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Deborah Birx, the Trump administration’s coronavirus response coordinator, said in an interview broadcast on Sunday that disinformation and denial about the coronavirus pandemic had plagued the White House.
In early last spring, people working in the White House denied the severity of the disease. “There were people who definitely believed it was a hoax,” she said in the interview, on the CBS news show “Face the Nation”.
This disbelief echoed in many pockets across the United States, as at the start of the pandemic, officials did not fully describe the specter of illness the virus could trigger. “And so they saw people catch Covid and be fine,” she explained.
Incomplete messages, she said, have had devastating consequences. Without specifically naming President Trump, who initially called the pandemic a “hoax,” Dr Birx noted that “any time a statement is made by a political leader that does not conform to public health needs, it derailed our response. This is also why I went out on the road, because I was not censored on the road.
In the summer and fall, in particular, Dr Birx visited several states and met with governors and local officials to talk about preventive measures, including wearing masks and social distancing.
She described the flow of information to Mr. Trump about the virus as chaotic and uncoordinated and said that to date she did not know the source of some of the data he was receiving. “I saw the president presenting graphics that I never did,” she said.
Dr Birx has come under heavy criticism from public health experts for being part of the Trump apparatus promoting misleading and sometimes completely erroneous content. She has been pilloried for failing to counter the president’s misinformation about the severity of the pandemic, his promotion of certain bogus treatments, and for failing to adequately respond to conflicting messages and approaches from the White House as the virus raged out of control last spring, then spread. across the country during summer and fall.
She said that whenever she had a material disagreement with the coronavirus policy and practice announced by the White House, within days, a negative story about it would emerge.
“I couldn’t do a national press,” she said. “The other thing that was very important to me was that I was not going to go out of the chain of command.”
In the interview, she said she has little exposure to Mr. Trump and is unsure whether he reads the regular reports she submits to Vice President Mike Pence.
She said she plans to announce her retirement from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention within four to six weeks.
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