Trump’s former coronavirus coordinator Birx takes job at Texas air purifier manufacturer

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Dr Deborah Birx, former coordinator of Trump’s White House coronavirus task force, takes a job in the private sector, joining a Texas manufacturer who says its purifiers clean up COVID-19 from the air in minutes and surfaces in hours.

Birx will join Dallas-based ActivePure as chief scientific and medical adviser, she and the company announced Friday.

Global health expert Birx came to the White House in 2020 to help lead the Trump administration’s response to the pandemic.

But she has come under fire for not standing up to former President Donald Trump as he downplays the virus, predicted it would go away, and wondered if ingesting bleach could help cure infected Americans.

While his friend and former mentor, Dr Anthony Fauci, was promoted to the post of senior medical adviser to Democratic President Joe Biden, Birx did not get a job in the new administration.

“The Biden administration wanted a clean slate,” she told Reuters in an interview. “I understand this completely.”

Birx left government earlier this week.

She and Fauci, she said, have regularly wondered what could have been done differently over the past year.

“When you have the 100,000 people we lost over the summer and the 300,000 people we lost in the fall-winter outbreak, you have to ask yourself and know that it didn’t happen too although she should have, ”she said.

“We are all responsible for this.”

The coronavirus has killed more than 530,000 people in the United States, more than any other country.

Birx said she always deals with regrets and could have taken steps to be more effective.

“I try to categorize them,” she said. “We have to be prepared to take a step back and really analyze where we could have been and why we weren’t more effective.”

Birx said she remained concerned about the level of testing in the country, but praised the new administration for modeling the wearing of masks and other behaviors that help fight the virus.

Trump, a Republican, avoided masks.

“I think the message has been very good, very consistent,” she said of the Biden team. “It’s really important when you ask people to change their behavior.”

In addition to her role at ActivePure, Birx also joined the George W. Bush Institute as a global health fellow and biopharmaceutical company Innoviva as a board member, she said.