Odd phrasing from Deborah Birx, speaking to Sanjay Gupta:
“There were about 100,000 deaths that came from that original surge. All of the rest of them, in my mind, could have been mitigated or decreased substantially.”I know that mitigate and mitigation are words common in COVID-19 discourse. But they always strike me as odd. Merriam-Webster gives these relevant meanings for mitigate : “to cause to become less harsh or hostile,” “to make less severe or painful.” But Birx is clearly not talking about palliative care. She’s not even speaking, really, about persons: “all of the rest of them” is deaths. You can’t “decrease” a person’s death, only a total number of deaths. Birx is speaking about death en masse.
A less evasive way to say it, “About a hundred thousand people died from that original surge. Hundreds of thousands more didn’t have to die.”
I lost my respect for Deborah Birx on March 25 last year. It never came back.
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I lost all respect for her when Cheeto was up at the podium during that infamous virus briefing, spewing his nonsense about injecting bleach and shining UV light into our veins, and not only did she not object, but just sat there, nodding mindlessly.
I remember how she sat there. She must have been impressed by his granularity: bleach and UV light.
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