Birx, former Trump coronavirus coordinator, takes job at Texas air purifier manufacturer

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Dr. Deborah Birx, former coordinator of Trump’s White House Coronavirus Task Force, is taking on a job in the private sector, joining a Texas manufacturer who says her purifiers clean COVID- 19 of air in minutes and surfaces in hours.

Birx will join Dallas-based ActivePure as a scientific and medical consultant, she and the company said on Friday.

A global health expert, Birx came to the White House in 2020 to help lead the Trump administration’s response to the pandemic.

But she was criticized for failing to face former President Donald Trump while he minimized the virus, predicted it would disappear and questioned whether taking bleach could help cure infected Americans.

Although his friend and former mentor, Dr. Anthony Fauci, was promoted to medical adviser to Democratic President Joe Biden, Birx did not get a job in the new government.

“The Biden government wanted a clean slate,” she told Reuters in an interview. “I understand that completely.”

Birx left the government earlier this week.

She and Fauci, she said, regularly wondered what could have been done differently in the past year.

“When you have the 100,000 people we lost during the summer and the 300,000 people we lost during the autumn-winter wave, you have to ask yourself and find out if it didn’t go as well as it should,” she said.

“We are all responsible for this.”

The coronavirus has killed more than 530,000 people in the United States, more than any other country.

Birx said he was still processing regrets and measures he could have taken to be more effective.

“I’m trying to classify them,” she said. “We have to be willing to take a step back and really look at where we could be and why we weren’t more effective.”

Birx said she remains concerned about the level of testing in the country, but praised the new administration for modeling the use of masks and other behaviors that help fight the virus.

Trump, a Republican, avoided the masks.

“I think the message has been very good, very consistent,” she said of Biden’s team. “This is very important when you are asking people to change their behavior.”

In addition to her role at ActivePure, Birx also joined the George W. Bush Institute as a global health fellow and the biopharmaceutical company Innoviva as a board member, she said.