- Health official Debbie Birx appointed as ‘coronavirus response coordinator’ under Vice-President Mike Pence
- Facing outbreak threat a month ago, US president said ‘we have it totally under control’. This week, under fire, he changed course
The new role will put Ambassador Debbie Birx, who has served since 2014 as the US government’s leader for combating HIV/Aids globally, at the centre of what now appears to be three leaders of the government response.
Trump revealed in a news conference on Wednesday evening that Pence would head up the administration’s management of the coronavirus, overseeing a task force nominally led by Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar. Birx will report to Pence but serve on the task force that Azar chairs.
Over three decades of public health experience, Birx “has been utilising the best science to change the course of the HIV pandemic and bring the pandemic under control”, the White House said in a statement, adding that she “will bring her infectious disease, immunologic, vaccine research and inter-agency coordinating capacity to this position”.
Speaking at the Conservative Political Action Conference on Thursday, Pence said “we are ready for anything” to fight coronavirus.
Trump faces ‘black swan’ threat to economy and re-election
“I promise you, this president, this administration, is going to work with leaders in both parties. We’ll work with leaders across this nation, at the state and local level. And this president will always put the health and safety of America first.”
Birx’s appointment marked the latest swerve by the White House in assigning responsibility to tackle the burgeoning public health crisis.
At the World Economic Forum in Davos last month, Trump said “we have it totally under control” and maintained “it’s going to be just fine”. The virus has since exploded globally from China to nearly 50 countries, with more worries emerging inside the US.
A week after Trump’s Davos comments, the White House announced a task force to handle the widening outbreak. A month later, Trump was forced to vastly upgrade the response when his bold predictions proved to be wrong.
Azar had reason to be confident: Trump had reassured him earlier in the day that he was doing a good job atop the task force and would not be replaced. And technically, he was not, even though he has lost ultimate authority over the federal response.
Azar insisted at Trump’s Wednesday news conference, however, that he would remain the chair of the White House task force, indicating Pence would play a supervisory role. That was before Thursday morning’s coronavirus “coordinator” announcement, which Trump hinted at the prior night.
At a congressional hearing on Thursday, Azar downplayed the significance of Pence’s appointment, calling it a “a lot of continuity” of the administration’s response to date.
“What the vice-president will do is actually a function very similar to what acting chief of staff Mick Mulvaney has been doing very ably for me,” he told the House Ways and Means Committee, describing the role largely as ensuring alignment across the government and coordinating decision-making outside the health care arena.
“The vice-president’s involvement and leadership across the whole of government brings just the weight of the office of the vice-president to that task.”
The administration’s disjointed messaging about the severity of the threat earlier this week frustrated even Republicans on Capitol Hill, especially after White House National Economic Director Larry Kudlow declared the containment effort as nearly “airtight” at nearly the same time CDC officials were warning of its “inevitable” spread.
An exasperated Senator John Kennedy aired his concerns directly to Trump on Tuesday, after the Louisiana Republican struggled to extract basic answers about the disease from acting Homeland Security Secretary Chad Wolf.
“We had one story from the classified briefing, we had another story from one Cabinet secretary, then we had another story from another Cabinet secretary,” said Kennedy, who on Thursday praised the decision to elevate Pence. “[Trump] said, I hear what you’re saying, I’m gonna get this straight.”
The announcement of Birx’s latest role within the administration came hours after news broke in California of the first potential case of coronavirus spreading within the US.
Congressman Eliot Engel, now the top Democrat on the House’s Foreign Affairs Committee, similarly lauded her as a “dedicated force in efforts to eliminate the global scourge of HIV/Aids”.
Yet despite her Obama-era appointment, Birx is a Republican and could be characterised as a conservative, one person who knows her said.
This person added that she’d be “good on camera” and has already worked closely with several of the administration’s current top public health officials – including Centres for Disease Control and Prevention director Robert Redfield, with whom she served as an Army doctor.
Most notably, this person said, she aided Redfield’s candidacy to become CDC chief in 2018, serving as a reference and advocating for him within the administration.
Source: SCMP
CHINDIA ALERT: You'll be living in their world, very soon 