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deborah birx
Birx Says Most Covid Deaths in US Were Preventable, So Ted Lieu Asks: Why Didn't You Challenge Trump?
"The malicious incompetence that resulted in hundreds of thousands of unnecessary deaths starts at the top, with the former President and his enablers."
Mar 28, 2021
After Former White House coronavirus response coordinator Dr. Deborah Birx said this weekend that hundreds of thousands of Covid-19 deaths in the United States could have been avoided had the previous administration responded more quickly and purposefully, Democratic Rep. Ted Lieu of California slammed the official for enabling former President Donald Trump's "malicious incompetence."
During an interview featured in a CNN documentary titled Covid War: The Pandemic Doctors Speak Out, which aired Sunday, CNN chief medical correspondent Sanjay Gupta asked Birx to describe "how much of an impact" she thinks it would have made had public authorities taken earlier and more decisive action to mitigate the spread of the virus.
"I look at it this way: The first time, we have an excuse. There were about 100,000 deaths that came from that original surge," Birx told Gupta. "All of the rest of them, in my mind, could have been mitigated or decreased substantially."
The national Covid-19 death toll is approaching 550,000, which means that, if Birx's assessment of the country's pandemic response is correct, more than 400,000 Americans died--and millions of loved ones suffered--unnecessarily as a result of political negligence. One journalist called the admission "utterly devastating."
Birx's acknowledgement that coronavirus cases, hospitalizations, and deaths in the United States could have been significantly lower provoked a sharp rebuke from Lieu, who criticized the former White House official for not publicly objecting to Trump's lethal mishandling of the pandemic.
"The malicious incompetence that resulted in hundreds of thousands of unnecessary deaths starts at the top, with the former President and his enablers," Lieu said in a tweet. "And who was one of his enablers? Dr. Birx, who was afraid to challenge his unscientific rhetoric and wrongfully praised him."
\u201cThe malicious incompetence that resulted in hundreds of thousands of unnecessary deaths starts at the top, with the former President and his enablers.\n\nAnd who was one of his enablers? Dr. Birx, who was afraid to challenge his unscientific rhetoric and wrongfully praised him.\u201d— Ted Lieu (@Ted Lieu) 1616869245
As the Washington Post reported Saturday, "Last March, Birx praised Trump for being 'so attentive to the scientific literature and the details and the data' with regards to the outbreak."
In addition, the newspaper noted, "Birx had presented overly optimistic data several times," and she "also sat quietly at a news conference last April when Trump pondered whether people could be injected with disinfectant to 'knock out' the coronavirus."
In a Dissent article published earlier this month, historian Colin Gordon acknowledged that "the Trump administration's response to the Covid-19 pandemic set new standards for incompetence, defiance of basic science and public health precautions, and petty politicization of the smallest policy details."
Nevertheless, Gordon added, "the administration's failures marked a difference in degree, not in kind. Deep inequities in health provision, underinvestment in public health, and indifference to the punishing inequality hardwired into our economy and our social policies all preceded Trump and--without bold action--will certainly outlast him."
"An important part of this longer history," Gordon wrote, "is federalism: the abdication of national responsibility for basic social policy standards to state governments."
As Common Dreams reported earlier this month, a new peer-reviewed study shows that as 2020 progressed, Covid-19 incidence and death rates became higher in states led by Republican governors--an outcome the researchers attribute to diverging approaches to public health policies that affected the spread of the virus.
"Republican governors... were slower to adopt stay-at-home orders, if they did so at all," while "Democratic governors had longer durations of stay-at-home orders," the researchers wrote. In addition, they pointed out that having a Democratic governor was "the most important predictor of state mandates to wear face masks."
As Gordon noted, "deference to state governments--many without the capacity or the willingness to make meaningful investments in public goods and services--also has significant effects on the broader social determinants of health."
Gordon's observation about the relationship between policymaking and well-being dovetails with other recent research documenting how union-busting and austerity--key components of the past half-century of neoliberalization--have worsened socio-economic inequalities, vulnerabilities, and coronavirus mortality.
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Dr. Birx Criticized for Failing to Speak Out on Trump's 'Parallel Data': Her 'Legacy is One of Sycophancy and Failure'
'Dr. Birx went out of her way to praise Trump and just straight up lied'
Jan 23, 2021
Dr. Deborah Birx, who was the Trump administration's coordinator of the Coronavirus Task Force, said in a CBS News' Face The Nation interview that aired Sunday that ex-President Donald Trump had been reviewing "parallel" data sets on the coronavirus pandemic from someone inside the administration.
"I saw the president presenting graphs that I never made," Birx said. "So, I know that someone out there or someone inside was creating a parallel set of data and graphics that were shown to the president."
Birx said she doesn't know who gave the Trump competing information but "I know now by watching some of the tapes that certainly Scott Atlas brought in parallel data streams." She added: "I don't know who else was part of it, but I think when the record goes back and people see what I was writing on a daily basis that was sent up to White House leadership, that they will see that I was highly specific on what I was seeing and what needed to be done."
Birx was blasted after her comments Sunday for failing to speak out at the time to set the record straight about what she saw in the White House:
\u201cSo brave of her to speak up now, when in real time she was telling audiences that the President was great at analyzing data. So... Dr. Birx legacy is one of failure, sycophancy and failure.\u201d— Soledad O'Brien (@Soledad O'Brien) 1611498680
\u201cSo maybe Dr. Birx should explain why she didn\u2019t set the record straight when she saw this.\n\nOf course she won\u2019t, because she was more committed to keeping her job than actually doing it well.\u201d— Dr. Angela Rasmussen (@Dr. Angela Rasmussen) 1611500198
Birx also said that there were COVID-19 deniers at the White House.
"There were people who definitely believed that this was a hoax," she said. "I think the information was confusing at the beginning. I think because we didn't talk about the spectrum of the disease, everyone interpreted what they knew."
\u201cIn fact, Birx gave data to Trump to mislead the public before he turned to Scott Atlas for even more misleading stats. I reported on her doing this in April https://t.co/Ch1hqm3RRN and July https://t.co/6TdpGXlSnv In August he switched to Atlas' fake data https://t.co/0dyRC6XcL3\u201d— Robert Mackey (@Robert Mackey) 1611523478
\u201cWOW!!! This Dr. Birx interview discusses a COVID disinformation campaign should lead to criminal charges if true.\u201d— Fred Guttenberg (@Fred Guttenberg) 1611496183
When asked what her biggest mistake was during her time in the Trump administration, Birx said she should have been "more outspoken," especially on the issue of COVID testing. "I didn't know all the consequences of all these issues," she said. Birx has been criticized for never publicly challenging Trump's suggestion to inject bleach, and after she warned of a dangerous "new phase" of the pandemic last August, Trump tweeted that her comments were "pathetic."
So Crazy Nancy Pelosi said horrible things about Dr. Deborah Birx, going after her because she was too positive on the very good job we are doing on combatting the China Virus, including Vaccines & Therapeutics. In order to counter Nancy, Deborah took the bait & hit us. Pathetic!
-- Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 3, 2020
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'This Is a Pandemic. You Cannot Hide It': Experts Denounce White House Secrecy in Private Warning to Cities to Take 'Aggressive' Covid Action
"The more that we can provide information to people to keep themselves and their families safe, the better off we'll be."
Jul 23, 2020
A private warning about rising coronavirus cases made to leaders in 11 cities by White House official Dr. Deborah Birx on Wednesday is the latest sign that the Trump administration must end the secrecy surrounding its response to the pandemic, an investigative journalism group said Wednesday.
In an exclusive report about Birx's Wednesday phone call to city officials, the Center for Public Integrity (CPI) revealed that Baltimore, Cleveland, Columbus, Indianapolis, Las Vegas, Miami, Minneapolis, Nashville, New Orleans, Pittsburgh, and St. Louis have all been identified this week as cities where immediate, "aggressive" action is needed to mitigate their coronavirus outbreaks.
All the cities are seeing increases in coronavirus test positivity rates. Birx told officials that as soon as even a slight climb in positivity rates is detected, city leaders must begin mitigation efforts such as contact tracing, closing restaurants, and urging residents to wear masks.
"If you wait another three or four or even five days, you'll start to see a dramatic increase in cases," Birx, the White House's coronavirus response coordinator, said on the call.
According to Vanderbilt University researchers, Nashville's positivity rate has already been going up for several weeks.
Public health experts identified Birx's private call, which was closed to the press, as the latest evidence that the White House is keeping key information about the pandemic from the public--a trend that could continue to weaken the nation's ability to mitigate the spread of Covid-19.
"This is a pandemic. You cannot hide it under the carpet," Bill Hanage, a Harvard epidemiologist, told CPI. "The best way to deal with a crisis or a natural disaster is to be straight with people, to earn their trust, and to give the information they need to make decisions for themselves and their communities."
The call came less than a week after CPI reported on a list of 18 states which the White House had privately identified as being in the pandemic "red zone," meaning they each had more than 100 new coronavirus cases per 100,000 people in the last week.
Dr. Ashish Jha, director of the Harvard Global Health Institute, wondered why information about "red zone" states is not being disseminated to the public on a regular basis, allowing people to make choices about the amount of contact they have with others while cases are going up.
"The fact that it's not public makes no sense to me," Jha told CPI. "Why are we hiding this information from the American people?"
Neil Ralston, a journalism professor in St. Louis, also asked on Twitter why the White House would want to keep secret the need for aggressive action in his city.
\u201cNot sure why the White House wants to keep secret the idea that St. Louis and 10 other cities need to take aggressive action, but . . . https://t.co/I2tlQVcCKZ\u201d— Neil Ralston (@Neil Ralston) 1595512920
CPI reported that while hundreds of emergency managers and political leaders from the states and cities in question were on the call, Baltimore's health department was not informed of the call. In order to get vital public health information promptly to the public, one epidemiologist told CPI, the White House must look beyond communicating with elected officials.
"It's not just people who are holding office who need to make decisions," Caitlin Rivers of Johns Hopkins University said. "The more that we can provide information to people to keep themselves and their families safe, the better off we'll be."
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