Deborah Birx thought about quitting the COVID-19 task force because the Trump administration would 'misrepresent reality,' but George W. Bush talked her out of it: book
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- Former President George W. Bush talked Dr. Deborah Birx out of quitting the COVID-19 task force.
- "I am not having the impact on the White House with the current pandemic that I would like," Birx told Bush.
- "You need to finish. You can never quit," Bush told Birx, according to her new book.
Dr. Deborah Birx thought about quitting her job as the White House COVID Task Force coordinator under President Donald Trump until former President George W. Bush talked her out of it, she revealed in her new tell-all memoir.
Birx, who's worked in public service for decades, went to meet with Bush at his Dallas home in September 2020 under the auspices that she wanted to talk about PEPFAR — the program started under Bush that she led to address the HIV/AIDS epidemic.
She told him the program was still running well despite the country's attention on the COVID-19 pandemic, and then shifted the conversation to her job on the task force — the real reason she wanted to meet with him.
"I am not having the impact on the White House with the current pandemic that I would like," Birx told Bush, according to her book. "I should focus on the other pandemic. I think I should return full time to my PEPFAR position at the State Department."
Bush understood what Birx meant, she wrote, and told her: "What you're saying is you want to quit."
At the time, the United States had still been reeling from the impact of the pandemic, and was on its way to surpass 200,000 COVID-19 deaths. "We were heading into the worst part of the COVID-19 pandemic," she wrote in her book.
Bush swiftly shut down the idea of her quitting.
"Nearly chuckling, he said, 'Well, you know you can't do that. I know you know that's right. You've got to do this. You need to finish. You can never quit,'" Birx wrote.
Birx credited Bush for her decision to stay in her role, writing: "Without being directly critical of the present administration, he let me know he understood what we were all up against. All the more reason to carry on."
The conversation comes in her new book, "Silent Invasion," which came out Tuesday. In it, Birx provides new insights on her experience on the COVID-19 task force, detailing the slew of hurdles and conflicts that plagued the Trump administration's response to the pandemic.
Then-Vice President Mike Pence appointed Birx as a coordinator on the task force in February 2020. Birx quickly became a household name as she updated Americans on the administration's pandemic response and advised them to take public health precautions to keep safe, all while trying to avoid contradicting Trump publicly. She spoke televised press briefings and often stood alongside Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nation's top infectious disease doctor.
Birx hit a breaking point in September 2020 — a month after the Trump administration brought on Dr. Scott Atlas to join the task force. Atlas had previously worked as a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, a conservative-leaning think tank based at Stanford University.
Birx writes in her book that she and Atlas aggressively clashed. Birx wanted strong mitigation measures that included testing, isolating, and masking, but Atlas wanted federal health officials to focus only on older, vulnerable adults and to worry less about younger people getting infected. He would also send unsolicited feedback to emails she sent the task force regarding COVID data.
Atlas was not an infectious disease expert but told Birx that his approach was what the president wanted over hers.
Still, Birx felt it was necessary to stay. In her book she writes how frequently her tenure was punctuated by disputes between scientists who wanted to focus on health and lives, versus economists who leaned more toward preserving livelihoods.
"When I thought about how much a new response coordinator, one aligned with President Trump on the most important issues, would risk American lives, the stakes for my quitting suddenly felt incredibly high," Birx wrote. "From where I sat, the picture was plain: if I left, more people would die—not because I was irreplaceable, but because the last two months had shown the willingness of the Trump administration to bend data to fit their desired ends, to misrepresent reality."
After Trump left office in January 2021, Birx revealed that she had considered quitting several times.
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