‘It’s complicated’: Biden team weighs whether to retain Deborah Birx

President-elect Joe Biden’s transition team is weighing whether to give Trump administration coronavirus coordinator Deborah Birx a role in its Covid-19 response, even as it prepares a broader purge of officials closely tied to the president’s handling of the pandemic.

The debate over Birx’s future has vexed transition officials, with advocates for the longtime public health official arguing that her experience on the front lines of the pandemic could aid a Biden administration that will be thrust into the middle of a deepening crisis.

Yet others are far more skeptical, voicing worries that her nine months as coordinator for the Trump White House’s coronavirus task force have permanently eroded her credibility — and that keeping Birx on would jeopardize Biden’s plan for selling the American public on a full reset of the federal government’s pandemic response, according to interviews with Biden’s Covid-19 advisers and others involved in the transition.

“It’s complicated,” said Céline Gounder, who sits on Biden’s Covid-19 advisory board. “It’s almost like she herself has been politicized.”

The deliberations about Birx’s fate represent one of the few uncertainties for a Biden transition that has spent months planning a total overhaul of the government’s coronavirus efforts.

The incoming administration is expected to replace nearly all of President Donald Trump’s task force leadership, in what one transition official called a “house cleaning” aimed at signaling a clear break from a federal response under Trump it viewed as nothing short of disastrous.

Only top infectious disease expert Anthony Fauci is guaranteed to be part of Biden’s pandemic team, where he’ll likely take on an elevated role as one of the administration’s highest-profile messengers. And even among Birx’s most ardent defenders, there is acknowledgment that she cannot remain in any sort of prominent role responsible for guiding the crisis response.

Birx declined to comment, and the Biden transition team did not respond to a series of questions.

Yet unlike most of Trump’s top task force officials, Birx is not a Trump appointee — rather, she’s spent decades working in various parts of the federal public health bureaucracy, and more recently as ambassador-at-large and U.S. global AIDS coordinator under President Barack Obama.

She also still boasts support from public health experts inside and outside of government, including close ties to Fauci, a longtime friend and mentor.

In recent months, Birx has also distanced herself from the White House’s herd immunity-style approach to the virus, remaining closely involved in daily efforts to combat the pandemic even as her influence within the Oval Office waned, and warning state officials that the situation will only continue to deteriorate without stricter adherence to health measures like mask wearing.

Those efforts have won her goodwill among some Biden officials, who said Birx will be integral to the transition process when it begins and potentially beyond that — especially as the new administration races to absorb the vast amount of pandemic data central to her response work.

“Her understanding of the delivery system and what the resources are at state and local levels is probably really high right now,” said Eric Goosby, a member of Biden’s Covid-19 advisory board who counts Birx as a friend. “She would be critical in the transition and helpful afterwards.”

The 64-year-old Birx has forged relationships with governors and state health officials as well, making her a potentially valuable link for an administration that will depend heavily on the states to cooperate on major priorities — from imposing mask mandates to managing the distribution of an eventual vaccine.

Still, for a Biden team that won the White House partly on vows to change course from Trump’s coronavirus policies, all of Birx’s expertise and connections ultimately may not be enough to outweigh her association with the president.

For weeks early on in the pandemic, she accompanied Trump to White House press briefings, cementing herself as among the most prominent faces of the largely failed response, several people close to the Biden transition said.

Throughout that period, she often adopted the administration’s upbeat tone, even as it became clear that the virus was spreading out of control. And in an April episode often cited by critics as a death knell for her credibility, she waved off Trump’s suggestion that an “injection” of disinfectant into a person might deter Covid-19.

“When he gets new information, he likes to talk that through out loud and really have that dialogue — and so that’s what dialogue he was having,” Birx told Fox News afterward.

That defense sparked immediate blowback, and remains the turning point even for some of Birx’s associates who had initially hoped she would play an influential role in convincing Trump to ramp up the federal government’s response — and now question why she hasn’t quit in protest.

“Publicly, she too often looked like an apologist,” said Gregg Gonsalves, a public health professor at Yale who has worked with Birx on HIV/AIDS issues. “It doesn’t bode well for confidence as a public leader when nobody knows what you stand for.”

More recently, Birx faced sharp criticism from House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who at one point in late July privately told senior White House officials that the task force coordinator was “the worst” and lamented “what horrible hands” they were in. Pelosi later doubled down, saying publicly that she had no confidence in Birx.

Senior Democrats and people involved in the transition have also bristled at her treatment of the Centers for Disease Control, blaming her clashes with CDC officials over its Covid-19 data collection for contributing to the Trump administration’s sidelining of the agency and Americans’ declining trust in public health institutions.

In private, Birx has told friends that there’s little appreciation of the behind-the-scenes work that she’s done to build support for tougher measures, and expressed frustration over the direction of the federal response — especially as Trump has tuned out his health experts in favor of adviser Scott Atlas, people familiar with the conversations said.

Birx has increasingly banded together with other top health officials in task force meetings to push back on Atlas’ advocacy for easing public health restrictions, and embarked on a nationwide tour in October to urge state and local officials to increase testing and focus on limiting the virus’ spread.

But for many Democrats, that effort came too late. And with the incoming Biden administration already faced with the challenge of winning Americans’ trust in a federal response, they contend there’s little value in bringing on officials who might also have to answer for the prior administration’s decisions.

“I would be stunned if she continues,” said one person close to the transition. “She has been too close to Trump and not speaking up enough to correct facts.”

CLARIFICATION: This story has been updated to clarify Deborah Birx’s background as a federal health official.