Ex-White House coronavirus response adviser Dr. Deborah Birx said most coronavirus mortality in the United States were avoidable, while a CNN interview for a documentary programmed to broadcast Sunday.
In an extract from “Covid War: The Pandemic Doctors Speak Out,” Birx said that while many deaths in the first surge of the coronavirus pandemic were possibly inevitable, the lethality of succeeding flows could have been considerably lessened if the U.S. had “mitigated earlier … paused earlier and done” greater social distancing and shutdown steps.
“I look at it this way,” Birx told CNN’s Chief Medical Correspondent Sanjay Gupta. “The first time, we have an excuse. There were about 100,000 deaths that occurred from that original wave. All of the rest of them, in my mind, could have been mitigated or decreased substantially.”In March 2020, Birx and National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases head Dr. Anthony Fauci cautioned that almost 240,000 would die from the coronavirus if cares were not taken. Till date, there are approximately 550,000 deaths from COVID-19 in the United States, according to the Johns Hopkins University Coronavirus Tracker.
In December, Birx said she would retire from her position as White House coronavirus coordinator amid the Biden administration’s transition into government. The move was widely seen in response to her tarnished reputation among Democrats, who saw her as an enabler of the Trump administration’s COVID-19 strategy.
“The malicious incompetence that resulted in hundreds of thousands of unnecessary deaths starts at the top, with the ex-President and his enablers,” Rep. Ted Lieu, D-Calif., said in a tweet reacting to Birx’s current remarks. “And who was one of his enablers? Dr. Birx, who was afraid to challenge his unscientific rhetoric and wrongfully praised him.”Birx’s remarks are between a set of remarks the former White House aide has made after leaving the Trump administration. Many public health executives in the federal government frequently battled with ex-President Donald Trump over the administration’s approach to the coronavirus pandemic and Trump’s public remarks confronting scientific proof.
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“I can’t tell you how many discussions we had on, how do we get the message out realizing what’s happening at the most senior levels of the White House,” Birx told ABC News beginning of this month. The longtime physician continued that Trump’s remarks guiding people to inoculate disinfectant into themselves gave her “extraordinarily uncomfortable.”In a January CBS News interview, Birx also said “there were people who believed that the virus was a hoax” in the White House and that Trump’s public remarks often instantly repudiated guidelines she and other health officials would provide governors and local leaders about the pandemic.
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