The Trump administration’s abysmal handling of America’s worst public health crisis in a century was the result of a refusal to accept the reality of that crisis — a refusal that started at the top. That’s the judgment of Dr. Deborah Birx, Trump’s former Coronavirus Response Task Force coordinator. In a new book, she describes decisions being made for political rather than medical reasons, bureaucratic morass that stifled data-gathering, and a president who didn’t want to hear bad news.
These important revelations, however, come from a problematic messenger. Birx seldom if ever publicly pushed back against or corrected Trump’s myriad assaults on the truth in those early days of the pandemic. Some of Birx’s media interviews — one, for example, lauding Trump as someone who is “so attentive to the scientific literature and the details and the data” regarding the pandemic — were transparently false and cringe-worthy sycophancy.
Early reporting about the book, “Silent Invasion: The Untold Story of the Trump Administration, COVID-19, and Preventing the Next Pandemic Before It’s Too Late,” indicates it does in fact offer some useful insight about what was happening behind the scenes as the pandemic unfolded starting in early 2020. She writes that dire predictions from her and other experts about just how serious the pandemic could ultimately be were met with resistance by Trump, who didn’t want to hear about anything that could ruin the strong economy.
