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Washington – Dr Deborah Birx, former White House coronavirus response coordinator under former President Donald Trump, revealed she does not have a full-time White House team working on the COVID response. 19 under the former president.
In an interview with “Face the Nation” that aired Sunday, Birx said she was “N in 1” during her tenure in the White House as the coronavirus response coordinator. In contrast, she praised President Joe Biden for putting together a team of experts in testing, vaccines, data and data usage, as well as a full-time supply chain contact . Under the Trump administration, these individuals existed “in different pockets of government,” Birx said.
“There was no full-time team in the White House working on the coronavirus,” she told “Face the Nation,” adding that she had asked for more staff. Birx noted that she had “an amazing support person” named Tyler Ann McGuffee who helped make sure she was at meetings on time and didn’t run out of emails.
Birx, a former U.S. Army colonel and adviser to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), said the structure of the Trump administration meant she was “the only full-time person in the White House working on the response to the coronavirus “.
“That’s what I was given,” she said. “So what I did was, I went to my people that I have known for the last few years in government, every 41 years, and I said, can you come to me help? And so I was able to recruit other agencies, individuals. ”
Among those she recruited was Irum Zaidi, who worked with Birx on the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, or PEPFAR.
A senior adviser to former Vice President Mike Pence, who led the White House Coronavirus Task Force, confirmed to CBS News that the staff who worked with Birx came from her days with PEPFAR and that she had put together this team. However, the advisor disputed the assumption that Birx was denied the necessary staff.
“There were between 7 and 8 full-time staff seconded from other agencies. They were paid,” the senior adviser told CBS News. Pence, meanwhile, also did not receive additional staff from the White House and his existing team worked on the COVID-19 response.
There have been nearly 25 million confirmed cases of the coronavirus in the United States and more than 417,000 Americans have died from COVID-19, according to Johns Hopkins University. Mr Biden has warned the outbreak will get worse before it gets better and has made the fight against the coronavirus his top priority.
On his first full day in office, Mr Biden deployed a national strategy to fight the coronavirus and used its executive authority to boost production of vaccines, testing supplies and personal protective equipment.
Birx stressed that for the new administration, having a team in the White House to respond to the ongoing pandemic “is going to be really, really important.”
“The amount of work that needs to be done not only at the White House but also at the state level to really ensure that we come out of this in some sort of normalcy by the summer will be really critical,” she declared.
Part of the success of the new administration, she said, will be bringing together experts in testing, vaccines, data and data use, and supply chain management.
Birx spent much of 2020 at the road meeting with state and local heads of state and said she and Zaidi wanted to determine what federal support the states needed, as well as how they interpreted the guidance from the government. CDC. Privately, Birx urged governors to ignore Mr. Trump’s contempt for mask-wearing and his pressure to reopen the economy faster than federal health guidelines would allow.
“It was the place where people let me say what to say about the pandemic, both in private with the governors and then following, doing the press to talk to people about this condition,” he said. she said.
Birx said she believed her science advice was being censored by the White House and that she was being deliberately barred from appearing in national media for some time. Driving across the country herself to meet with governors in person, Birx said she can offer her advice and also understand why local leaders might ignore it.
As to whether Pence was aware of Birx’s conversations with governors, the former vice president’s senior adviser told CBS News “he supports the process but doesn’t have a great level of detail.”
Birx provided regular reports to Pence staff, although the senior advisor said he may not have read them all and approved of them. The adviser challenged the principle of censorship, noting that her written reports to governors had been approved by the Office of Intergovernmental Affairs before their publication.
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