Former White House Coronavirus Response Coordinator Deborah Birx said that Trump administration officials were “distracted away from the pandemic” by campaigning for the 2020 presidential election – and alleged that over 130,000 American lives could have been saved with proper implementation of public health measures.
Birx delivered the remarks during closed-door testimony in front of congressional investigators on the Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Crisis earlier this month.
Lawmakers released excerpts of Dr. Birx’s statements on Tuesday, saying her comments “confirm that President Trump’s prioritization of politics, contempt for science, and refusal to follow the advice of public health experts undermined the nation’s ability to respond effectively to the coronavirus crisis.”
As cases of COVID-19 surged last year, the presidential election ramped up.
According to the released portions of the transcript, Dr. Birx said she felt certain Trump officials “had gotten somewhat complacent through the campaign season” with respect to mitigating the coronavirus pandemic, as they “weren't [at the White House] and we weren’t having COVID meetings continuously.”
Birx listed specific recommendations she said she gave to the administration that were either ignored or implemented too late, like mandating mask-wearing, early vaccination for those in long term care facilities, and a comprehensive mitigation plan for post-election season, as cases again began to climb (with a few notable dips) from last October through mid-January of this year.
Birx pointed, in particular, to mask mandates as an area where the Trump White House failed. The administration did not make any form of national masking requirement, leaving it up to state leaders to decide — and Birx noted that states without such mandates tended to have higher fatality rates from COVID-19 than states who did implement the regulations.
Had the Trump administration put “optimal” universal mask mandates in place early last year, around 130,000 of the 400,000 Americans who died before Jan. 8 may have lived, Birx said.
“I believe if we had fully implemented the mask mandates, the reduction in indoor dining, the getting friends and family to understand the risk of gathering in private homes, and we had increased testing, that we probably could have decreased fatalities into the 30 percent less to 40 percent less range,” Birx told lawmakers, adding that she made those recommendations to White House officials for “months” despite being brushed aside.
To date, over 736,000 Americans have died of COVID-19, roughly 300,000 of which occurred after President Joe Biden took office.
When asked directly by lawmakers if Trump did everything in his power to control the pandemic, Birx answered: “No. And I’ve said that to the White House in general, and I believe I was
very clear to the [former] president in specifics of what I needed him to do.”
Birx also heavily criticized Dr. Scott Atlas, who served as an advisor to the coronavirus task force, in her remarks, saying Atlas’ support for so-called “focused protection” was “reckless” and “dangerous.”
In late 2020, Atlas reportedly voiced support on social media for the controversial Great Barrington Declaration, a petition that called for the federal government to allow those at “minimal risk of death” to live their normal lives in an attempt to reach herd immunity.
Atlas has since deleted his Twitter profile.
“I felt that he was utilizing incomplete information to make his case, and I think that is always very dangerous,” said of Atlas’ views, adding that he had a “strong belief that anybody who was only going to have mild disease or asymptomatic disease should be allowed and actually encouraged to get the virus and spread the virus because that was your pathway, although it’s never said that way, to herd immunity.”
Atlas has denied the accusations, saying in a statement to the New York Times: “The claim that I advised the President at any point in my time in Washington to ‘let the infection spread widely without mitigation to achieve herd immunity’ is false. I never advised the President, the Task Force, or anyone else while in Washington to allow the virus to spread.”
A spokesperson for the former president similarly defended the previous administration’s actions, writing to the Washington Post: “President Trump led an unprecedented effort to successfully combat the coronavirus, delivering PPE, hospital beds, treatments, and three vaccines in record time. Unfortunately, this approach was not taken up by the current government, and more lives have been lost from covid this year than the entirety of 2020, which the Fake News media places no blame onto Joe Biden.”