How Did Deborah Birx Get the Job?

THIS ARTICLE IS PART OF A SERIES, FROM THE BROWNSTONE INCIDENT, WHICH PRESENT A THEORY AS TO WHY THE PANDEMIC WAS HANDLED THE WAY IT WAS.

I WILL POST ONE ARTICLE A DAY FOR THE NEXT FEW DAYS.

Reading Deborah Birx’s badly written, poorly edited The Silent Invasion, published at the end of April 2022, is not easy. In fact, it’s mind-numbingly tedious, especially if you try to read every word and not skim over the myriad digressions, repetitions, and multi-paged meanderings.

Nevertheless, according to The Atlantic, it is “the most revealing pandemic book yet,” detailing how “Trump’s team botched the pandemic.”

I agree that this 521-page “excruciating story” (as The New York Times calls it) is indeed revealing. However, it has little to do with Trump or what The Atlantic might consider pandemic botching. 

The most revealing parts of the book are: 

1) the claims about Birx herself that, upon close inspection, make little sense, contain strange inconsistencies, or contradict other claims made in the book and elsewhere; and 

2) the absurd claims about epidemiology and public health generally, and SARS-CoV-2 specifically, endlessly repeated by Birx as scientific truths when in fact they are anything but. 

Investigating these claims is important because they touch on crucial pandemic questions: Who made the terrible pandemic policy decisions and, perhaps most mysteriously and importantly, why?

Here I investigate the obfuscation surrounding  Deborah Birx’s appointment as White House Coronavirus Response Coordinator, and then the garbage science she so forcefully pushed once she got there.

How did she get the job?

I have not interviewed Dr. Birx in person, but I have read her book, as well as articles about her and interviews with her. Based on all of these, I put together a Q&A in which the questions are mine, and the answers are verbatim quotes from The Silent Invasion, as well as Dr. Birx’s testimony before the Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Crisis in the US House of Representatives on October 12, 2021, and other interviews. 

Page numbers from the book and line numbers from the hearing transcript are in parentheses. Links to other articles and interviews are also included.

Q: Dr. Birx, you were officially hired as White House Coronavirus Response Coordinator on February 27, 2020. Who offered you the job?

A: My friend Matt [Pottinger], the deputy national security advisor (p. 32)

In the Congressional hearing on October 12, 2021, you said you did not know why Matt Pottinger was the one to approach you for this job (lines 1505-1507). It does seem odd that Matt would be in charge of appointing a pandemic response coordinator, since public health and epidemiology were not at all part of his experience. As Lawrence Wright reports in The New Yorker in December 2020, “in a very noisy Administration, he had quietly become one of the most influential people shaping American foreign policy.” So why did he hire you again?

I’ve known him through his wife. I really knew his wife. I worked with her at the CDC. (lines 1507-1509)

Matt’s wife, Yen Pottinger, is a friend of yours?

A former colleague at the CDC and a trusted friend and neighbor (p. 32)

So Matt Pottinger was not really a friend, it was his wife you were friends with? 

I had known Matt through her eyes for the last three or four years. (lines 1526-1529)

What did you say in your Face the Nation interview on January 24, 2021 about your relationship with Matt and Yen Pottinger?

I’ve known him and I’ve known his wife for a very long time. We’ve worked on pandemics together. Both of us were in Asia during SARS. And so we understood how serious this can go 

Follow-up questions:

• Matt and Yen married in 2014. Did you know Matt before that? 

[ANSWER NOT FOUND]

• When you say you’ve worked on pandemics together, you do not mean you and Matt Pottinger. You mean you and Yen Pottinger worked on AIDS research at the CDC at some point while you were there, between 2007 and 2014. Correct?

Yes

• As far as you and Matt, when you say both of you were in Asia during SARS – you mean back in 2002-2003, you were in Thailand doing research on an AIDS vaccine that never came to fruition, and Matt was a reporter for Reuters and the Wall Street Journal in China?

Yes [ref ref]

You were Yen Pottinger’s boss at the CDC when you worked at the Division of Global HIV/AIDS, a position you left in 2014. What can you tell us about your friendship with Yen from the time you left that job until Matt offered you the Covid Task Force position?

In our three years working together at the CDC, I had marveled at her abilities in the lab. (p. 32)

As early as mid-January, Yen and I had been in communication about the outbreak in China. As events unfolded, we shared whatever insights, information, and anxiety we had. (p. 32)

GO READ THE WHOLE THING.