‘The harm was irrevocable’: Megan Ranney on Deborah Birx’s revelations about White House COVID-19 response
“Accepting a job working for Donald Trump was her first and worst mistake.”
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Dr. Deborah Birx was among several top doctors from the Trump administration interviewed in a tell-all documentary special aired by CNN on Sunday that leveled criticism of the government’s response to the coronavirus pandemic last year.
Birx, who served as White House coronavirus coordinator, told the network that most of the COVID-19 deaths in the United States after the first 100,000 during the spring surge could have been prevented with a more vigorous response.
Some in public health are expressing criticism of the segment, stressing that it appears the former Trump administration officials are focused on managing — or salvaging — their legacies, according to the Washington Post.
“Level of revisionist history going on tonight on CNN is stunning,” wrote Dr. Ashish Jha, dean of the Brown University School for Public Health.
Level of revisionist history going on tonight on CNN is stunning
Especially from Giroir — who spent all last spring saying we had plenty of testing, which was plainly untrue
Now he says system was unprepared?
May be level with the American people last year when it mattered? https://t.co/bYnwMryAoC
— Ashish K. Jha, MD, MPH (@ashishkjha) March 29, 2021
Reacting to the segment, Dr. Megan Ranney, an emergency room physician and director of the Brown Lifespan Center for Digital Health, wrote in an op-ed for CNN that before the coronavirus pandemic, Birx was “known as a consummate scientist and public health professional.”
Ranney presented her case for “what went wrong” for the top doctor and her role in the nation’s response to the pandemic.
“Accepting a job working for Donald Trump was her first and worst mistake,” the emergency room physician wrote. “She, like many of us, had no idea how badly his administration would distort, ignore and deny science and the truth during the pandemic.”
As a result, Birx has become “inextricably” tied to Trump and his COVID-19 response, Ranney wrote. The doctor’s next error was allowing the administration’s “lies to go unchecked.”
“For months as the calamity worsened, she let Trump’s lies go unchecked on the public stage,” Ranney wrote. “The harm was irrevocable.”
The emergency room physician wrote that “at the end of the day,” she feels sad for Birx.
“Birx’s mistakes were complicated by something that wasn’t her fault at all, and something I know all too well: She was a woman in a male-centered world,” Ranney wrote. “We know that the Trump White House had a reputation for being particularly toxic for women. As a female physician-scientist myself, I am familiar with implicit and explicit misogyny and the big and small ways in which it changes one’s decisions.”
The doctor said she takes the expert’s downfall as a warning, that the methods of surviving such spaces can turn into weaknesses.
“Like many of us she might have gotten so used to accepting the small slights that she may not have seen the bigger warning signs until she was in too deep,” she wrote.
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