by Hal Brown, MSW
It has just been revealed that Dr. Deborah Birx told the White House that the Coronavirus surge was fading, and boy, was she about as wrong as she could be.
I never completely trusted her. She seemed to be in awe of being on the podium with Donald Trump. It is difficult for me to think that her judgment was swayed by her desire to please the president. I live in a world where everyone I associate with looks at the president as sees him as a self-aggrandizing blowhard. As a man I’ve tried not over-interpret the demeanor to Birx when she appeared alongside the president but my female friends have said she looked like she was smitten by him.
As a therapist who worked with numerous bright women over my 40 year career who were attracted to and sometimes married emotionally abusive narcissistic men I should know that smart women can be very dumb in this one area. The largest percentage of women who came for help at our clinic were trying to either extricate themselves from bad relationships and learn what it was in themselves that attracted them to men who initially treated them with loving respect but ended up revealing their dark side once they’d trapped them into a relationship.
In an article on Saturday (Inside Trump’s Failure: The Rush to Abandon Leadership Role on the Virus) this is how the NY Times described the role of Dr. Birx in early April:
For scientific affirmation, they turned to Dr. Deborah L. Birx, the sole public health professional in the Meadows group. A highly regarded infectious diseases expert, she was a constant source of upbeat news for the president and his aides, walking the halls with charts emphasizing that outbreaks were gradually easing. The country, she insisted, was likely to resemble Italy, where virus cases declined steadily from frightening heights.
On April 11, she told the coronavirus task force in the Situation Room that the nation was in good shape.
This is someone who, one would think, ought to know better. Consider her official State Department resume.
Here’s an excerpt from The New York Times:
Mr. Trump had missed or dismissed mounting signals of the impending crisis in the early months of the year. Now, interviews with more than two dozen officials inside the administration and in the states, and a review of emails and documents, reveal previously unreported details about how the White House put the nation on its current course during a fateful period this spring.
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Key elements of the administration’s strategy were formulated out of sight in Mr. Meadows’s daily meetings, by aides who for the most part had no experience with public health emergencies and were taking their cues from the president. Officials in the West Wing saw the better-known White House coronavirus task force as dysfunctional, came to view Dr. Fauci as a purveyor of dire warnings but no solutions and blamed officials from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention for mishandling the early stages of the virus.
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Dr. Birx was more central than publicly known to the judgment inside the West Wing that the virus was on a downward path. Colleagues described her as dedicated to public health and working herself to exhaustion to get the data right, but her model-based assessment nonetheless failed to account for a vital variable: how Mr. Trump’s rush to urge a return to normal would help undercut the social distancing and other measures that were holding down the numbers.
Now think about this:
Then there was Dr. Birx, the response coordinator of the coronavirus task force. Unlike Dr. Fauci, who only stopped by the White House to attend meetings, she was given an office near the Situation Room and freely roamed the West Wing, fully embracing her role as a member of the president’s team.
What is this apparent power Trump has over intelligent people so he is able to turn them into sycophants who develop blind spots in their ability to think critically? How do they succumb to Trump’s own confirmation bias. This is the tendency to search for, interpret, favor, and recall information that confirms or supports one's prior beliefs or values, an important type of cognitive bias that has a significant effect on the proper functioning of society by distorting evidence-based decision-making. Wikipedia.
I don’t have answers to these questions. If I could ask Mary Trump to explain one thing this is what I would ask her.
Monday, Jul 20, 2020 · 6:32:41 PM +00:00 · HalBrown
From my favorite columnist Heather “Digby” Parton:
Donald Trump's virus-whisperer: The tragic downfall of Dr. Deborah Birx
It turns out that many of the most important decisions that were made during that period weren't done by the official task force headed by Vice President Mike Pence, but by another shadowy group that met every weekday morning in White House chief of staff Mark Meadows' office. (Remember, Jared Kushner was also running his own task force on a secret, separate track.)
This one was single-mindedly dedicated to producing evidence to back up the White House decision to open up the economy, come what may. Dr. Birx was their validator, the only public health official among the group of political hands, and the Times describes her as "the chief evangelist in the West Wing for the idea that infections had peaked and the virus was fading quick.
Birx relied on an optimistic model that depended on everyone doing everything exactly right, while Fauci had a more realistic view of probable human behavior and listened to reports on the ground as well as the statistical data. As things got worse, Birx's rosy scenarios were chosen over Fauci's darker predictions. Trump didn't want to hear bad news and Birx was there to give him what he needed.
She still is. Apparently, she remains the go-to for the White House communications team whenever they need some damage control.
When Birx first came on the scene at the beginning of the pandemic, I wrote about the fact that she was part of a Christian right public health subculture (yes, that actually exists) that surrounds Mike Pence's office. I don't think I expected that she'd be willing to sacrifice her reputation as a serious infectious disease expert for the thrill of being on Trump's "team." Apparently she has.