What compelled Birx to pathologically lie, hide data, and manipulate the elected administration and the American people in order to orchestrate what turned out to be a social, economic, and public health catastrophe, then boast about it afterward? Even assuming the worst about her, it’s unlikely that she would have been willing to knowingly destroy so many people’s lives without also believing, at some level, that she was doing the right thing.

But how were lockdowns ever the right thing to do? Every form of totalitarianism requires a central animating ideology, and dogmatic adherence to this ideology in turn provides totalitarians with justifications and excuses for their actions. Birx spent decades building her career in a global system in which success depended on adhering to the ideology that the Chinese government must be embraced by the international community and particularly the United States because it was changing for the better. Over time, this increasingly meant treating Chinese propaganda as coequal with reality—in history, science, finance, environmental matters, human rights, diplomacy, and public health. The best way to succeed in a system that rewards adherence to ideology over anything else is to believe the lies oneself.

For Birx and other elites indoctrinated in this often lucrative and career-bolstering ideology, the idea that a two-month lockdown of Wuhan had eliminated COVID from all of China—but from nowhere else on earth—could not be seen as the logical absurdity that it plainly was. Xi said lockdowns worked, and he must be believed. Lockdowns were “the science,” and it had to be followed.