All well and good for Dr. Deborah Birx to tell us now that Donald Trump’s White House had “gotten somewhat complacent” in 2020 – as the pandemic went from bad to worse. That had the Trump administration not been so “distracted,” more than 130,000 lives could have been saved.
So testified Birx two weeks ago before a House subcommittee. But where was the good doctor when we most needed her? Needed her as the White House Coronavirus Response Coordinator under Trump to speak the truth as she saw it? Surely, she understood then as she does now that he could easily have done a few simple things to lessen the impact of the pandemic. But while Birx served under Trump, she remained mute, certainly in public. She did not share with the American people what she really thought.
During her time in the White House Dr. Birx was an enabler. Enablers are subordinates who allow or even encourage their superiors to engage in, and then to persist in behaviors that are destructive. As I wrote in my recent book, The Enablers, they are accomplices. Superiors cannot go wrong or do wrong without the support, active or passive, of some of their subordinates.
Dr. Birx was not alone in her enablement. Donald Trump has had enablers lifelong, especially during his political career. It’s that the year 2020 was no exception. While the plague raged, Trump benefited from others being complicit, including medical professionals in addition to Birx; elected officials; cabinet members; White House aides; media luminaries; and family members.
But physicians going along to get along is especially disturbing and disheartening. Not that this is new. History has taught us that medical professionals are not immune to the attractions of power. Still, because history repeats itself costs were incurred. Dr. Birx herself testified that tens of thousands of lives were lost to the coronavirus because Trump was “complacent.” What she did not say was that it would have been impossible for the president to do what he did – and to not do what he did not – without support from some in the medical establishment.
The president was aided and abetted by physicians in addition to Birx, including, for example, Dr. Robert Redfield, who between 2018 and 2021 was Director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Redfield was meek and mild while Trump tinkered and tampered with his agency, precluding it from performing optimally during a national health crisis. Even the highly praised and widely admired Dr. Anthony Fauci, Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, shares blame. Though as time went on, he spoke out more, invariably he did so carefully and cautiously, presumably at the time to protect his relationship with the president.
To be fair, physicians such as Birx, Redfield, and Fauci were in a difficult position. On the one hand, they were professionally obliged to do no harm. But, on the other hand, they were saddled with a superior who was interested not in the public welfare but in his own.
What should they have done, these presumably well-intentioned medical professionals in government service? They should have spoken up and spoken out. Done so loudly and clearly then and there, ideally early on and in tandem, as one. Never should they have been compliant for so long. Never should Dr. Deborah Birx have sat in near silence as President Donald Trump suggested to her at a White House coronavirus task force press briefing in April 2020, “Supposing we hit the body with a tremendous – whether its ultraviolet or just very powerful light – and I think you said that hasn’t been checked but you’re going to test it…. Sounds interesting. And then I see the disinfectant where it knocks it out in a minute. One minute. And is there a way we can do something like that, by injection inside or almost a cleaning?”
The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars/But in ourselves, that we are underlings. Nowhere was it written that President Donald Trump’s enablers were destined to do what they did. They could have done differently, decided not to enable, decided not to be, because they did not have to be, underlings. In which case the American experience of the pandemic – and everything that was subsequent – would have been different. For history is made not by institutions, but by individuals. This includes Birx and numberless others too timid or craven to speak truth to power.