Dr. Deborah Birx, the White House coronavirus response coordinator under Donald Trump, recounted Monday the day the former president suggested ingesting disinfectant to treat COVID-19.

In an interview with ABC News’ “Good Morning America,” she also discussed a pact she and other top health officials made to all quit the White House Coronavirus Task Force if one of them had been fired. 

Birx gave the interview while promoting her book, “Silent Invasion: The Untold Story of the Trump Administration, Covid-19, and Preventing the Next Pandemic Before It’s Too Late,” which will be released Tuesday.

When Trump floated the idea of injecting disinfectant during a White House news briefing in April 2020, it appeared to many that he was directing his comments to Birx, who was sitting along the side of the room. 

Birx said government scientists were asked to compare the impact of disinfectants on surfaces to sunlight in hopes of announcing that outdoor playgrounds were safe for children. But before the White House briefing, unbeknownst to her, an Oval Office conversation between Trump and the scientists shifted to the internal use of disinfectants — the scientists were the ones Trump was actually directing his comments to during the news briefing, she said.

“At the beginning, I didn’t even know what was happening,” she told ABC. “I couldn’t understand how disinfectant and sunlight for our outdoor playground equipment became this.”

Birx writes in her book that during the news briefing, “I looked down at my feet and wished for two things: something to kick and for the floor to open up and swallow me whole.”

She said, after the briefing, she immediately went to senior Trump staffers and said, “This has to be reversed immediately, and by the next morning the president was saying it was a joke. But I think he knew by that evening, clearly, that this was dangerous.”

Trump has insisted in the two years since that his comments were made in jest.

Birx also told “GMA” that she; Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases; Dr. Robert Redfield, then the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention; and Dr. Stephen Hahn, then the commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration, made a pact that if Trump fired one of them, the others would resign from the task force. 

“I think that was really important because I really wanted to protect Bob Redfield and Steve Hahn, and they were under enormous pressure,” she said. 

Birx said the Trump administration’s response to the pandemic was a “tragedy on many levels.” She has previously said the U.S. could have dramatically reduced its COVID-19 death toll if the administration had acted earlier and more decisively, and that the administration had censored her.

She said one reason she wrote the book was “so that everybody in America could see what was really happening, what was really getting done.” 

She added: “Because if you don’t see what was happening, then you won’t fix it the next time. So I wanted to be very transparent about what went right and what didn’t go right.”

In a statement last year, Trump called Birx “a proven liar with very little credibility left,” adding, “Many of her recommendations were viewed as pseudo-science.” His administration also has insisted its pandemic response saved millions of lives.