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… is from page 136 of Scott Atlas’s important 2021 book, A Plague Upon Our House: My Fight at the Trump White House to Stop COVID From Destroying America [2]:
The first item on the [Trump White House] Task Force agenda was nearly always an update by [Deborah] Birx on the data and on her travels. There was no question that she worked very hard; indeed, every morning by 6:00, Dr. Birx was already sending out her emails of compiled numbers. While she regularly related a few experiences from her visits, she proudly reminded everyone that she “was all about the data.” What was not outwardly acknowledged was that her data was mainly a compilation of automatically generated tabulations of cases, hospitalization, and deaths, as well as some percentages and trend plots. The set of data she distributed always included arbitrary categorizations of the cases, test positivity, or other factors in specified ranges that were assigned certain colors. Convenient to look at, those categories were not of sound scientific basis; nothing formed the limits of the ranges other than arbitrary cutoffs. Yet these categories automatically garnered significance and drove meaningful policy decisions at the state and local levels.
DBx: Covid ‘analysis’ and policy-making have exposed the incompetence of many ‘scientists’ occupying government offices. Unfortunately, ordinary people had to pay the price for the ineptitude of the likes of Deborah Birx and for the megalomania of Anthony Fauci.