Dr. Deborah L. Birks, Coronavirus Response Coordinator for President Donald J. Trump told a congressional committee investigating the federal pandemic response that Trump White House officials had asked her to change or delete portions of the weekly guidelines she sent to state and local health officials in what she described as consistent. efforts to stifle information as virus cases increased in the second half of 2020.
Dr. Birks, who testified publicly before the panel Thursday morning, also told the commission that Trump White House officials withheld reports from states during a winter epidemic and refused to publicly release documents containing data on the spread of virus and recommendations on how to contain it.
Her account of White House intervention came in a multi-day interview conducted by the commission in October 2021, which was published Thursday with a set of emails sent by Dr. Birks to colleagues in 2020 warning of the influence of a new adviser. on the White House pandemic, Dr. Scott Atlas, who she says downplays the threat of the virus. The emails give a new insight into how Dr. Birks and Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, the government’s chief infectious disease expert, struggled with what Dr. Birks called the disinformation spread by Dr. Atlas.
The pressure to downplay the threat was so widespread, Dr Birks told commission investigators, that she had developed techniques to avoid the attention of White House officials who may have objected to her public health recommendations. In reports she prepared for local health officials, she said she sometimes put ideas at the end of sentences so that colleagues reviewing the text would not notice them.
In her testimony Thursday, she offered similar grueling assessments of the Trump administration’s response to the coronavirus, suggesting that officials in 2020 misjudged the coronavirus as flu-like, even after seeing high mortality from Covid-19 in Asia. and Europe. That, she said, caused “a false sense of security in America,” as well as “a feeling among the American people that this would not be a serious pandemic.”
The non-use of “short, consistent communication”, she added, “led to inaction in the beginning, I think in our agencies”.
And those who are guilty, she said, are not “just the president.”
“Many of our leaders used words like ‘We could keep them,'” she continued. “And you can’t contain a virus that can’t be seen. And it wasn’t visible because we weren’t testing. “
Dr. Birks became a controversial figure during his time at Trump’s White House. A respected AIDS researcher, she was removed from her position to lead the government’s program to combat the international HIV epidemic to coordinate Covid’s federal response.
But her credibility was called into question when she failed to correct Mr Trump’s unscientific reasoning about the coronavirus and praised it on television as “attentive to the scientific literature.” She was also criticized for backing reports in the White House in the first months of the coronavirus outbreak that the pandemic was waning.
Yet as the epidemic continued that same year, Mr. Trump and some senior advisers became increasingly impatient with Dr. Birks and her public health colleagues, who called for mitigation efforts. In search of the opposite presence, the White House hired Dr. Atlas, who acted as a rival to Dr. Birks.
“They believed the opposite points, which were never supported by data from Dr. Atlas,” she said at Thursday’s hearing.
In an email received by the commission on August 11, 2020, Dr. Birks told Dr. Fauci and other colleagues about what she called a “very dangerous” meeting in the Oval Office with Mr. Trump. During that session, she said, Dr. Atlas called the masks “overrated and unnecessary” and challenged testing for the virus, saying it could harm Mr. Trump politically.
Dr Birks says Dr Atlas has inspired Mr Trump to call for closer recommendations on who to look for tests.
“Identifying the case is bad for the re-election of the president – testing should only be done on patients,” she said, saying Dr. Atlas.
“He noted that the task force got us into this ditch by encouraging testing and falsely increasing the number of cases compared to other countries,” she added, referring to a group of senior health officials who meet regularly at the White House. “The conclusion was that Dr. Atlas is brilliant and the president will follow his guidelines now.”
In another email sent to senior health officials two days later, Dr. Birks cataloged seven ideas supported by Dr. Atlas, which she called misinformation, including that the virus is comparable to the flu, that footballers cannot become seriously ill with a virus and that “children are immunized”.
“I’m lost in what we need to do,” she wrote, warning that if workloads continue to rise, there will be “300,000 dead by December.” The United States ended the year with more than 350,000 deaths from Covid.
“I know what I’m going to do,” Dr. Fauci wrote in response. “I will continue to say what we have been saying all along, which contradicts each of its 7 points below. If the press asks me if what I say is different from his, I will simply say that I respectfully disagree with him.
In interviews with the commission last year, Dr. Birks described regular attempts by others to undermine the weekly estimates of the pandemic, which he first sent to government and local officials in June 2020, offering “comprehensive data and country-specific recommendations on the state of a pandemic “, the commission wrote in a press release.
Beginning in the fall of that year, Dr. Birks said, she began receiving a “three- or four-state change list” each week, which sometimes included offers to loosen mask recommendations or indoor capacity limits. In one case, she was asked to soften the guidelines for South Dakota officials and remove some recommendations for the state, which had a jump in the number of cases at the time.
When she asked the White House to publish the reports so Americans would know more about outbreaks in their communities, the request was denied, she told investigators. In December 2020, she told them that the White House had stopped sending reports to the states unless requested.
Dr Birks told the commission’s investigators that she had been asked to change the reports about “25 per cent” of the time, otherwise they would not be sent.
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