The fates of the two most prominent public health officials during the early days of the pandemic have diverged wildly in the early Biden administration, with Dr. Anthony Fauci more ubiquitous than ever but Dr. Deborah Birx effectively ostracized.
Fauci, the government’s top infectious disease expert, is now the chief medical adviser to President Biden and is more prominent on television than ever. In just the past week, he’s appeared on Face the Nation and Today to air his thoughts on the coronavirus.
After having his public speaking roles sharply limited by the Trump administration, the 80-year-old National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases director has made it clear that he relishes the freedom to speak under Biden.
“The idea that you can get up here and talk about what you know, what the evidence, what the science is, and know that’s it, let the science speak. It is somewhat of a liberating feeling,” Fauci said at the second press briefing in the Biden administration.
Fauci gained a favorable reputation among Democrats for “not sugar-coating things.” He became the enemy of Democrats’ enemy when former President Donald Trump openly campaigned against him.
Fauci’s willingness to acknowledge vaccine distribution hiccups, failed testing rollouts, and other obstacles before the Trump administration infuriated the president. On the other hand, he remained popular throughout much of 2020 among all voters. Morning Consult found in October 2020 that 79% of Democrats believed Fauci has done a good or excellent job handling the pandemic, compared with 56% of independents and 54% of Republicans.
Fauci’s stint in the Trump White House attracted the ire of Republicans in Congress and conservative voters. In a July Senate hearing, Rand Paul, a conservative Republican from Kentucky, attacked Fauci’s credibility after he praised the COVID-19 response efforts deployed in New York, the original virus epicenter in the United States.
“For you to say NY got it done correctly disregards the facts & calls your judgement into question,” Paul said.
Fauci has said he and his family were frequently harassed and even received death threats.
Fauci has also been criticized for his early blunders in the coronavirus response. On March 8, Fauci said, “There’s no reason to be walking around with a mask.” In late January, Fauci said, “An epidemic is not driven by asymptomatic carriers.” The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention now says that asymptomatic spread is a main driver of infections.
Since joining the Biden administration’s COVID-19 response team, Fauci has spoken candidly about Trump, former Vice President Mike Pence, and others in the president’s inner circle who toed the line when it came to White House messaging to downplay the pandemic.
Fauci told the Atlantic that Trump “surrounded himself with strange people” and that he was “not interested in the outbreak.” Fauci added that the pandemic to him “was an inconvenient truth that he didn’t accept as a truth. It’s something that got in the way of what he really wanted to do.”
Another foil to Fauci and Birx was Dr. Scott Atlas, a conservative radiologist without training in epidemiology. Trump made him a pandemic adviser in August 2020 after Atlas’s flurry of TV media appearances.
“[Atlas] didn’t undermine me because I didn’t give a s— about him,” Fauci said about Atlas. “I didn’t really care what he said.”
Fauci also weighed in on Pence’s appointment as head of the coronavirus task force early on, telling the New York Times that the task force started out with “the standard kind of scientifically based, public health-based meetings.”
“Then, I started getting anxious that this was not going in the right direction — the anecdotally driven situations, the minimization, the president surrounding himself with people saying things that didn’t make any scientific sense,” Fauci added.
Meanwhile, Fauci and Birx enjoyed a solid professional relationship. They have worked together on government efforts to eradicate HIV/AIDS for more than 37 years. He also came to her defense in speaking with the Atlantic.
“[Atlas] was a complete foil to poor Debbie Birx. I felt so bad for her because he completely undermined her,” Fauci said.
Birx, an early member of the White House Coronavirus Task Force when the pandemic began, has been shut out from the White House. She was criticized by Democrats as bowing to pressure from Trump to keep pandemic progress reports upbeat.
Birx said on Sunday that her efforts to warn the public were repeatedly stifled and that she lacked control over the flow of information to Trump.
“I saw the president presenting graphs that I never made,” Birx said. “Someone out there or someone inside was creating a parallel set of data and graphics that were shown to the president. I don’t know to this day who.”
Birx took a measured approach to her position on the task force and often resisted openly disagreeing with Trump. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said in August that she had lost all confidence in Birx, arguing that she was too accommodating to Trump’s pattern of pushing misinformation about the pandemic.
“I understand obviously wanting to highlight what’s working well,” Jennifer Nuzzo, a senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, told the New York Times. “I also think that failing to be frank about the shortcomings of the response undermines governmental credibility, and governmental credibility is so critical in getting people to take this threat seriously.”
Birx announced earlier this week that she will retire “probably within the next four to six weeks from CDC.”
Her standing with the public plummeted after a report that she celebrated Thanksgiving in a Delaware beach town with three generations of her family from two households. Only days prior, Birx had warned the public to avoid holiday gatherings, especially with older family members, and to limit celebrations to “your immediate household.” Birx was accused of hypocrisy for gathering with family.
“To me, this disqualifies her from any future government health position,” Dr. Angela Rasmussen, a virologist at the Georgetown Center for Global Health Science and Security, told the Associated Press. “It’s a terrible message for someone in public health to be sending to the American people.”
Birx responded to the report by saying that she “did not go to Delaware for the purpose of celebrating Thanksgiving” but rather to take the two-day visit as a trip to prepare her Delaware property for sale.
Birx could not be reached for comment.
