Most US Covid deaths 'could have been mitigated' after first 100,000, Birx says
Former coronavirus taskforce coordinator tells CNN deaths could have been prevented
Former coronavirus taskforce coordinator Dr. Deborah Birx tells CNN deaths could have been prevented if Trump administration acted sooner
.uspg
US PRESS GROUP
The "vast majority" of the almost 550,000 coronavirus deaths in the US could have been prevented if Donald Trump's administration had acted earlier and with greater conviction, according to one of the public health experts charged with leading the pandemic response at the time. Dr Deborah Birx was the White House coronavirus taskforce coordinator in the Trump administration and is among six leading medical experts involved in the then government's efforts to fight the outbreak who will assess errors, missteps and moments of success, during a CNN documentary to be broadcast on Sunday night.
Birx, who last week took a controversial new private-sector job as medical adviser to an air cleaning company in California, will point to the Trump administration's failure to learn from or respond quickly to the first wave of infections that swept the country in early spring 2020.
"I look at it this way. The first time we have an excuse," Birx tells CNN's Sanjay Gupta in the program entitled Covid War: The Pandemic Doctors Speak Out. She goes on: "There were about 100,000 deaths that came from that original surge. All of the rest of them, in my mind, could have been mitigated or decreased substantially."
Trump was criticized for downplaying the seriousness of the virus, making numerous false claims, including that its effects were no worse than flu, predicting Covid-19 would "just disappear" and referring to it in racist terms. He pressed for cities and states to reopen through last summer as a second wave pushed the death toll higher.
He also ridiculed the wearing of masks and made outlandish claims such as suggesting injecting disinfectant into the body could be a legitimate coronavirus treatment, which experts slammed at the time as dangerous.
A Columbia University study last year found 84% of deaths could have been prevented with an earlier shutdown, CNN reported.
Birx, who often praised Trump, claimed in January she had been "censored" by the White House and had considered quitting. But her decision to speak out in tonight's documentary was criticized by other prominent pandemic experts.
"This happened on her watch," Jonathan Reiner of George Washington University told CNN, adding that Birx had "a duty to stand up and speak up".
Another doctor featured in the documentary, Robert Redfield, the former director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), appears to repeat Birx's claims of censorship by the administration. Stating he was "allowed to have opinions now", Redfield will claim, without evidence, that he believes Covid-19 was created in a Chinese laboratory.
"If I was to guess, this virus started transmitting somewhere in September, October in Wuhan," he said. "That's my own feelings, and only opinion."
The World Health Organization has called the assertion "extremely unlikely", while Dr Anthony Fauci, the US government's head of infectious diseases, also downplayed it in a White House briefing on Friday.
"Obviously, there are a number of theories. Dr Redfield was mentioning that he was giving an opinion as to a possibility, but again, there are other alternatives, others that most people hold by," Fauci said.
Birx and Redfield are not serving in Joe Biden's administration, while Fauci has been retained by the new administration's White House team, as the leading infectious diseases adviser to the president.
The program will air as the CDC reports more than 50 million Americans are now fully vaccinated and Biden targets 200m vaccinations in his first 100 days in office. The CDC, however, remains "deeply concerned" about rising infections even as vaccinations set daily records.
Fauci will tell Gupta that his push to go "all out" on pursuing a vaccine as early as January 2020 "may have been the best decision I have ever made".
Dr. Deborah Birx revealed that she received a "very uncomfortable" and "very difficult" phone call from Donald Trump after speaking publicly about the spread of Covid-19 while serving in the former President's administration. Birx said the phone call followed her appearance on CNN in August.
"It was a CNN report in August that got horrible pushback. That was a very difficult time, because everybody in the White House was upset with that interview and the clarity that I brought about the epidemic," Birx told Dr. Sanjay Gupta, "I got called by the President," Birx continued. "It was very uncomfortable, very direct and very difficult to hear."
Asked by Gupta whether she was threatened during the call, Birx responded, "I would say it was a very uncomfortable conversation."
CNN has reached out to Trump's office for comment on the documentary.
The anecdote from Birx highlights the warring voices behind the scenes as the former administration grappled with how to handle the federal response and messaging surrounding the pandemic. During his time in office, Trump repeatedly contradicted his own medical officials, having long dismissed the gravity of the virus and eschewed practices like social distancing and mask wearing.
In August, Birx warned that the US was "in a new phase" of the coronavirus pandemic with more widespread cases, telling CNN's Dana Bash on "State of the Union" at the time that "what we are seeing today is different from March and April. It is extraordinarily widespread. It's into the rural as equal urban areas."
By contrast, Trump in August repeatedly highlighted New Zealand's recent coronavirus outbreak while claiming the US had done a good job of containing the virus. At the time, New Zealand had reported 1,304 confirmed infections and 22 coronavirus-related deaths, while the US had recorded at least 5,527,306 Covid-19 cases and 173,114 related deaths, according to Johns Hopkins University.
In addition to disclosing the phone call with Trump, Birx revealed in the documentary that the number of coronavirus deaths could have been "decreased substantially" if cities and states across the country had aggressively applied the lessons of the first surge toward mitigation last spring, potentially preventing the surges that followed.
"I look at it this way. The first time we have an excuse," Birx said. "There were about a hundred thousand deaths that came from that original surge. All of the rest of them, in my mind, could have been mitigated or decreased substantially."
CDCCNNCoronaCOVID-19Donald TrumpDr. Anthony FauciDr. Deborah BirxDr. Robert RedfieldSanjay GuptaTrump AdministrationWHO
Jeff Sessions claims he's clueless about his DOJ's snooping on Congress
Former Attorney General Jeff Sessions is telling associates he had no idea his Justice Department seized phone records of two top Democratic congressional critics of then-President Donald Trump. In the hours since The New York Times broke the news on Thursday that prosecutors subpoenaed Apple metadata from Reps. Adam Schiff (D-CA) and Eric Swalwell (D-CA), former Attorney General Sessions has privately told people that he wasn't aware of, nor was he briefed on, the reported data seizures while he led the Trump DOJ. This week's revelations were a surprise to him, according to a source familiar with the matter, and another person close to Sessions.
Watchdog investigates seizure of Democrats' phone data
The US justice department's internal watchdog launched an investigation on Friday after revelations that former president Donald Trump's administration secretly seized phone data from at least two House Democrats as part of an aggressive leaks inquiry related to the Russia investigation into Trump's conduct.
Trump feared Democrats would replace Biden with Michelle Obama, book claims
Donald Trump called Joe Biden a "mental retard" during the 2020 election, a new book says, but was reluctant to attack him too strongly for fear the Democrats would replace him with Hillary Clinton or Michelle Obama. Biden went on to beat Trump by more than 7m in the popular vote and by 306-232 in the electoral college, a result Trump deemed a landslide when it was in his favor against Clinton in 2016.
Intelligence failures left police officers exposed to a violent mob of Trump supporters
The deadly insurrection at the US Capitol was "planned in plain sight" but intelligence failures left police officers exposed to a violent mob of Trump supporters, a Senate investigation has found. The Capitol police intelligence division had been gathering online data since December about plots to storm the building on 6 January, including messages such as: "Bring guns. It's now or never." But a combination of bad communications, poor planning, faulty equipment and lack of leadership meant the warnings went unheeded, allowing the insurrectionists to overrun the Capitol and disrupt certification of Joe Biden's election victory. Five people died.
© 2021/2022 INTER PRESS GROUP®
Contact | Terms of Service | Jobs | Private Policy