Dr. Deborah Birx recounted an atmosphere of censorship and competition for the former president’s attention regarding key coronavirus data during a wide-ranging, 90-minute interview that aired on Sunday.
During an interview with CBS’s Face the Nation, Birx said she had to “remove all of the ancillary data that was coming in” when she was tapped to serve on former President Donald Trump’s coronavirus task force and said that “parallel data streams” still made their way into the White House — data that different from what she had given to the vice president.
“It took a while after I arrived in the White House to remove all of the ancillary data that was coming in,” Birx said. “I mean, there was parallel data stream coming into the White House that were not transparently utilized. And I needed to stop that.”
Birx said she never determined who was providing the other information to the president or whether it came from someone inside the White House or an outside adviser, but White House coronavirus adviser Scott Atlas “certainly” contributed.
Atlas was a contentious adviser pick who frequently criticized the effectiveness of masks and contradicted data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the World Health Organization.
Birx declined to call the data “disinformation” when prompted by CBS’s Margaret Brennan, referring to it only as “parallel data streams.”
“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. I know what I sent up, and I know that what was in his hands was different from that. You can’t do that. You have to use the entire database.”
During her time on the coronavirus task force, Birx frequently visited state leaders and held phone calls with governors. Birx told CBS that the reason she traveled so much was that she “wasn’t censored on the road.”
“When you have a pandemic where you’re relying on every American to change their behavior, communication is absolutely key,” Birx said. “And so every time a — a statement was made by a political leader that wasn’t consistent with public health needs, that derailed our response. It is also why I went out on the road because I wasn’t censored on the road.”
She continued, “If you noticed, I was not able to do national press. The other thing that was very important to me is I was not going to go outside of the chain of command. And so if our White House comms group did not put me out, I didn’t ask to go out. … There was so much leaking and so many parallel stories being leaked to the press that did not have grounding in truth that I didn’t want to ever be part of that slippery slope. … So I knew that every time I had a significant disagreement in the White House that within days a story would be planted.”
When asked whether she thought her work on the coronavirus pandemic was politicized, Birx said that “pandemics are always political.”
“I’ve worked in 60 countries. Every pandemic is political because you have to make policy changes to confront them, and policies are often political,” she said. “White Houses function in a pretty bureaucratic way and most of the agencies function in a very predictable and bureaucratic way. But when you remove the infrastructure of the civil servants, then you end up with a lot more very quick right turns, left turns, right turns, left turns, and that becomes less predictable and less able to manage that kind of response and change.”
During the interview, Birx said that she intends to retire from the CDC “probably within the next four to six weeks.”
Birx first announced her intent to retire after she and her family faced backlash during the holiday season. Her family made headlines when she appeared to defy her own coronavirus stay-at-home recommendations by traveling for Thanksgiving and gathering with family members from different households.
