She describes her first meeting with Trump, on March 2, 2020, when she tried to explain to him that the virus “is not the flu.” Trump listened for a minute, briefly challenged her, then literally changed the channel on one of the TV screens he had simultaneously been watching.īirx didn’t stand up to Trump in public while she worked for him. A career public-health worker and career Army officer (on active duty from 1980 until 2008), Birx refuses to sum up her views of Trump personally, but she offers more than enough detail for readers, including historians, to reach their own conclusions. She does not, however, neglect the central character in Washington. She later drove around the country and talked with governors and other local leaders, and has a real basis for comparing their performance. But Birx was in the building, watching everything unfold, and she can and does shine light on details that others can’t. Perhaps that’s why so much coverage focused single-mindedly on Trump, the loudest and most shocking voice, while largely neglecting the rest of the team. More than a year has passed since the former administration left office, but the inner workings of its response to the pandemic have still remained out of view. Other pandemic-book writers have been forced to speculate about what happened outside of Trump’s immediate environment. In between, alternately bolstering and disappointing her, are her longtime colleagues Anthony Fauci and CDC Director Robert Redfield. Birx also praises her friend Matt Pottinger, who served as a deputy national security adviser, along with governors including Doug Burgum of North Dakota and Doug Ducey of Arizona. Pence never seemed publicly at variance with Trump, and Kushner has been widely criticized for inept logistical efforts, but Birx offers a few convincing examples of moments when they worked to quietly facilitate some positive actions. She portrays Vice President Mike Pence and presidential son-in-law Jared Kushner as often aiding work that Trump loudly derided. The forces for good, in her view, include some surprises. Birx is forthright in calling out numerous examples of her sexist treatment by other White House staffers, especially Meadows and Short. Also: Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar, the entrenched and inflexible staff of the CDC, the out-of-its-depth staff of the Council of Economic Advisers, the politically wobbly World Health Organization, Governor Kristi Noem of South Dakota, and Governor Ron DeSantis of Florida, who, Birx indicates, knew better but caved to political pressure. Other lead villains include presidential Chief of Staff Mark Meadows (who seems to care only about politics) and vice-presidential Chief of Staff Marc Short (who seems to care only about protecting his boss from his boss). Atlas, she writes, repeatedly responded to group emails from her by hitting “Reply All” and then removing her from the list before sending. The worst is Scott Atlas, the radiologist whose epidemiology advice Trump came to take. In the early crucial weeks of the crisis, she writes, “some roaming the halls of the West Wing believed that the less we did, the less we would be held accountable for whatever was about to happen.”īirx has her own list of bad guys. The book’s first 150 pages, on the period from January through March 2020, are especially riveting. Where other chroniclers describe the White House as if it had just one occupant, Birx gives us the full cast. Birx paints a portrait of an administration in full, made up of people with a mix of talents and motivations. She does so with much more detail and nuance than we’ve had from anyone else. Birx also cites the CDC’s consistent failure to develop good data about the pandemic, and places this at the center of reforms she proposes toward the book’s end.īut what sets Silent Invasion apart is how Birx, with the writing assistance of Gary Brozek, unhesitatingly names names (and dates and places). She laments testing problems, including initial refusals to enlist the private sector, mistakes at the CDC, and later failures to ramp up diagnostics. She repeatedly emphasizes what she identifies as the principal fault in the Trump administration’s pandemic response: a failure to recognize the importance of asymptomatic transmission (thus the book’s title). Birx does a very good job of distilling what went wrong.
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