- Dr. Deborah Birx said that thousands of Americans died from preventable deaths by COVID-19.
- During an interview with CNN, she said that everything after the first outbreak could have been mitigated.
- But some people, including Congressman Ted Lieu, responded by accusing her of enabling Trump.
- See more stories on the Insider business page.
Dr. Deborah Birx, a former member of the White House coronavirus response team, said thousands of Americans had died of preventable deaths from COVID-19 and that everything after the initial increase could have been mitigated.
Birx was speaking during an interview with CNN’s Dr. Sanjay Gupta for the network’s coronavirus documentary that airs on Sunday.
A clip of Birx’s comments was shared on Saturday.
“I see it this way: the first time, we have an excuse. There were about 100,000 deaths caused by the initial increase,” said Birx, who served in the Trump administration. “Everyone else, in my opinion, could have been mitigated or substantially reduced.”
According to Birx, more than 80% of American deaths could have been mitigated: at this point, almost 550,000 people died of COVID-19 in the United States, according to data from Johns Hopkins University. The U.S. reached 100,000 deaths in late May 2020.
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Birx was a controversial member of the coronavirus task force and was often criticized for not explicitly hitting President Donald Trump when he contradicted the advice of public health officials and medical experts on preventing coronavirus transmission.
—CNN Newsroom (@CNNnewsroom) March 27, 2021
Some of those criticisms reappeared on Saturday, when the clip of his interview with CNN circulated on Twitter.
Democratic Rep. Ted Lieu of California, who also served as impeachment manager against Trump in January, accused Birx of being partially responsible for preventable deaths.
“The malicious incompetence that has resulted in hundreds of thousands of unnecessary deaths starts at the top, with the former president and his facilitators,” Lieu said in a tweet. “And who was one of your facilitators? Dr. Birx, who was afraid to challenge his unscientific rhetoric and wrongly praised him.”
Many others in Twitter he also intervened, accusing Birx of being an accomplice. Some have also re-circulated a old March 2020 clip in which Birx praised Trump as being “attentive to scientific literature, details and data”.
She has since said that she enjoyed working on the road under the Trump administration because she was not “censored” as she was at the White House.
Another doctor interviewed by CNN on Saturday said that he agreed with Birx about the preventable deaths of COVID-19, but that “it happened under his supervision”.
“She was the coordinator of the White House pandemic. That was her job,” said Dr. Jonathan Reiner of George Washington University. “And if things weren’t being done the way she liked it, her duty was to get up and speak.”
As for the number of preventable deaths, Reiner compared the United States to Germany, a country he says has a “mediocre” response to the pandemic. And yet, if the United States had a death toll similar to that of Germany, only 300,000 Americans would be dead.
“A quarter of a million Americans would be alive today,” he said.
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