“He noted that it was the task force that got us into this ditch by promoting testing and falsely increasing case counts compared to other countries,” she added, referring to a group of senior health officials that gathered regularly at the White House. “The conclusion was Dr. Atlas is brilliant and the president will be following his guidance now.”
In another email sent to senior health officials two days later, Dr. Birx cataloged seven ideas espoused by Dr. Atlas that she regarded as misinformation, including that the virus was comparable to the flu and that “children are immune.”
“I am at a loss of what we should do,” she wrote, warning that if caseloads kept mounting, there would be “300K dead by Dec.” The United States ended the year with more than 350,000 Covid deaths.
In her interviews with the committee last year, Dr. Birx described regular efforts to undermine the weekly pandemic assessments she first sent to state and local officials in June 2020, which offered “comprehensive data and state-specific recommendations regarding the status of the pandemic,” the committee wrote in a news release.
Beginning in the fall of that year, Dr. Birx said, she began receiving “a list of changes for three or four states” each week, which sometimes involved attempts to loosen mask recommendations or indoor capacity restrictions. In one instance, she was asked to soften guidance intended for South Dakota officials and remove some recommendations for the state, which had a surge in case counts at the time.
Dr. Birx told committee investigators that she was asked to change the reports about “25 percent” of the time or else they would not be sent.