Washington – Dr. Deborah Birx, the former White House coronavirus response coordinator under former President Donald Trump, revealed that she did not have a full-time team at the White House working on the response to COVID-19 under the former president.
In an interview with “Face the Nation” that airs on Sunday, Birx said she was “an N of 1” during her tenure at the White House as coordinator of the coronavirus response. In contrast, she praised President Joe Biden for forming a team of experts in testing, vaccines, data and data use, as well as a full-time supply chain person. During the Trump administration, these individuals existed “in different sectors of the government,” said Birx.
“There was no team, full-time staff at the White House working on the coronavirus,” she told Face the Nation, adding that she asked for more employees. Birx noted that she had “an amazing support person” named Tyler Ann McGuffee, who helped to ensure that she arrived on time for meetings and did not miss emails.
Birx, a former United States 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 they gave me,” she said. “So what I did was look for my people I met in the government for the past few years, all 41, and said, can you come and help me? And then I was able to recruit from 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 team that worked with Birx was from his time at PEPFAR and that she put that team together. However, the consultant contested the premise that Birx did not have the necessary personnel.
“There were 7 to 8 full-time employees seconded from other agencies to her. They were paid,” the senior adviser told CBS News. Meanwhile, Pence also did not receive additional White House staff, and his team worked on the COVID-19 response.
There have been almost 25 million confirmed cases of coronavirus in the United States and more than 417,000 Americans have died of COVID-19, according to Johns Hopkins University. Biden warned that the outbreak will get worse before it gets better and made fighting coronavirus his priority.
On his first full day in office, Mr. Biden launched a national strategy to fight coronavirus and used its executive authority to increase vaccine production, test supplies and personal protective equipment.
Birx emphasized that, for the new government, having a team at the White House to respond to the ongoing pandemic “will be very, very 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 get out of this with some kind of normalcy in the summer will be really critical,” she said.
Part of the success of the new administration, she said, will be bringing together experts in testing, vaccines, data and data usage and supply chain management.
Birx spent much of 2020 on the road, meeting with state and local leaders and said that she and Zaidi wanted to determine the federal support that states needed, as well as how they would interpret the CDC’s guidelines. In particular, Birx encouraged governors to disregard Trump’s contempt for wearing a mask and his pressure to reopen the economy faster than federal health guidelines would allow.
“That was the place where people let me say what needed to be said about the pandemic, both in private with the governors and in the follow-up, doing the press to speak to the people of that state,” she said.
Birx said he felt that his science-based orientation was being censored by the White House and that he was being deliberately prevented from appearing in the national media for a while. Crossing the country to meet face to face with governors, Birx said he could give his guidance and also understand why local leaders may be disregarding it.
As to whether Pence was aware of Birx’s conversations with governors, the former vice president’s senior adviser told CBS News “he supported the process, but didn’t have a great deal of detail.”
Birx provided regular reports to Pence’s team, although the senior advisor might not have read them all and had not signed them. The advisor contested the censorship premise, pointing out that her written reports to governors were released by the Office of Intergovernmental Affairs before publication.