Initially, and widely, viewed as someone of experience, savvy and integrity, she currently finds herself in a crossfire hurricane, equally disparaged by President Donald Trump, who called her "pathetic," House Speaker Nancy Pelosi who announced she had "lost confidence" in Birx, and a number of professional peers who once welcomed her appointment. (At times, it seems that the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, Dr. Anthony Fauci, once her mentor and now a frequent White House outcast, continues to support her.)

This type of reputational crash is common enough with politicians but not in the medical world. Birx and I graduated medical school in the same year, both became infectious disease specialist specialists with a career focus on HIV infection, and know many of the same people. But I have never met her, nor have I heard anything -- good or bad -- to allow me to determine whether she indeed is responsible for some large part of the disaster.

So, to sort this out, I did what academic doctors (like Birx and me) always do: I searched her published scientific work in PubMed, the National Library of Science database.

I had found this approach useful several years ago when the ophthalmologist, Rand Paul, ran for the United States Senate. A PubMed review showed just one article by Dr. Paul, a report that reflected his fascination with the cornea, the single area in the body that lies outside the reach of what is called "immune surveillance" -- the happy place for a libertarian.

Dr. Birx emerges in the medical literature as extremely serious and accomplished. In her 233 articles published across almost four decades of professional life, she has written on HIV vaccines, on genetic mutations of HIV, and then, in 2005, in her role as director of CDC's Division of Global HIV/AIDS (DGHA), on the challenges of providing treatment to areas of the world, including Africa, South America and Southeast Asia, that lacked a reliable health care delivery infrastructure.

Among other interests, she appeared to be concerned that adolescent girls and young women have access to HIV prevention and treatment. In 2017, she envisioned a world that provided "a supportive social environment that enables young women to grow up into young adults who are free to graduate from high school and plan their pregnancies (emphasis mine), ultimately entering adulthood safe, healthy, and free from HIV."

Of particular interest in these Covid-19 times, she was an ardent champion of testing, testing and more testing for HIV. She stressed "routine access to routine viral load monitoring [a blood test] in all settings" and "analysis of HIV [drug resistance] data [via blood test] to monitor the success of mitigation strategies."

Plus she worried that the world was not ready for the challenge this much testing would pose to laboratories, voicing her concern in an article entitled, "Laboratory systems and services are critical in global health: time to end the neglect?" In other words