Not complicated at all!


Kevin Perry sent me this story yesterday about how the Biden team is pondering whether to give Dr. Susan Birx a role in the new administration’s pandemic response team. To quote the article, “’It’s complicated,’ said Céline Gounder, who sits on Biden’s Covid-19 advisory board. ‘It’s almost like she herself has been politicized.’” This is roughly the equivalent of saying “Maybe we should reconsider our idea of appointing Jared Kushner as Chief of Staff. He seems to be a little politicized.”

Of course, there’s no question that Dr. Birx has great technical chops and has done a lot of good work in her position. But there’s also no question that she has done great harm, not due so much to inaction as to her actions and words that had no other effect than to hinder the nation’s response and lead to a lot of needless deaths. Here are some examples from my posts:

The first time I wrote about her was in this post on April 1. I was talking about the fact that what was needed was a total lockdown of the country (rather than the partial state-by-state lockdowns already in place) and that this would save in the millions of lives. But of course that required persuading Donald Trump. Could she do that? I said “Dr. Birx doesn’t even try very hard to change Trump’s mind, as exemplified by her assertion last Thursday that there’s no shortage of ventilators; so she will be no help in this.”

On April 20, I got onto the subject of testing (as I have often done, from the beginning of this blog in March). I said “Trump has declared that not to be a problem (and, disgracefully, Drs. Birx and Fauci seem to support his position, although they didn’t talk that way at all last week)…”

On April 27, I railed against a statement she’d made the previous day:

Of course, if I’m right that the shortage of tests is behind the continuing high level of the ratio of deaths to total cases, then this will be solved when we have adequate tests, right? Yes it would, but now it seems that Dr. Susan Birx is waving the white flag on our ever having adequate tests available, at least tests that detect infections. She said yesterday that what’s needed is a “breakthrough” so that we have antigen tests for Covid-19, which would be a lot easier to administer and require fewer supplies.

I don’t know about you, but I don’t find it very comforting to hear that – three months into the pandemic in the US and at a time when the government’s own guidelines say that widespread availability of testing is crucial to reopening, yet reopening is clearly proceeding anyway – the person in charge of the whole recovery effort is now saying that it will take a small miracle for us to have the tests we need anytime soon.

Dr. Birx, please explain to me exactly why you are in this job, if your chief function now seems to be to deflect blame for anything bad that happens, since clearly a miracle won’t happen. We could hire a faith healer who would do that much more efficiently, and without giving Americans the illusion that at least one or two people at a high level in the government actually know what they’re doing.

On May 4 I asked, neither for the first nor the last time, “Drs. Birx and Fauci, why are you still working for this guy?” It was clear to me that neither of the good Doctors was going to be able to change Trump’s determination to lead the country to ruin. I thought they could have both done a lot more good if they resigned; that might finally wake up Mitch McConnell to the fact that he needed to tell Trump in no uncertain terms that he wouldn’t have any more support in Congress if he didn’t turn the whole coronavirus response over to somebody competent. I still think that might have happened, but we’ll never know now.

On May 21, I asked the rhetorical question “Which poses the greater threat to the US: a) the novel coronavirus, or b) Dr. Susan Birx?” I reiterated her early “no shortage of ventilators” statement, as well as her teaming up with Jared Kushner to push the idea that testing was freely available. Now she seemed to be wholeheartedly joining in Trump’s campaign to convince the public that the real problem wasn’t the virus - it was that the CDC was grossly exaggerating its impact by inflating the number of deaths. In fact, this was the beginning of Trump’s efforts – largely successful – to neutralize the CDC’s previously sterling reputation in the eyes of Americans and the world. And she provided immense help to this effort. Thanks a lot, Dr. Birx!

The last time I mentioned her in a post before today was on September 29, when I discussed her active role in Trump’s campaign – also successful – to get the CDC to change its guidance for school reopening. I concluded by saying:

Dr. Birx was only partially successful in her effort to get the CDC to change their guidance. And of course Trump never had the power to push schools to reopen, since those decisions are controlled on the state and local level (I’ll discuss how badly that can go in another post soon). But I do believe Dr. Birx deserves a medal for valor in the federal War on Children.

She has been a disaster in the White House. The Times made it clear in a great article a couple months ago that, despite having no epidemiological background, she became convinced in April that the virus would disappear very soon. Soon, she was meeting daily with the Chief of Staff and provided the “science” that guided the Trump administration’s disastrous push to get states to reopen before they should have. I thought the best that could be said for her lately was that she had pretty much shut up for the last few months, but now it turns out she was actively working behind the scenes to make sure that the burden of the failed US response to the novel coronavirus was shared as equally as possible between children and adults. After all, kids have the right to endanger their and their families’ health, too - just like adults. 

So my advice to the Biden campaign is “Don’t waste another minute considering whether Susan Birx should be part of your team. Just be very thankful that she isn’t.”

I would love to hear any comments or questions you have on this post. Drop me an email at tom@tomalrich.com.

 

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