Birx: White House meddled in reports
Dr. Deborah Birx, President Donald Trump’s coronavirus response coordinator, told a congressional committee investigating the federal pandemic response that Trump White House officials asked her to change or delete parts of the weekly guidance she sent state and local officials, in what she described as a consistent effort to stifle information as virus cases surged in the second half of 2020.
Birx also told the committee that Trump White House officials withheld the reports from states during a winter outbreak and refused to publicly release the documents, which featured data on the virus’ spread and recommendations for how to contain it.
Her account of White House interference came in an interview the committee conducted last year, which was released Thursday with a set of emails Birx sent to colleagues in 2020 warning of the influence of a new White House pandemic adviser, Dr. Scott Atlas, who she said downplayed the threat of the virus.
The push to downplay the threat was so pervasive, Birx told committee investigators, that she developed techniques to avoid attention from White House officials who might have objected to her public health recommendations.
In testimony on Thursday, she offered withering assessments of the Trump administration’s coronavirus response, suggesting that officials in 2020 had mistakenly viewed the coronavirus as akin to the flu even after seeing high COVID-19 death rates in Asia and Europe. That perspective, she said, had caused a “false sense of security in America” as well as a “sense among the American people that this was not going to be a serious pandemic.”
Not using “concise, consistent communication,” she added, “resulted in inaction early on, I think across our agencies.” And those at fault, she said, were not “just the president.”