Every day, when the White House coronavirus response coordinator takes the podium, she delivers another story designed to keep Americans washing their hands and maintaining their distance from each other.
At times, it has included her millennial daughters or young grandchildren.
Wednesday, her story centered on the moral of Dr. Deborah Birx’s own grandmother’s heart-wrenching story and a plea not to be the person who introduces the virus to a vulnerable person.
Her grandmother Leah lived with a lifetime of guilt after bringing flu home from school, she said. Leah’s mother was one of the estimated 50 million people who died in the 1918 Spanish flu epidemic.
“She never forgot that she was the child who was in school who innocently brought that flu home shortly after her mother delivered,” said Birx, 63. “My grandmother lived with that for 88 years … this is not a theoretical. This is a reality.”
Her fans say one of her core skills is this ability to weave personal narrative into complex political and medical questions honed during a career fighting HIV and AIDS that required her to be as comfortable talking to African patients as heads of state.
Chris Rosica, a crisis communications expert, said storytelling made people tune in, remember the message, and, most importantly, share it. Birx, he said, had a powerful ability to connect with her audience.
“When it comes to storytelling, personal stories are often the most effective ways to communicate,” he said. “They not only suck people in, but there’s also an emotional element beyond the facts and the science.”
After training as an immunologist, Birx joined the U.S. Army, rising to the rank of colonel. Stationed at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center in the early 1980s, she learned of a mystery illness killing young men.
“We tried to save these soldiers and we couldn’t,” she told the Strategerist, a podcast produced by the George W. Bush Presidential Center, last fall. “We didn’t know what the problem was, and we didn’t know how to treat it. It was devastating.”
She worked on research with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the National Institutes of Health. And in 2014, she was appointed by President Barack Obama to head the President’s Emergency Plan For AIDS Relief, making her one of the rare holdovers from the last administration.
She has frequently used her personal experience to make her point when she appears in the White House briefing room. Last week she spoke about her daughters as she appealed to millennials who weren’t heeding advice to stay home because they believed they were invulnerable.
“I am the mom of two wonderful millennial young women who are bright and hardworking, and I will tell you what I told them: They are the core group that will stop this virus,” she said. “They are the group that communicates successfully, independent of picking up a phone. They intuitively know how to contact each other without being in large social gatherings.”
She has talked about the difficulty of managing her own multigenerational household, which includes 9-month-old and 2-year-old grandchildren, and her parents, aged 91 and 96, in order to protect the most at risk.
“We’ve really been focused on who is the most vulnerable and who needs to be protected, and ensuring that every family understands that,” she said.
And on Monday, she said she had stayed away from the White House during the weekend because of a low-grade fever. She returned when a coronavirus test proved negative.
A day later, she delivered some much needed good news: The interventions, the hand-washing, the travel bans, the 6-foot social distancing, and the bar closures were having an impact.
The worst projections, the worst numbers, such as a British study that forecast 2.2 million deaths in the United States, were worst-case scenarios based on no action being taken. The lesson of the Chinese province where the disease was first seen, and where an estimated 600,000 people were infected, was that intervention made a big difference.
“That is nowhere close to the numbers that you see people putting out there,” she said. “I think it has frightened the American people.”
