Admiral Brett Giroir abruptly became the face of federal Covid-19 coronavirus testing this week. He stood next to President Trump on Monday and toed the administration’s positive line on its handling of the pandemic.
Giroir is Trump’s virus testing czar, but elements of his past led some observers to question whether he’s the right choice to head the testing program.
Giroir “says that his experience working on vaccine development projects at Texas A&M University helped prepare him for this historic moment,” the Washington Post reported recently.
“But after eight years of work on several vaccine projects [at Texas A&M], Giroir was told in 2015 he had 30 minutes to resign or he would be fired.”
Giroir quit.
The Post cites a report from A&M’s local Texas newspaper, the Bryan-College Station Eagle, as saying Giroir “got low marks on being a ‘team player’” and was more interested in promoting himself than the health science center where he worked.
On Tuesday, Sen. Mitt Romney (R-UT), whose mutual dis-admiration society with Trump is well known, got into the mix.
During Monday’s White House briefing on the pandemic, Giroir had pleased the president by bragging that the U.S. has conducted more coronavirus tests than South Korea, on a per-capita basis.
The next day, at a Senate Health Committee hearing, Romney aimed a barb directly at Giroir.
“I understand politicians are going to frame data in a way that’s most positive politically,” Romney said. “Of course, they don’t expect that from admirals.”
But Giroir is not a Navy admiral.
Giroir, 59, does hold the rank of 4-star admiral and wears a uniform modeled on that of Naval officers, complete with medals and ribbons. Yet he’s never served in the Navy or any other military force: he’s an admiral in the Public Health Service Commissioned Corps, one of eight U.S. uniformed services, only six of which are military. (The other is NOAA.)
But Romney was right about the more important issue: Giroir’s comparison between the U.S.-South Korea on virus testing.
When the virus outbreak spread from China, South Korea’s government moved quickly to start testing its citizens (which the Trump administration did not), allowing it “to get a handle on the situation much faster,” says the Post.
And that meant South Korea hasn’t needed to conduct nearly as many tests, because a far smaller portion of its population has actually contracted the virus.
The Post says that in two recent interviews, Giroir “blamed his ouster” from Texas A&M “on internal politics at the university, not on any problems with [his vaccine] project.”
The Post cites people who’ve worked with him as saying that such a “combative response” is “classic Giroir.”
Giroir has held a variety of health-related federal jobs, and has sometimes been criticized for his performance and willingness to bow to politicians. Notably, he favors restricting family planning rules to sexual abstinence, rejecting not only abortion but birth-control measures.
When Trump appointed Giroir to his previous job, Acting Commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), last year, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) sent him a letter expressing her reservations:
“I have concerns about your appointment because during your time as the Assistant Secretary for Health at the Department of Health and Human Services,” Warren wrote, “you have undermined evidence-based programs and promulgated policies based on political ideology-behavior that is antithetical to the very mission of HHS and the agency you are now charged with leading.”
