JEsuit High School, a Catholic school for children in New Orleans, is proud of its students. In 1978, its website records that student debaters Moisés Arriaga and Brett Giroir “had a legendary season, winning the City Championship, the District Championship, the State Championship and the NFL National Championship.”
Forty-two years later, Giroir’s debating skills face his ultimate test. Like Donald Trump’s coronavirus testing czar, America’s top political news anchors repeatedly question him about what he sees as an epic disaster. And despite his golden career in school, Giroir’s grades and record have come under increasing scrutiny as the number of pandemic deaths in the US exceeds 150,000.
“What he does over and over in his public statements is always take the most positive turn he can into what is clearly just an abysmal failure in terms of America’s testing strategy,” said Jeremy Konyndyk, who led the response. from government to international disasters. in USAid from 2013 to 2017.
Now 59, Giroir spent his childhood in a small town outside of New Orleans, the son of an oil field worker and a police officer. “Growing up, I had significant hearing problems and hearing loss, and there was no ENT doctor in my small hometown; We had to drive 30 miles into town to see a specialist, ”he told Texas Medical Center News online in 2014.
“It so happened that the clinic was close to the Jesuit high school, one of the best high schools in the region. It seemed like an interesting place to be, so I set my goal, which was astronomical at the time, of being admitted to Jesuit high school. Fortunately, I walked in, and that was the academic starting point for me. “
Success on the debate team meant touring universities, including Harvard, where he earned a place to study biology before earning a medical doctorate at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center. Giroir began her career as a pediatrician in Texas and became the head of the Dallas Children’s Medical Center.
After a stint at the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, Giroir returned to Texas in 2008 and became the executive director of the Texas A&M University Health Science Center. But his ambitions to make it a world-leading vaccine facility for a billion doses per month came to an abrupt halt.
In 2015, Giroir was told he had 30 minutes to resign instead of being fired, the Washington Post reported, after an annual performance review said he was “more interested in promoting himself” and did poorly as a “player of equipment”.
Since then, Giroir has claimed that he was a victim of university politics. “If you are not familiar with academic politics, it makes politics in Washington look like a minor league game,” he told the Post in April this year, adding that he was “heartbroken” about being expelled before his job. about vaccines without completing.
Others interviewed by the Washington Post told a different story. Robin Robinson, who as director of the Federal Advanced Biological Research and Development Authority oversaw a major grant for the Texas vaccine project, was quoted as saying that Giroir “over-promised.”
He added: “I always had a good relationship with Brett. I know he has a short temper and that sometimes he has a hard time controlling it. ”
In 2017, Trump elected Giroir as assistant secretary of health at the Department of Health and Human Services, making him the secretary’s top medical and scientific adviser, Alex Azar. The nomination was delayed for months, as Democrats voiced concern over their commitment to women’s health issues, but ultimately confirmed it.
Giroir made a positive first impression on some in Washington. Stephen Morrison, senior vice president of the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) study center and director of its Center for Global Health Policy, recalls talking to him about a Trump administration initiative on domestic HIV / AIDS.
“He seemed very authentic to me in his compassion for the stigmatized, marginalized and highly vulnerable populations of HIV in the United States. Some of them were public sessions, many of them were private debates by invitation, so there would inevitably be people in the room who actively detested anything the Trump administration did, but were surprised by their seriousness and compassion and genuine desire. of making a difference and doing something right
“I think the general opinion of him was quite high here in the city and people respected him a lot and took him very seriously.”
Giroir also leads initiatives on physical activity patterns, sickle cell disease, and opioid policy, and has been criticized by Senate Democrats for not recognizing the role of pharmaceutical companies in the opioid epidemic.
But it is the coronavirus that gave the decisive moment of his career or, perhaps, some would say, a poisoned chalice. In early March, Trump stated that “anyone who wants a test can get tested” despite the massive shortage of test kits. A week later, on March 13, Giroir was tasked with overseeing the federal government’s testing efforts, a relatively unknown option for a monumental post.
Since then, critics argue, the U.S. tests have been a historic catastrophe that has allowed the virus to develop into a wildfire. The number of tests carried out has increased to more than 50 meters and last Sunday, in the CNN State of the Union, Giroir said that anyone who “needs” a test can get one. But getting test results is a different matter: Chemical shortages and plastic pipette tips can mean it takes up to two weeks for labs to turn them around, rendering them virtually useless.
Konyndyk, principal investigator at the Center for Global Development study center in Washington, said: “The bottom line is that the federal government has not taken care of the problem and has not been tasked with solving it. Ultimately, that is a much more president decision than Brett Giroir, but Brett Giroir voluntarily facilitates and facilitates it.
“It is a failed policy, so it is the owner. It is not saying that we are failing, it is not saying that we need a different approach, it continues to work on an approach that at this point only has to say that it has manifestly failed. We are going backwards in the tests. Delays get longer. “
Public health officials have had to navigate treacherous waters at the Trump White House. Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, has a reputation for bluntly telling the truth and duly found that his media appearances were reduced; Until recently, he said, he had not informed Trump in two months. By contrast, Deborah Birx, the coordinator of the coronavirus task force, was recently described by the New York Times as “the leading evangelist for the idea that the virus threat was fading.”
Giroir, who has appeared alongside Trump in the admiral uniform he is entitled to wear as chief of the U.S. Health Service Commissioned Corps, appears to fall further into the Birx camp when it comes to placating the president.
Konyndyk added: “The responsibility of a scientist in the type of role he is in is not simply to share the political turn that is favorable to the president. It’s giving the president and, frankly, giving the public an honest, science-based and evidence-based perspective on what is needed, and that’s not what Giroir is doing and, frankly, not what Birx has been doing.
“I blame him for that and I also recognize that in time if he did, I’m sure he still wouldn’t be in that role.” That’s the dilemma any high-profile government scientist is caught in: if you turn, you keep your access; If you tell the truth, you risk being sidelined. See an approach to that from Dr. Fauci and see a different approach from Drs. Birx and Giroir ”.
Giroir is working for a president who has claimed that the tests are “overrated” and bragged about a campaign rally in which he called for the tests to be delayed because it makes the United States look bad. Many experts suggest that the biggest flaw from the start is the lack of a national assessment strategy, causing state governors to sink or swim alone. It will cast a long shadow on Giroir’s career.
Zac Petkanas, director of the coronavirus war room at Protect Our Care, a health advocacy group, said: “On Sunday he came out and was bold enough to say that everyone who needs an exam can get an exam. This is obviously nonsense. Sure, multiple people can get evidence, but then they have to wait 10 to 20 days to get the results back, making the tests essentially useless. “
Petkanas added: “Clearly, Giroir is nothing more than a water provider for the Trump administration’s policies and the Americans are paying the price because he will not stand up to the administration and do the right thing, and that means we need a federal citizen. testing infrastructure that doesn’t pit states against each other and coordinates this response so that all states can get the materials they need when they need them and people can get tested. “
