Top critical review
3.0 out of 5 starsHonest information repeated three times
Reviewed in the United States on August 4, 2022
On the positive side, the book is an honest account of what happened and pulls no punches about who was helpful in fighting the pandemic and who was not. It has good information in it. The first 1/4 of the book moves along nicely. After you get about 2/3 of the way through the book, it becomes very redundant. At the end, the book becomes very prescriptive in an overly optimistic way. The last 50 pages are a real slog to finish.
To a mild extent, the book is an attempt to prop up Birx's reputation by letting the reader discover things that were never public. It is a bit self serving in that respect, but not terribly so and she is honest about her shortcomings. (If you read Esper's book about being defense secretary, it is full of self serving, reputation salvaging material.)
Where the book fails badly is in its editing. Are there no more editors on the planet? Birx repeats herself over and over and over. In some cases, it is almost a cut and paste repeat of something from an earlier chapter. Here’s the book in a nutshell – you need to do four things in a pandemic: test, mask up, avoid indoor crowds and get vaccinated when it becomes available. I swear she repeats this 30 times. About 30% of the entire book is redundantly redundant.
Birx is a data driven scientist. She reiterates that ad nauseam. That is why she failed. She wants everyone to be as receptive to data as she is. They are not, especially the politicians she worked with. She isn't exactly naive, but she got recruited into an lying, image-centered administration where she did not have the bare knuckle skills to compete. She talks about being assertive in her international work and how assertive women as seen as bitchy compared to men. As true as that may be, it falls flat in her narrative. As a military person used to obeying orders, she could never bring herself to stand up and shout out to the American people, "These folks are lying to you and killing you." They were. She did what she could within the ever tighter bounds the Trump administration placed around her. Like so many others, she stayed on because she felt quitting would have made things worse. B.S. The whole reason the Trump administration was such a disaster was precisely because people did not leave and go public with what they knew. Birx's good intentions only paved the proverbial road to hell which Trump led the country down. What really strikes home is her observation that what Trump said in public was absolutely inconsistent with the positive actions he let others in the administration take to fight the pandemic. His lies to present a favorable political image killed people all the while his government was trying to save them. Knowing that gnaws at your soul.
I have worked with scientists and I know what the stereotype is like. Birx fits it well. So much so that she could be cast as the scientist in a futuristic calamity movie who keeps trying to warn the government about an impending disaster only to be constantly ignored. Her experience is life imitating fiction. Within 50 pages you know what is going to happen to her. Why she couldn't figure that out sooner is sad.
A parting word ... once you get halfway through the book are will find yourself increasingly inclined to put it down and go on to something else. You won’t miss much if you do, although you should read about her fight with Scott Atlas – the guy who pushed herd immunity. That has some spark.