May 29th 2020

By Bill Berkowitz 

While Dr. Anthony Fauci, Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, gets raked over the coals by President Donald Trump and his colleagues at the Fox News Channel for speaking his mind and citing evidence-based science discussing the coronavirus pandemic, Dr. Deborah Birx, Fauci’s colleague and coordinator of the White House Coronavirus Task Force, gets a pass from these attacks as she holds back from calling out Trump for even his most foolish and reckless statements. 

Case in point: When during a recent press conference, Trump suggested that it “would be interesting to check” if perhaps the injection of disinfectant might serve as “a cleaning.” Birx, took to the microphone immediately after Trump’s statement, and “pointedly avoided saying that Trump’s comments were not just ignorant but actively dangerous, especially if anyone was considering drinking disinfectant,” The Atlantic magazine’s James Fallows noted.    

Axios’ Jonathan Swan pointed out that Birx is “better than any of the other public health officials at talking to Trump. While MAGA-land has spent weeks trying to get Anthony Fauci fired, Birx has been far more adept at influencing the president and shaping the administration's response to the global coronavirus pandemic.”

Swan added: “The media is clearly enamored with Fauci, but Dr. Birx is significantly more influential in the West Wing,” one senior White House official told Axios. “It’s influence not just because she’s an operator — she’s also a workhorse. She’s the person building the models and poring over the data every night to brief POTUS and the task force.”

In late March, in a column headlined “Has Deborah Birx Crossed the Line?”, Tim Murphy, contributing editor of The Body Pro -- a publication geared toward HIV issues -- posed two important questions: 

“Just how far can a respected scientific expert go in playing along with an egotistical, science-flouting president, in the broader name of the public good?” 

and, 

“What was the moment that might have permanently undermined the long and distinguished career of Deborah Birx, M.D., the coordinator of the U.S. global AIDS efforts who has suddenly turned into the response coordinator for the White House coronavirus task force?”

Murphy cites numerous statements from interviews with Birx that demonstrate her ultra-fealty to the president – a fealty that undermines her credibility and integrity. 

An interview with Christian Broadcasting Network on March 25, seems to sum up her relationship to both Trump and truthfulness. Birx said: “[Trump is] so attentive to the scientific literature and the details and the data. I think his ability to analyze and integrate data that comes out of his long history in business has really been a real benefit.”

Murphy writes that his questions, referring specifically to Birx, are being “asked with particular keenness by HIV/AIDS activists both in the U.S. and Africa who have known and respected Birx for years. Many now have mixed feelings about how far the legendarily pragmatic, diplomatic doctor will go to ‘stay in the room’ alongside a president whose pronouncements on COVID—such as saying he wanted the U.S. economy up and running again by Easter—have been widely denounced as a danger to public health (the administration conceded this point and extended the social distancing guidelines until then end of April.).”

Birx’s unwillingness to stand up to the president, or to at least tone down her effusive praise, is confusing at best to the many people that have worked with her over the years and think quite highly of her. 

“As far as I’m concerned, she’s been the best PEPFAR director we’ve had,” said Rev. Charles King, the CEO and cofounder of the New York City HIV services organization Housing Works. King was one among many “HIV experts globally who together urged the Trump administration, when it came into power, not to fire Birx from the position as part of a general house-cleaning.”

Murphy assesses the differences between Drs. Birx and Fauci: “Birx and Fauci are playing different roles and have different statuses. Although he technically serves at the pleasure of the president, Fauci, who is nearly 80, enjoys a certain degree of autonomy as the nation’s leading epidemics expert, built up over six presidential administrations dating back to [Ronald] Reagan. This gives him slightly more leeway to, say, put his palm over his face behind Trump when Trump invokes ‘the Deep State Department,’ or, more importantly, to correct or contradict Trump’s underestimation of the scale of COVID—or Trump’s overestimation of possible treatments such as chloroquine plus azithromycin, in the absence of clinical data.

“Birx, who is 64, is not as well known or trusted by the general public. And while Fauci’s job is to ‘be the expert,’ which gives him that leeway to correct the president, Birx’s job is to coordinate the White House response—to somehow be the fixer between Trump’s desires and pronouncements and the medical truth on the ground—which is arguably tougher than Fauci’s.“

And what of the role of “fixer” in the maelstrom and devastation wrought by the corona virus pandemic? The New Yorker’s Emily Nussbaum recently tweeted: “Dr. Birx is going to leave a horrible legacy. It's one thing to be a cynical paid fixer. It's worse, in my eyes, to be the expert who props up the mad king. I get that it's an emergency and I understand the theoretical strategy she may think she's pursuing, but it's a moral horror.”