Dr. Birx Says US COVID Deaths Could Have Been Decreased Substantially

Once, Dr. Deborah Birx was former President Trump’s right-hand woman and champion in the fight against the coronavirus. Now a critical retiree, Birx says that many U.S. deaths “could have been mitigated or decreased substantially.”

For most of 2020, Birx was a regular fixture at daily White House briefings on the spread of the deadly coronavirus — or the perceived lack thereof. The former administration’s coronavirus coordinator, Birx watched as Trump consistently cast doubt on the severity of the pandemic and the validity of science. Time after time, however, she said nothing even in the face of extremely dangerous misinformation.

Meanwhile, America began its deadly descent with COVID-19, whose death count is still climbing today and was approaching 550,000 at presstime.

Now that Birx has retired from the government, however, the doctor is speaking freely and frequently about how American leadership got it all wrong.

On CNN, Birx said that the first spike of U.S. COVID-19 deaths, numbering in the hundreds of thousands, could have been far fewer if officials had been more aggressive. She told CBS that she’d often considered quitting her job.

Yet she was still in the room when Trump suggested that people could do an “internal cleaning” of sorts by injecting cleaning solutions, an idea so literally toxic that Clorox and other industry product-makers denounced it on social media.

Only late in Trump’s presidency, when he brought in neuro-radiologist Scott Atlas to endorse his falsely sunny assessment of America’s COVID-19 plight, did Birx begin to slowly extract herself and speak out. And those in the know are not letting her forget it.

Rep. Ted Lieu (D-Calif.), for one, called Birx an enabler of Trump’s slow response in a tweet: