Dr. Deborah Birx may not have garnered the limelight that her public health colleague Dr. Anthony Fauci did during her stint as one of the faces of the Covid response in the Trump White House, but she quickly became a media darling as she turned on the previous administration in a desperate effort to rehabilitate her image.
It worked. Numerous major media organizations took her self-serving Trump-bait and ran with it. Dr. Birx was soon transformed from a timid bureaucrat unprepared for national leadership into an eminently competent public health official speaking to ‘her struggle to get through to an administration unprepared for the pandemic,’ according to CNN.
The former Covid response coordinator had come under intense criticism for not doing more to push back against the supposedly ‘political’ response from the Trump administration.
“Any other president would have wanted to know just how bad things were going to get and what could be done to prevent the worst case,” Birx wrote about her time on the Covid task force in early 2020. “Except, this wasn’t any other president or any other White House. This was President Trump and the Trump White House. I was standing on constantly shifting sand, among political players I didn’t know and a president who apparently liked his news served good and upbeat, or not at all.”
Dr. Birx even went so far as to claim the 2020 election campaign was ‘distracting’ the Trump administration from fighting Covid.
“I felt like the White House had gotten somewhat complacent through the campaign season,” said Deborah Birx. That is about as politically loaded a statement one could expect from a public health official. It is also highly suggestive of the frustration that she felt that more extreme measures were not being imposed on the American populace to purportedly thwart the virus.
Furthermore, according to the Washington Post, Birx was on a “quest to ensure that the White House’s pandemic response was grounded first and foremost in rigorous scientific data.” Well, about that.