Silent Invasion [electronic resource] : The Untold Story of the Trump Administration, Covid-19, and Preventing the Next Pandemic Before It's Too Late

Cover image for Silent Invasion [electronic resource] : The Untold Story of the Trump Administration, Covid-19, and Preventing the Next Pandemic Before It's Too Late

Title:

Author:

Birx, Deborah.

Description:

-- The Atlantic Silent Invasionreally up against in the Trump White House. Digging into the hard-fought victories, the costly mistakes, and the human drama surrounding the administration’s efforts, she examines the forces that crippled efforts to control the virus and explores why these blunders continue to haunt us today.And yet amid the agonizing missteps were bright spots that point the way forward—the fastest vaccine creation in history, governors that put their citizens’ health first, and Tribal Nations that demonstrated the powerful role of community in curbing spread, despite their criminally underfunded healthcare systems. Collectively these successes reveal the valiant work of many who were committed to saving lives, as well as highlighting the dire need to reform our public health institutions, so they are nimble and resilient enough to confront the next pandemic.With the pandemic now moving into its third year confounding two presidential administrations, Dr. Birx presents a story at once urgent and frustratingly unfinished, as Covid-19 continues to put thousands of American lives at risk. The end result is the most comprehensive and extensive accounting to date of the Trump Administration’s struggle to control the biggest health crisis in generations—a revelatory look at how we can learn from our mistakes and prevent this from happening again.

Publisher:

HarperCollins,

Date:

2022

Digital Format:

CLOUDLIBRARY EPUB

Language:

English

Summary

"The most revealing pandemic book yet."--The Atlantic

The definitive, inside account of the Trump Administration's response to the Covid-19 pandemic from White House Coronavirus Response Coordinator and Coronavirus Task Force member, Dr. Deborah Birx.

In late February 2020, Dr. Deborah Birx--a lifelong federal health official who had worked at the CDC, the State Department, and the US Army across multiple presidential administrations--was asked to join the Trump White House Coronavirus Task Force and assist the already faltering federal response to the Covid-19 pandemic. For weeks, she'd been raising the alarm behind the scenes about what she saw happening in public--from the apparent lack of urgency at the White House to the routine downplaying of the risks to Americans. Once in the White House, she was tasked with helping fix the broken federal approach and making President Trump see the danger this virus posed to all of us.

Silent Invasion is the story of what she witnessed and lived for the next year--an eye-opening, inside account, detailed here for the first time, of the Trump Administration's response to the greatest public health crisis in modern times. Regarded with suspicion in the West Wing from day one, Dr. Birx goes beyond the media speculation and political maneuvering to show what she was really up against in the Trump White House. Digging into the hard-fought victories, the costly mistakes, and the human drama surrounding the administration's efforts, she examines the forces that crippled efforts to control the virus and explores why these blunders continue to haunt us today.

And yet amid the agonizing missteps were bright spots that point the way forward--the fastest vaccine creation in history, governors that put their citizens' health first, and Tribal Nations that demonstrated the powerful role of community in curbing spread, despite their criminally underfunded healthcare systems. Collectively these successes reveal the valiant work of many who were committed to saving lives, as well as highlighting the dire need to reform our public health institutions, so they are nimble and resilient enough to confront the next pandemic.

With the pandemic now moving into its third year confounding two presidential administrations, Dr. Birx presents a story at once urgent and frustratingly unfinished, as Covid-19 continues to put thousands of American lives at risk. The end result is the most comprehensive and extensive accounting to date of the Trump Administration's struggle to control the biggest health crisis in generations--a revelatory look at how we can learn from our mistakes and prevent this from happening again.

Reviews (1)

Kirkus Review

The often silenced Trump Covid adviser has her say about the pandemic and its mismanagement. Birx, who regularly appeared before the microphones with Anthony Fauci before being sidelined, was brought into the battle against Covid-19 as a result of her successful, ongoing work battling AIDS in Africa. Interviewed for the new job, she found herself having to explain to a resistant Trump that the virus was not just a bad flu. "He holds up his hand," she writes. "He smiles that glib grimace of a smile. I stop speaking." The interview was symptomatic of her treatment thereafter, her messaging often at odds with Trump's, Mark Meadows', and other White House figures'. She found a sympathetic, behind-the-curtain ally in Jared Kushner as well as unnamed members of the presidential communications staff, who found ways for her to get the word out. Yet her foes in the administration--particularly right-wing doctor Scott Atlas, "the worst purveyor of misinformation"--contradicted or stifled her warnings that masks, isolation, and mass vaccinations were needed, and she blames many of the hundreds of thousands of subsequent deaths on those insiders. Much of the narrative offers lessons for fighting the next pandemic, and there her writing can be--well, clinical. Still, her arguments are sound: Health agencies must be better coordinated, the CDC should be decentralized and its workers placed in underserved regions, and a single strong message about the risks and dangers of any given illness needs to be sent out. Readers will come to her book, though, not for her epidemiological prescriptions but instead for her anecdotes of battles against recalcitrant political appointees and assorted yes men as epitomized by Meadows, the object of an uncharacteristically sharp outburst from Birx: "This is the kind of unbelievable level of fuck-up that ends up killing people. We can't keep doing this!" Yet keep doing it they did, and the death toll mounted. A frontline view of a bungled battle against a lethal pandemic. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.