Birx's Story.

• Author: Henderson, David R.
• Position: Deborah Birx

Silent Invasion: The Untold Story of the Trump Administration, Covid-19, and Preventing the Next Pandemic Before It's Too Late

By Dr. Deborah Birx 506 pp.; Harper, 2022

From March 2020 to January 2021, Dr. Deborah Birx was the coordinator of the White House Coronavirus Task Force. Many of us got to know her because of her regular appearances on TV in the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic. Now she has written a long book, Silent Invasion, on her experiences in that job. She gives her views on appropriate pandemic policy and on the various players in the White House.

The book's subtitle is overly long, and so is the book. We learn over and over her view, which she seemed to have expressed almost daily at White House meetings, that the key to reining in the pandemic was social distancing, testing, masking, limiting the size of indoor gatherings, and--occasionally--lockdowns.

Unfortunately, given the book's length, she doesn't give strong evidence for her views. And at times she reveals herself to have a strange view of "proof." Also, the evidence against the efficacy of masks--evidence that surfaced well before she finished her book--would cause one to hope that she would address this matter. (See "How Effective Are Cloth Face Masks?" Winter 2021-2022.) But she does not; her support for masking is as strong as it was in 2020.

There are other examples of sloppy thinking. Although Birx claims that she carefully looked at the COVID numbers virtually daily, she fails at times to make important distinctions such as the difference between the infection fatality rate and the case fatality rate. She doesn't address the famous Great Barrington Declaration (GBD), which advocated focusing government attention on high-risk populations while leaving much of the rest of society to function unrestrained, though at one point in the book she seems to endorse that idea.

After reading the book, I give Birx credit on three policy issues: First, she is fairly critical of how the Centers for Disease Control substantially slowed the development of COVID tests and gives the private sector kudos for how quickly it reacted. Second, she shows a real understanding of how the absence of property rights for tribal nations badly hurts the people who live there. Third, although she--like me--favors people receiving the COVID vaccines, she wisely points out that they are not a silver bullet for ending the pandemic.

Questionable choice I One question Birx addresses early in the book is how she got such an important job. She wasn't an obvious choice to head the U.S. COVID response; when she received the offer, she was in Africa as the U.S. Global AIDS coordinator for the President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief. There's not a close connection between AIDS and how it spreads and SARS-CoV-2 (the technical name for the coronavirus) and how it spreads. A key factor in her getting the job was her friendship with Matt Pottinger, a former journalist and Marine who was the deputy national security adviser. In her telling, Pottinger seemed to be very high on Birx's abilities. But she doesn't tell the reader what expertise Pottinger had that would have enabled him to make a good choice for such an important position.

And there are reasons to question her judgment on scientific and policy matters. Start with her concept of "proof." In comparing her and her assistant, Tyler Ann McGuffee, not getting infected in the White...