Birx says Trump presented graphics she never made

Photographer: Drew Angerer / Getty Images

Deborah Birx, who recently ended her term on Donald Trump’s coronavirus task force, said disinformation abounded in her White House and that the former president presented “parallel” information about the pandemic.

“I saw the president presenting graphics that I have never done. So I know that someone – someone outside or someone inside – was creating a parallel set of data and graphs that were shown to the president, ”said Birx in a long interview on CBS’s “Face the Nation” program, which aired on Sunday.

“I know what I sent, and I know what was in his hands was different from that,” she said.

Birx was frequently introduced by the president’s side in the spring, when he held extended daily press conferences on the response to the coronavirus in the United States, which often left the script. She was in the press room in April when Trump suggested injecting disinfectant to prevent the virus.

Birx described the difficulties of delivering science-based recommendations to the White House, where some people believed the coronavirus was a scam, she said. Trump assessed the severity of the virus in March, but the White House did not follow its “blocking criteria” on blockades afterwards, as the country gradually reopened months before the presidential election.

“The worst possible time when you can have a pandemic is in a presidential election year,” she said.

Birx said he believes Scott Atlas, a former adviser to Trump on the coronavirus task force, has brought “parallel data flows”, although she doesn’t know who else was part of it. Atlas won Trump’s favor, advocating loosening restrictions on social distance during the pandemic.

Birx, 64, who expects to retire within weeks, said he “always” considered leaving the Trump task force because he feared being seen as a political person. His comments on the Trump administration’s rejection of science-based discoveries echo those of Dr. Anthony Fauci, who described what it was like to work for Trump over a weekend interview with the New York Times.

Fauci, 80, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases since 1984, said he never thought about giving up.

In addition to receiving death threats from those who were angry at his advice during the pandemic, he told the newspaper that he once received an envelope filled with unidentified powder, which fell on his face and chest. “It was kind of benign, but it was scary,” he said.