Dr. Deborah Birx, who served as the response coordinator on the Trump White House’s coronavirus task force, said she can’t leave the notorious disinfectant injection incident behind her.
“Frankly, I didn’t know how to handle that episode,” Birx said Monday on ABC News Live’s The Breakdown, adding, “I still think about it every day.”
The incident involved then-President Donald Trump suggesting in April of last year that disinfectant could potentially be injected into the body to kill the coronavirus.
DEBORAH BIRX JOINS BUSH INSTITUTE AND AIR PURIFIER MAKER
“And then I see the disinfectant, where it knocks it out in a minute, one minute,” Trump said at the time. “And is there a way we can do something like that by injection inside or almost a cleaning because, you see, it gets in the lungs, and it does a tremendous number on the lungs, so it’d be interesting to check that so that you’re going to have to use medical doctors with, but it sounds interesting to me.”
Trump’s comments, which he insisted were made sarcastically and his administration said were taken out of context by the media, came during a briefing of the coronavirus task force held on April 23. During the briefing, Bill Bryan, who headed the Department of Homeland Security’s Science and Technology Directorate, discussed how UV light and disinfectants are effective at killing the coronavirus.
“I can tell you that bleach will kill the virus in five minutes,” Bryan said, after which Trump mentioned injection.
Birx, who was also present at the briefing, subsequently found herself being asked to speak to Trump’s comments about disinfectant.
“I think it bothers me that this is still in the news cycle because I think we’re missing the bigger pieces of what we need to be doing as an American people to continue to protect one another,” she said the Sunday after the April briefing.
On Monday, Birx added that she and Dr. Anthony Fauci, who was perhaps the most prominent face of Trump’s task force and is now President Biden’s chief medical adviser, mulled over how to be a foil to certain messaging from the White House.
“I can’t tell you how many discussions we had on ‘how do we get the message out,’ realizing what’s happening at the most senior levels of the White House,” she said.
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While Fauci remains on the public payroll, Birx has since left government and now works as a senior fellow at the George W. Bush Institute. She has also been hired by ActivePure Technology, an air filtration company seeking Food and Drug Administration clearance to sell purifiers to remove coronavirus particles.
