The coronavirus crisis in the United States has reached staggering new heights. The country tallied more than 3,000 reported deaths on Wednesday alone, making it the single deadliest day of the pandemic in America so far. With the holiday season expected to bring an uptick in travel and family gatherings, and the already-negligent president now almost entirely preoccupied with his effort to overturn his election loss, things could soon get worse.
Joe Biden and Kamala Harris represent a new start. By bringing sidelined scientists and medical experts back to the foreground, and surrounding themselves with what appear to be competent officials—not just Jared Kushner or whoever—and by simply caring and recognizing that hospitals are straining and people are dying, the incoming leaders are promising a stronger, more robust effort to combat the pandemic, and a more orderly rollout of the vaccines that will help bring this crisis to a close. For some involved in the current government COVID efforts, the question is: Will there be any continuation between the two administrations’ teams?
Anthony Fauci, the trusted physician and public health expert, has been asked to stay on, remaining the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, as well as Biden’s top medical adviser. But for the two other top figures in the government’s COVID response, the future is a little less certain. Deborah Birx, coordinator of the White House coronavirus task force, is reportedly hoping to stay on in the Biden administration. Moncef Slaoui, head of Operation Warp Speed, said in the fall that he hopes to continue in his role until “things are rolling” with vaccines. But each comes with baggage that could weigh down their hopes of sticking around.
Before taking her current post, Birx—who has worked under every president since Reagan—would have seemed likely to continue in some role under Biden, especially as members of the president-elect’s orbit have praised her in the past. Birx “embodies the best of what it means to be a pioneer, to be a practitioner, and a public servant all rolled into one,” John Kerry, Biden’s climate envoy, said of her in 2014. But she’s squandered that goodwill over the past year as she appeared to go to great lengths to stay on Donald Trump’s good side, at the expense of her own reputation. Her nadir on the task force was perhaps in April, when Trump suggested during one of his rambling coronavirus press conferences that disinfectant and/or “very powerful light” could somehow be used to treat human beings infected with COVID. She appeared understandably uncomfortable in the briefing room as the president ranted. But asked about the astonishingly bizarre comments later on Fox News, she defended him: “When he gets new information, he likes to talk that through out loud and really have that dialogue, and so that’s what dialogue I think he was having,” Birx said. “I think he just saw the information at the same time immediately before the press conference and he was still digesting that information.”
It’s hard to trust a public health expert who is willing to justify a suggestion that injecting bleach might be a good way to knock out a virus, and that credibility gap could make it hard for the incoming administration to keep her around—even in a diminished role. “Publicly, she too often looked like an apologist,” Gregg Gonsalves, a public health professor at Yale who has worked with Birx, told Politico in November. “It doesn’t bode well for confidence as a public leader when nobody knows what you stand for.” Birx has been more outspoken in recent weeks, warning about the dangers facing the country as infections spike and condemning the “myths” leaders have promoted about the virus that everyday Americans are “parroting” back. Still, it may not be enough to remove the blemish of the Trump administration from her. As AIDS Healthcare Foundation head Michael Weinstein told the AP, “History will have to judge whether they enabled the president by giving him credibility based on their expertise or whether she and the others did more in helping prevent more people from being hurt by the craziness.”
Slaoui’s status is perhaps more complicated. Unlike Birx, the vaccine chief does not appear to be seeking a longterm role in Biden’s government, and with the emergence of vaccines in the U.S. imminent—Pfizer’s shot is set to be approved by the Food and Drug Administration this week, possibly as early as Thursday—some believe it would make sense to keep continuity at Operation Warp Speed for the coming rollout. But the former pharmaceutical executive has been blasted by watchdogs and Democrats over conflicts of interest; Elizabeth Warren, for one has called for his termination. Moreover, Biden was critical of Operation Warp Speed as a candidate, condemning Trump’s vaccine efforts as lacking in “sound leadership, global vision, or a strategy for securing the necessary funding to see this mission through or secure trust from Americans who depend on its success.”