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Birx’s hiring at ActivePure Technology, a Texas-based filtration company, comes as it seeks formal approval from the Food and Drug Administration to market its air purifier to remove coronavirus particles .
The company has aggressively marketed its products even as it awaits FDA review for Covid-19 screening, claiming on its website that its technology has a proven kill rate of over 99.9% of the SARS-COV-2 suspended in the air in 3 minutes.
“We developed a technology, called ActivePure, that destroys the COVID virus in the air and deployed it for decades. It’s unique and it works, “wrote CEO Joe Urso in a recent open letter to President Joe Biden, urging him” to encourage – or, where you can, demand – the use of the best technology. now “.
The FDA has given air purifier makers more leeway during the pandemic on how their devices might be used, but urged them to clarify which functions the FDA has approved and which it does not. not.
Urso, in a statement to POLITICO, said that after the company applied for an emergency use authorization late last year, the FDA asked the company to seek a different authorization instead that includes higher standard of review and might take longer.
The FDA declined to comment.
Birx could not be reached immediately for comment. Reuters first announced his new job at ActivePure.
Birx spent years working in various parts of the federal public health bureaucracy, most notably as a roving ambassador and global AIDS coordinator under the Obama administration.
But she gained national recognition under Trump, who appointed her to help coordinate Covid’s response at the start of the pandemic. Birx played a central role in the early months of the effort, at times drawing criticism from Democrats for his upbeat portrayals of the fragile federal response and his refusal to refute former President Donald Trump’s inaccurate claims.
Yet she ultimately fell out of favor with Trump as he pushed for a swift reopening of the country as the virus continued to rage. She spent her final months on the task force traveling the country, urging state officials to continue focused on limiting the spread of the virus by maintaining public health restrictions.
For her new role at the George W. Bush Institute, in addition to her pandemic-related work, she will use her global health expertise to support her broader portfolio. The organization is housed in the library of the former president and works on a range of economic and health issues.
As a government official, she had worked with the organization on a 2018 public-private partnership aimed at reducing cases of cervical cancer among women living with HIV in 12 African countries. .
Earlier this week, Birx also joined the board of directors of Innoviva, which primarily collects royalties from certain lucrative GlaxoSmithKline drugs, according to a regulatory filing.
Biden officials during the transition had debated whether to retain Birx to help with the ongoing response, but in December she announced plans to step down from government, citing the record that last year’s scrutiny had taken. weigh on his family.
In January, Birx said in an interview with CBS that she frequently considered leaving the Covid task force and that she faced “outside advisers” who often presented Trump with conflicting information about the pandemic.
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