White House coronavirus response coordinator Dr. Deborah Birx says she plans to retire in response to the “overwhelming” experience of being caught violating her own holiday travel guidelines.
In an interview with Newsy, Birx, who had previously sought to remain on the coronavirus task force in the incoming Biden administration (assuming Congress confirms Joe Biden’s election), said she would do what she could to help the next president and then retire.
“I want the Biden administration to be successful,” said Birx, who has worked for the federal government since 1980.
“I will be helpful in any role that people think I can be helpful in, and then I will retire,” she added.
In a November 20 appearance on CNN’s New Day, Birx urged Americans not to gather with people outside their immediate households for Thanksgiving.
“I don’t like it to be any number,” she said. “Because you know, if you say it can be 10, and it’s eight people from four different families, then that probably is not the same degree of safe as 10 people from your immediate household.”
However, the Associated Press reported Sunday, “The day after Thanksgiving, she traveled to one of her vacation properties on Fenwick Island in Delaware. She was accompanied by three generations of her family from two households.”
While in Delaware, Birx appeared on CBS’ Face the Nation and chastised Americans who had failed to heed her advice.
“We know people have made mistakes over the Thanksgiving time period,” she said. Some people “went across the country or even into the next state.”
“If your family traveled, you have to assume that you are exposed and you became infected,” she declared, adding that “you need to avoid anyone in your family with comorbidities or over 65.”
Birx and her husband also own houses in Washington, D.C., and Potomac, Maryland. According to the AP, the Potomac house is “where her elderly parents, and her daughter and family live, and where Birx visits intermittently. In addition, the children’s other grandmother, who is 77, also regularly travels to the Potomac house and returns to her 92-year-old husband near Baltimore.”
News of Birx’s Thanksgiving trip was leaked by Kathleen Flynn, whose brother is married to Birx’s daughter. Flynn told the AP “she brought forward information about Birx’s situation out of concern for her own parents, and acknowledged family friction over the matter.”
“She cavalierly violated her own guidance,” Flynn said of Birx.
In a statement to the AP, Birx tried to justify her apparent disregard for her own advice by saying her roughly 50-hour visit to Delaware was not “for the purpose of celebrating Thanksgiving” but for winterizing the property ahead of a potential sale. She also said her family ate together during that time.
Birx’s opinion appears to be that getting together with family members from multiple households for Thanksgiving dinner is a dangerous, coronavirus-spreading event, but gathering with family members from multiple households the very next day to winterize a house and share a meal is not.
“We need leadership to be setting an example, especially in terms of things they are asking average Americans to do who are far less privileged than they are,” global health specialist Dr. Abraar Karan told the AP. And what could be more privileged than working at the highest levels of the U.S. government for decades and owning at least three homes in some of the most expensive parts of the country?
But poor, downtrodden Dr. Birx apparently can’t take criticism nearly as well as she can dish it out, and so she’s retiring — with, one can be certain, a very comfortable pension.
“I think what was done in the past week to my family — you know, they didn’t choose this for me. They’ve tried to be supportive, but to drag my family into this,” Birx told Newsy.
“My daughter hasn’t left that house in 10 months. My parents have been isolated for 10 months. They’ve become deeply depressed as I’m sure many elderly have as they’ve not been able to see their sons, their granddaughters,” she said. “My parents have not been able to see their surviving son for over a year. These are all very difficult things.”
Indeed they are. Yet while Birx expects her fellow Americans to continue to live as hermits despite the damage it is doing their families — all in an effort to stamp out a virus with a survival rate of well over 99 percent — she made an exception for her own family.
Hypocrisy, thy name is COVID commandants.
