by The US response to the pandemic has already led to a series of rapidly published books. A few notable examples come from masters of journalistic storytelling, including Michael Lewis and Lawrence Wright; former officials, such as Scott Gottlieb and Andy Slavitt; and journalists, especially Yasmeen Abutaleb and Damian Paletta. But the most important entry to date, the book that should be an indispensable resource for future historians, is: silent invasion by Deborah Birx, the coordinator of the White House Coronavirus Task Force under President Donald Trump.
Birx’s book has received relatively little attention in the two weeks since it was published – it has still not been reviewed by The Washington Post or the Los Angeles Times, for example, or caused almost as much chatter as Mark Esper’s less sweeping memoirs also just released. Much of the attention that has been given to Birx has focused not on the contents of the book, but rather on Birx herself, who served on the task force during her nearly…one year tenure. That’s a shame, because the book is the best account we have yet of how Trump’s team screwed up the pandemic response so badly.
Birx distils very well what went wrong. She repeatedly emphasizes what she identifies as the main flaw in the Trump administration’s pandemic response: failure to recognize the importance of asymptomatic transmission (hence the book’s title). She complains of testing problems, including initial refusals to engage the private sector, errors at the CDC, and subsequent failures to ramp up diagnostics. Birx also cites the CDC’s consistent failure to develop good data on the pandemic, placing it at the center of the reforms she proposes toward the end of the book.
But which sets? silent invasion What is unusual is how Birx, with the writing help of Gary Brozek, mentions names (and dates and places) without hesitation. She does that with much more detail and nuance than we’ve had from anyone else. Birx sketches an integral portrait of a board consisting of people with a mix of talents and motivations. Where other chroniclers describe the White House as if it had only one occupant, Birx gives us the full cast. The first 150 pages of the book, covering the period from January to March 2020, are especially compelling. In the first pivotal weeks of the crisis, she writes, “some who wandered the corridors of the West Wing believed that the less we did, the less we would be held accountable for whatever happened.”
Birx has her own list of bad guys. The worst is Scott Atlas, the radiologist whose epidemiological advice Trump came to follow. Atlas, she writes, repeatedly responded to group emails from her by clicking “Reply All” and then removing her from the list before being sent. Other main villains include Presidential Chief of Staff Mark Meadows (who only seems to care about politics) and Vice Presidential Chief of Staff Marc Short (who only seems to care to protect his boss from to be boss). Also: Secretary of Health and Human Services, Alex Azar, the entrenched and inflexible staff of the CDC, the unfathomable staff of the Council of Economic Advisers, the politically shaky World Health Organization, Governor Kristi Noem of South Dakota, and Governor Ron DeSantis of Florida, who, Birx points out, knew better, but gave in to political pressure. Birx is candid in citing numerous examples of her sexist treatment by other White House staffers, most notably Meadows and Short.
The forces for good contain some surprises, she says. She portrays Vice President Mike Pence and presidential son-in-law Jared Kushner as often helpful in the work that Trump loudly mocked. Pence has never appeared publicly in conflict with Trump, and Kushner has been widely criticized for inept logistical efforts, but Birx offers a few compelling examples of times when they quietly enabled some positive action. Birx also commends her friend Matt Pottinger, who served as deputy national security adviser along with governors including Doug Burgum of North Dakota and Doug Ducey of Arizona. In between, alternately strengthening and disappointing her, are her longtime colleagues Anthony Fauci and CDC director Robert Redfield.
Other pandemic book writers have been forced to speculate about what happened outside of Trump’s immediate environment. More than a year has passed since the former government left office, but the inner workings of its response to the pandemic are still out of the picture. Perhaps that’s why so much coverage was deliberately focused on Trump, the loudest and most shocking voice, while largely neglecting the rest of the team. But Birx was in the building watching it all unfold, and she can and will shine light on details that others can’t. She later drove across the country speaking to governors and other local leaders, and has a real basis for comparing their achievements.
However, she does not neglect the main character in Washington. Birx, a career health officer and career army officer (on active duty from 1980 to 2008), declines to summarize her views on Trump personally, but she provides more than enough detail for readers, historians included, to draw their own conclusions. Pull. She describes her first meeting with Trump on March 2, 2020, when she tried to explain to him that the virus “isn’t the flu”. Trump listened, briefly challenged her, then literally switched channels on one of the TV screens he’d been watching at the same time.
Birx did not publicly stand up to Trump while she worked for him. In the book, she laments her most public mistake: when Trump appeared to advocate the use of disinfectant in a live-broadcast briefing, uttering weakly and quietly, “Not as a treatment.” She should have been more forceful, she writes, “should have ignored my deep-seated, military-honed instinct to not publicly correct a multiple.”
Birx’s refusal to publicly oppose Trump while in the White House continues to haunt her reputation. Her subsequent interviews, like her book, were revealing, but they were also often criticized as too little, too late. This criticism has some merit. Some cynics may think she wrote her book to cover up the record. I’m more likely to believe she stays motivated by her own sense of duty, and want the rest of us to see what she saw.
The book makes a compelling case that much of the blame being placed on Birx for the pandemic shortcomings of the Trump era is oversimplification, or worse. Birx describes how she and other officials tried privately to counter Trump’s opposition to the fight against the pandemic. In August 2020, Birx writes, Trump hanged her when she refused to come back after he insisted that “the virus is under control.” She is remarkably candid about how she and her colleagues manipulated Trump into the first 15-day shutdown in March, then the 30-day extension, which he almost immediately regretted. (Neither Trump nor anyone in his camp appear to have publicly commented on Birx’s book.)
Birx portrays himself as a skilled bureaucratic fighter. For example, when Pence’s chief of staff told her that the stark bulleted language at the top of a daily report was too politically explosive, she simply inserted nearly identical language further into the document, where the busy politicians trying to stifle her don’t see it. She’s the kind of person who still considers it a victory if her initiatives are publicly refuted, but actually remain unchanged.
But Birx seems to have been head over heels in the toxic office politics of the Trump White House. For example, she speculates extensively in the book about which of her rivals tried to undermine her by releasing a memo she wrote warning of the wave of late 2020 on the eve of the presidential election. In this case, it seems likely that Mark Meadows was right: As Birx writes in the book, he told her the leak was intended to affect the election, not her career.
Birx had felt much more comfortable working for President George W. Bush, who, she writes, “created a space where people could succeed, supported us to make the impossible possible. The Trump White House was the complete opposite in many ways.” When Birx felt particularly annoyed by Trump, Bush convinced her not to resign.
Deborah Birx could not bring order to the chaos of the Trump White House, or reason or compassion for the management of the pandemic. The resulting losses were enormous.
But none of that takes away from what silent invasion has to offer. Birx has given us an important account of how and why all those losses were incurred. With COVID cases on the rise again, her reflections can be put to significant use both as yesterday’s history is being written and today’s history is unfolding.
