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- Dr Deborah Birx, who worked under Trump, recounted an “uncomfortable” conversation with him last year.
- Birx said the conversation took place after she appeared on CNN and provided “clarification” on the pandemic.
- The interview is part of an upcoming CNN documentary on the pandemic.
- See more stories on the Insider business page.
Former White House coronavirus response coordinator Dr. Deborah Birx said she had an “uncomfortable” conversation with former President Donald Trump last year after speaking candidly during an appearance at TV News.
Birx’s comments come in a preview of the upcoming pandemic documentary titled “COVID WAR: The Pandemic Doctors Speak Out,” which airs Sunday at 9 p.m. on CNN.
“It was a CNN report in August that got horrific rejection,” Birx said in the clip released by CNN on Sunday. “It was a very difficult time, because everyone in the White House was upset by this interview and the clarity with which I caused the epidemic.
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“I was called by the president,” she added. “It was very uncomfortable, very direct and very difficult to hear.”
As CNN noted, Birx appeared in August on CNN’s “State of the Union” and offered a critical perspective on the state of the pandemic in the United States at that time. In the interview, Birx said the August 2020 pandemic was different from an outbreak earlier in the year because the virus had infiltrated rural communities.
“What we see today is different from March and April,” she said at the time. “It’s extraordinarily prevalent. It’s in rural areas as equal urban areas.”
When asked by CNN’s Dr Sanjay Gupta if she felt threatened by the former president, she repeated that the exchange had been a “very uncomfortable conversation.”
Birx told Gupta that she knew she was “being watched.”
“Everyone inside was waiting for me to take a misstep so they could, I guess, withdraw from the task force,” she said.
Trump has had a difficult relationship with his Coronavirus Task Force advisers, as he has publicly ignored their advice, although he has more publicly argued with Dr.Anthony Fauci, longtime director of the US National Institute. allergies and infectious diseases.
Fauci has previously spoken about what it was like to work with the former president and said working under Biden was “liberating” in comparison. Trump in an interview in March bragged about ignoring Fauci’s recommendations.
“I thought rather than send him back, you know, I listened to him, but I didn’t do what he said because frankly his record is not a good record,” said Trump on the “The Truth With Lisa Boothe” podcast.
In an interview with the New York Times published in January, Fauci said Trump sometimes called him after giving an interview and asking him why he hadn’t given a more “positive” view of the pandemic.
In a recently released clip from CNN’s upcoming documentary, Birx said that every COVID-19 death in the United States after the first 100,000 could have been mitigated after the first wave.
As of Sunday, more than 549,000 people in the United States died from COVID-19, according to data analyzed by Johns Hopkins University. The United States reached 100,000 deaths from COVID-19 at the end of May 2020.
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