less than half an hour, so not a big commitment) in a podcast by John Tierney at City Journal. It is well worth the time to listen, and there is a transcript if you prefer to read it. 

The secret to Birx's success was simple: she is a bureaucrat, not a scientist. She knew how to play the bureaucratic game, and when confronted by obstacles she knew how to get around them. Unfortunately Pence backed her up. 

She’s able to enact this kind of casual coup of him, and it didn’t require a shot fired, and it was mostly done with an email inbox and an edit function. It’s the most pedestrian office space tactics imaginable. And it ends up having these unbelievably catastrophic consequences for hundreds of millions of people. And it’s the most casual, bland office drone stuff you can imagine in terms of what she actually has to do to circumvent a president.

This gets to the big weakness Trump has as an executive in government, as I have said before. He wants to "drain the swamp" but has no idea what it is, where it resides, and how to thwart it. Time and again his own government agencies ran circles around him--to the point that there was a well-known #resistance that was celebrated in the media. Trump never managed to fight it well, which is why his bureaucratic accomplishments were minimal. In his first two years, he got some laws passed with a Republican Congress, and his foreign policy achievements were monumental. 

But when it came to the administrative state he was stymied. Running a real-estate empire is not like running the federal government. 

Again, Deborah Birx is not a researcher. She’s not even an epidemiologist. She’s a bureaucrat. She was overseeing the dispersal of AIDS medicine. She wasn’t doing foundational research into the nature of the HIV/AIDS virus or whatever. So again, real hardcore Harvard, Stanford gold-plated credentials people that are basically trying to come in to provide an intellectual architecture for Trump’s guerrilla instincts that the lockdowns are bad and are counterproductive and come with a huge human toll. Atlas puts together this meeting in the White House. It’s him and a couple of these other heavy hitters. And it’s specifically scheduled so that Deborah Birx can attend. They make a point to schedule it so that she can be there and she can make her case in front of the president. And she at the last minute says, “I’m not going to be there because it would look bad for me.” She refuses to deign to give them her attention or her time, which is the most horribly unscientific way—

John Tierney: And also because she can’t possibly argue with them because they know so much more than she does.

Rob Montz: But it’s amazing that she has since publicly admitted she doesn’t even pretend to engage with the substance of their critiques. I know this from having suffered from my sins and watched everything that she’s ever said about the time in the White House.

John Tierney: My condolences.

Rob Montz: She doesn’t even attempt to engage with it analytically. She just calls it a heresy, and then openly admits to using her bureaucratic intrigue powers to censor and silence her critics. We talk about it in the doc that she, shortly after that meeting with the president, between the president and these professors, goes to the media team at the White House and tells them, “You can’t put Scott Atlas on national news anymore.” And they say, “Yeah.” The most grotesque censorship imaginable. And she’s openly admitting to it because she isn’t thinking anything’s wrong with it.

I've only read snippets of Birx's book, but what I have read is appalling. She is very proud of her lying to and manipulating the president and is quite open about it. 

My one quibble with the documentary is that the focus on Birx--which is laudable because she has gotten a free pass--gives Fauci too little grief for his own sins. 

In my judgment it WAS Fauci--and Birx. There can be more than one.