But SHE was a major part of the problem
By Kenny Stancil, staff writer
for Common
Dreams
After Former White House coronavirus
response coordinator Dr. Deborah Birx said this weekend that hundreds of
thousands of Covid-19 deaths in the United States could have been avoided had
the previous administration responded more quickly and purposefully, Democratic
Rep. Ted Lieu of California slammed the official for enabling former President
Donald Trump's "malicious incompetence."Birx with her famous scarves covered for Trump's disasterous
pandemic policies that, by her own admission, caused 400,000+
unnecessary deaths
During an interview featured in
a CNN documentary titled Covid War: The Pandemic
Doctors Speak Out, which aired Sunday, CNN chief medical
correspondent Sanjay Gupta asked Birx to describe "how much of an
impact" she thinks it would have made had public authorities taken earlier
and more decisive action to mitigate the spread of the virus.
"I look at it this way: The
first time, we have an excuse. There were about 100,000 deaths that came from
that original surge," Birx told Gupta. "All of the rest of them, in
my mind, could have been mitigated or decreased substantially."
The national Covid-19 death toll is
approaching 550,000, which means that, if Birx's assessment of the country's
pandemic response is correct, more than 400,000 Americans died—and millions of
loved ones suffered—unnecessarily as a result of political negligence. One
journalist called the admission "utterly
devastating."
Birx's acknowledgement that coronavirus cases, hospitalizations, and deaths in the United States could have been significantly lower provoked a sharp rebuke from Lieu, who criticized the former White House official for not publicly objecting to Trump's lethal mishandling of the pandemic.
"The malicious incompetence
that resulted in hundreds of thousands of unnecessary deaths starts at the top,
with the former President and his enablers," Lieu said in a tweet.
"And who was one of his enablers? Dr. Birx, who was afraid to challenge
his unscientific rhetoric and wrongfully praised him."
As the Washington Post reported Saturday, "Last March,
Birx praised Trump for being 'so attentive
to the scientific literature and the details and the data' with regards to the
outbreak."
In addition, the newspaper noted,
"Birx had presented overly optimistic data several times," and she
"also sat quietly at a news conference last April when Trump pondered
whether people could be injected with disinfectant to 'knock out' the
coronavirus."
In a Dissent article
published earlier this month, historian Colin Gordon acknowledged that "the Trump
administration's response to the Covid-19 pandemic set new standards for
incompetence, defiance of basic science and public health precautions, and
petty politicization of the smallest policy details."
Nevertheless, Gordon added,
"the administration's failures marked a difference in degree, not in kind.
Deep inequities in health provision, underinvestment in public health, and
indifference to the punishing inequality hardwired into our economy and our social
policies all preceded Trump and—without bold action—will certainly outlast
him."
"An important part of this
longer history," Gordon wrote, "is federalism: the abdication of
national responsibility for basic social policy standards to state governments."
As Common Dreams reported earlier this month, a new
peer-reviewed study shows that as 2020 progressed, Covid-19 incidence and death
rates became higher in states led by Republican governors—an outcome the
researchers attribute to diverging approaches to public health policies
that affected the spread of the virus.
"Republican governors... were
slower to adopt stay-at-home orders, if they did so at all," while
"Democratic governors had longer durations of stay-at-home orders,"
the researchers wrote. In addition, they pointed out that having a Democratic
governor was "the most important predictor of state mandates to wear face
masks."
As Gordon noted, "deference to state governments—many without the capacity or the willingness to make meaningful investments in public goods and services—also has significant effects on the broader social determinants of health."