The inside story of how Trump's COVID-19 coordinator undermined the world's top health agency

[douglas9]

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.”

https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/10/inside-story-how-trumps-covid-19-coordinator-undermined-cdc

[madaboutharry]

1. We all have known a Birx type in the workplace.

They are the people who destroy morale, drive resignations, and collect ass kissers. They are the reason for mission failure due to their lack of leadership skills. They make unilateral decisions simply because they can and refuse to correct course even when it is evident that what they are doing isn’t working.

[The Genealogist]

2. So true

In the organization I work in, there is an office that seems to set up its system for the purpose of sabotaging the employees, then its leaders fly off the handle when mistakes happen. The turnover in the toxic environment of that department is ridiculous.

[hlthe2b]

3. Yup... The defense of Birx by a handful is "professional courtesy."

But the truth of how she has been perceived--especially within CDC and NIH--and among the HIV-AIDS research community worldwide-- for DECADES is quite different.

There must be a good word to describe people like this--those whose technical skills and professional objectives are subsumed by their overwhelming addiction to power and self-aggrandizing. I can think of several that just don't quite capture her and I'm surely not going to resort to any gender-based ad hominem. But, she has betrayed her profession, her colleagues, and the entire public health of millions of Americans, thus endangering people worldwide. But. she survives and even thrives--the vile creature that she has become.