Dr. Deborah Birx came to the White House podium Wednesday with a personal story meant to express a dire warning to Americans shirking social distancing guidelines.
Birx said that her grandmother lived with the guilt of infecting her mother during the pandemic of 1918.
“It’s important to me personally because my grandmother, for 88 years, lived with the fact that she was the one, at age 11, who brought home the flu to her mother, Leah, for which I am named, when her mother had just delivered and her mother was succumbed to the great 1918 flu. She never forgot that she was the child that was in school that innocently brought that flu home,” she said.
Birx continued: “This is why we keep saying to every American: You have a role to protect each and every person that you interact with and we have a role to protect one another. It’s why we are social distancing, why you are social distancing, but to every American out there: when you are protecting yourself, you are protecting others. And if you, inadvertently, I know, brought this virus home to someone with a preexisting condition, I can tell you my grandmother lived with that for 88 years… This is not a theoretic, this is a reality, you can see the number of deaths that are occurring.”
Birx is the response coordinator for the White House Coronavirus Task Force.