Deborah Birx

1980 to 1994, Birx served as an active duty reserve officer in the United States Army.

1994 to 2008, Birx was active duty regular Army, achieving the rank of Colonel.

1980 to 1989, Birx worked as a physician at the Walter Reed Army Medical Center.

February 27, 2020

Ambassador Birx is a world-renowned global health official and physician. She will be detailed to the Office of the Vice President and will report to Vice President Mike Pence. She will also join the Task Force led by Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar. She will be supported by the National Security Council staff. Dr. Birx serves as the U.S. government’s leader for combatting HIV/AIDS globally and will continue to oversee this critical work through her able Deputy Angeli Achrekar, while bringing her interagency expertise and coordination that brought ground-breaking progress to the global HIV/AIDS pandemic to the Coronavirus response in the White House.

Ambassador Birx is a scientist, physician, and mom, with three decades of public health expertise, including virulent diseases, their vaccines, and interagency coordination. She has been utilizing the best science to change the course of the HIV pandemic and bring the pandemic under control, community by community and country by country.

Her focus over three decades has been on HIV/AIDS immunology, vaccine research, and global health. She has developed and patented vaccines, including leading one of the most influential HIV vaccine trials in history. Three different Administrations across both political parties have relied on her knowledge and judgement. Ambassador Birx has previously coordinated the Army, Navy, and Air Force in their HIV/AIDS efforts and led the CDC’s Division of Global HIV/AIDS, Center for Global Health, and their global implementation of the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief program.

She has deep experience in coordinating across agencies. She has worked from the research bench to the clinic, but understands the primary focus must always be to reach the individuals most in need. She will bring her infectious disease, immunologic, vaccine research and interagency coordinating capacity to this position. ¹⁾

SCIENCE - 14 Oct 2020 By Charles Piller

Deborah Birx, President Donald Trump's COVID-19 coordinator, helped shake the foundation of a premier public health agency.

On the morning of 13 July, more than 20 COVID-19 experts from across the U.S. government assembled in a conference room at the Department of Health and Human Services, steps from the Capitol. The group conferred on how best to gather key data on available beds and supplies of medicine and protective gear from thousands of hospitals. Around the table, masks concealed their expressions, but with COVID-19 cases surging out of control in some parts of the country, their grave mood was unmistakable, say two people who were in the room.

Irum Zaidi, a top aide to White House Coronavirus Task Force Coordinator Deborah Birx, chaired the meeting. Zaidi lifted her mask slightly to be heard and delivered a fait accompli: Birx, who was not present, had pulled the plug on the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's (CDC's) system for collecting hospital data and turned much of the responsibility over to a private contractor, Pittsburgh-based TeleTracking Technologies Inc., a hospital data management company. The reason: CDC had not met Birx's demand that hospitals report 100% of their COVID-19 data every day.

According to two officials in the meeting, one CDC staffer left and immediately began to sob, saying, “I refuse to do this. I cannot work with people like this. It is so toxic.” That person soon resigned from the pandemic data team, sources say.

Other CDC staffers considered the decision arbitrary and destructive. “Anyone who knows the data supply chain in the U.S. knows [getting all the data daily] is impossible” during a pandemic, says one high-level expert at CDC. And they considered Birx's imperative unnecessary because staffers with decades of experience could confidently estimate missing numbers from partial data.

“Why are they not listening to us?” a CDC official at the meeting recalls thinking. Several CDC staffers predicted the new data system would fail, with ominous implications. “Birx has been on a monthslong rampage against our data,” one texted to a colleague shortly afterward. “Good f—ing luck getting the hospitals to clean up their data and update daily.”

The interviews and documents obtained by Science show Birx replaced a functional, if imperfect, CDC data system—well understood by hospitals and state health departments—with an error-ridden and unreliable filter on hospital needs that sometimes displays nonsensical data, such as negative numbers of beds. Such problems could hamper effective distribution of federal resources during an anticipated fall and winter spike in COVID-19 and flu cases, CDC officials say.

“This is the surreal part of it: They are attempting to replicate something we built over 15 years. And they are failing,” says a high-level CDC official with personal knowledge of the system. “Either Birx isn't looking at the data, or she's looking away—because it's an absolute disaster.” ²⁾

NBC News

Trump calls Birx's COVID-19 warnings pathetic — but the real test is what she does next -

Doctors like Fauci and Birx find themselves in an unenviable position, as do so many employed by the Trump administration. But given our national crisis, there is little room for excuses.

Yet, when Birx finally countered some of Trump's conspiracy theories and half-truths this month, she predictably found herself in his crosshairs.

She stated the obvious last week, describing infections as “extraordinarily widespread”throughout the nation. This irked Trump, who accused Birx of taking “the bait” from Pelosi and attacking the administration's response.

(tweet) So Crazy Nancy Pelosi said horrible things about Dr. Deborah Birx, going after her because she was too positive on the very good job we are doing on combatting the China Virus, including Vaccines & Therapeutics. In order to counter Nancy, Deborah took the bait & hit us. Pathetic! — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 3, 2020

Birx, a colonel in the Army who serves at the pleasure of the president, highlights the metamorphosis that seemingly competent and objective individuals undergo inside Trump's White House. As David Smith wrote in the Guardian, “Like other White House officials before her, she is said to be sacrificing a hard-won professional reputation at the altar of Trump's vanity.”

Now, as America enters a new, critical coronavirus phase, Birx finds herself at a fork in the pandemic road. Will she continue to walk the line between truth and the politicized “truth” Trump desires to hear? Or will she opt to clearly put her medical oath over job security?

August would be an ideal time for Birx to grow a spine. With the protracted first wave of the virus inching closer to the dreaded fall and with schools now reopening, the country remains all but rudderless in its response to the coronavirus pandemic. After the federal government abdicated its role to helm a coordinated response, 50 states scrambled to cobble together 50 different plans. ³⁾

Dr Deborah Birx: White House virus expert quits over holiday travel

BBC News - December 20, 2020

A top public health official on the White House coronavirus task force has said she will retire after it emerged she hosted a holiday gathering. Dr Deborah Birx, who is 64, cited the criticism she has faced for a family get-together over Thanksgiving in Delaware in her decision to step aside.

“This experience has been a bit overwhelming,” she said. “It's been very difficult on my family.”

Dr Birx had reportedly been seeking a job from US President-elect Joe Biden.

A world-renowned Aids researcher, she has worked in the US government since the Reagan administration.

In an interview with US news network Newsy aired on Tuesday, a masked Dr Birx did not specify when she would stand down, but said she would help the incoming Biden administration and “and then I will retire”.

She had urged Americans in the days before Thanksgiving to restrict gatherings to “your immediate household”.

But it emerged on Sunday she had travelled from Washington to one of her other properties, on Fenwick Island in Delaware, where she was joined by three generations of her family from two households.

While in Delaware, she did an interview with CBS in which she noted that some Americans had “made mistakes” over Thanksgiving by travelling and they “should assume they were infected”.

The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, whose director has often joined Dr Birx on the podium during briefings, has warned Americans not to travel over the holidays.

As the US coronavirus caseload surges, the agency has also cautioned against indoor gatherings with people from different households.

Dr Birx had insisted she went to the property in Delaware to prepare it for a potential sale, though she acknowledged sharing a meal with her family during the visit. ⁴⁾

The Talented Mr. Pottinger: The US Intelligence Agent Who Pushed Lockdowns

Brownstone By Michael Senger July 20, 2022

I barely knew who Matt Pottinger was until I read that he’d appointed Deborah Birx as White House Coronavirus Response Coordinator in her bizarrely self-incriminating memoir Silent Invasion. There’s little information about Pottinger’s role in Covid online.

Yet Pottinger is portrayed as a leading protagonist in three different pro-lockdown books on America’s response to Covid-19: The Plague Year by the New Yorker’s Lawrence Wright, Nightmare Scenario by the Washington Post’s Yasmeen Abutaleb, and Chaos Under Heaven by the Washington Post’s Josh Rogin. Pottinger’s singularly outsized role in pushing for alarm, shutdowns, mandates, and science from China in the early months of Covid is extremely well-documented.

Pottinger’s enormous influence during Covid is especially surprising not only because of his absence from online discussion about these events, but because of who he is.

The son of leading Department of Justice official Stanley Pottinger, Matt Pottinger graduated with a degree in Chinese studies in 1998 before going to work as a journalist in China for seven years, where he reported on topics including the original SARS. In 2005, Pottinger unexpectedly left journalism and obtained an age waiver to join the US Marine Corps.

Over several tours in Iraq and Afghanistan, Pottinger became a decorated intelligence officer and met General Michael Flynn, who later appointed him to the National Security Council (NSC). Pottinger was originally in line to be China Director, but Flynn gave him the more senior job of Asia Director.

2020

1. Ratcheting Up Alarm via “Asymptomatic Spread”

In January 2020, Pottinger unilaterally called meetings and ratcheted up alarm about the new coronavirus in the White House based on information from his own sources in China, despite having no official intelligence to back up his alarmism, breaching protocol on several occasions.

In Washington, Matt Pottinger was first made aware of the new coronavirus after China’s CDC Director called US CDC Director Robert Redfield to report it on January 3, 2020. According to Pottinger, he grew increasingly alarmed due to the rumors he saw on Chinese social media ⁵⁾