Birx says deaths ‘could have been mitigated’ previous year
- by Grant Boone
- in Sports
- — Mar 29, 2021
"It shocked me because it was such a jolt to what we were trying to do", he said of Trump's efforts.
Fauci was interviewed on a CNN special that aired Sunday night and the discussion arrived at the vaccine effort.
By mid-spring, Trump expressed that the economic health of the U.S. depended on state reopenings.
"My understanding was I could not be national because the president might see it".
Developing story, more to follow.
As the Post said, Fauci did not appear to give credit to - or even bother to mention - Trump's Operation Warp Speed, which saw the US government pumping billions of dollars into multiple drug manufacturers to get a COVID vaccine developed as quickly as possible.
Trump lacked the ability to lift the health restrictions that individual states put into place, so he sought to influence the debate and direct anti-lockdown sentiments mostly toward Democratic governors like Ralph Northam of Virginia and Gretchen Whitmer of MI.
"I got called by the President", she added. "And I said to myself, 'Oh my goodness".
Dr. Deborah Birx, a member of former President Donald Trump's White House Coronavirus Task Force, told CNN's Dr. Sanjay Gupta that she believed most of America's Covid-19 deaths "could have been mitigated" after the initial surge if the Trump administration had taken action sooner. That was a very hard time, because everybody in the White House was upset with that interview and the clarity that I brought about the epidemic", Birx told CNN Chief Medical Correspondent Dr. Sanjay Gupta in the documentary "COVID WAR: "The Pandemic Doctors Speak Out".
Last year, Trump strongly backed the reopening of states by April and May, saying that the country's economic recovery depended on states being fully operational.
Fauci, for his part, said that "best decision" he made was accelerating efforts for the production of a COVID-19 vaccine.
In an interview with The New York Times published in January, Fauci said Trump would sometimes call him after he gave an interview and ask why he hadn't given a more "positive" outlook on the pandemic. "It was very uncomfortable, very direct and very hard to hear".
In February, Fauci's boss, Dr. Francis Collins, the National Institutes of Health director, praised the Trump administration for the "breathtaking" success of Operation Warp Speed in getting multiple effective coronavirus vaccines developed and tested within one year of the virus outbreak.
As of Sunday, more than 549,000 people in the USA have died from COVID-19, according to data analyzed by Johns Hopkins University.
