During an appearance at Plymouth State University last week, Deborah Birx heaped praise on students. “We’re winning right now on these university campuses because of the students,” a masked Birx told a socially distanced crowd. “The students have altered their behavior, and that gives me tremendous hope. These students can show us the way because they have been very cautious.”
That’s the kind of backslapping message that Birx, the coronavirus-response coordinator for the White House Coronavirus Task Force, has been delivering on campuses all over the country since late June. As of last week, Birx had visited 27 colleges and traveled more than 15,000 miles in rental cars (she reportedly shares driving duties with a colleague). She has inspected numerous laboratories, fielded questions from anxious professors, quizzed administrators about their pandemic plans, and recited the same advice about the importance of masks, distancing, and regular testing.
She has also doled out compliments. Lots of them. Birx told those gathered at Virginia Tech that “the university has done an excellent job.” While visiting the University of Mississippi, she said it was clear that administrators had “put the health of the student first, the health of the community first.” At Clemson, she touted the “outstanding efforts” administrators have made to “open the university and to keep it open.” Clemson has had serious challenges in those efforts, with more than 4,000 students testing positive since June.
She may have also gone slightly over the top during a visit to Texas A&M’s campus last month when she said that the university had some of the “lowest infection rates the nation has seen.” As The Houston Chronicle pointed out at the time, Texas A&M’s positivity rate hovered around 10 percent for most of September (according to the university’s Covid-19 dashboard, that number is now just under 4 percent). It’s a rate that, if anything, is on the high side.
So why would Birx decide to go on a college tour in the midst of a pandemic? Ideally, that question would be put to Birx herself, but requests via the White House to interview her have gone unanswered. One reason for the trip may be, as she’s noted in her remarks at colleges, that she believes it’s necessary to see firsthand how different communities are handling the disease. In that sense, it’s not unlike how, in her role as the United States’s global AIDS coordinator, she traveled throughout Africa. Another reason may be that she seemed to fall out of favor with President Trump over the summer as he turned to advisers with a more laissez-faire approach to the virus.
When she visited Auburn, she was asked about reports that her role at the White House had been “diminished” and that she was unhappy with the direction of the task force. She brushed off that characterization. “Do I look like a person that is diminished?” she replied. “I’ll tell you that is the first time those adjectives have ever been used describing my behavior.” She generally sidesteps other Trump-related questions too. “I’m not going to second guess what the president has done and not done,” she told an audience at the University of Kentucky.
Before her speech at Plymouth State last week, Birx was introduced by the university’s president, Donald Birx, who also happens to be her older brother. He said he’s always asking his sister for advice, including how much Clorox to inject. “Just a joke there,” he said. You can’t tell from the recording whether she laughed or grimaced at the reference to a now-infamous press conference during which Trump suggested injecting cleaning solutions and using “light inside the body.”
In her speech, Birx commended universities like Plymouth State that chose to hold in-person classes, and took a not-so-subtle dig at those who went the more cautious, online-only route. “Not many universities believed in their students enough to open their doors,” she said. “It shows that you believed that students would modify their behavior, and we’re learning that students do. We’re hoping that other universities that were completely online will welcome their students to in-person learning.”
During the Q&A session, a student brought up what he called “speakeasy parties” that Plymouth State students are, he said, secretly holding in basements. “We’ve got to work on that,” Birx told him, and encouraged the student and others to anonymously turn in those who might be flouting the rules. At the time of Birx’s speech, Plymouth State, which has roughly 4,000 undergraduates, had only a few active coronavirus cases.
Birx also made it clear that she believes that progress on vaccines will mean that the spring semester for colleges will be very different from the fall. She thinks that faculty and staff members may be able to get inoculated before the end of January, which is why she is encouraging colleges to delay the beginning of their semesters until then. That is a more optimistic timeline than has been offered by some other experts.
In an interview, Donald Birx said he has closely followed his sister’s advice and will continue to do so. Over the summer, when the idea of resuming fall classes seemed fraught if not foolish, Donald said he reached out to her for reassurance. “I said to her, ‘Can we really do this?’ And she said, ‘Yes. So long as you follow the procedures and policies,’” he recalled. He asked her specific questions, too, like whether it was OK to follow the World Health Organization’s one-meter (about three feet) distancing protocol rather than ensuring six feet of separation in classrooms. She told him that was fine.
Donald said it’s been “surreal” watching his sister go from a widely respected, if not widely known, government official to a household name. It’s been “hard to watch” when she’s been on the receiving end of vigorous, sometimes personal criticism, he adds. “I think she went into it with an open mind and felt she could help people because of her background,” he said of her decision to join the task force. “And she knew what would probably happen at the end of the election cycle.”
In her speech at Plymouth, Birx herself alluded to the hit her reputation has taken, and to the fact that the harsh spotlight she’s been under in recent months might spell the end of a decades-long stint in public service. “When you work on a pandemic in a presidential-election year,” she told the audience, “you know it’s a terminal event in your government career.”