Dr. Deborah Birx Claims Some States Kept ‘Very Tight’ 2020 COVID Restrictions to Hurt Trump

Dr. Deborah Birx, who served as the coordinator of the White House Coronavirus Task Force under President Donald Trump, claimed some states kept tight COVID restrictions in place in 2020 “because it was an election year.”

Birx appeared on CBS News’s Takeout With Major Garrett Wednesday, where she talked about the politics behind the COVID response.

“It was said today many times by Republicans, or implied rather, that Dr. [Anthony] Fauci was a villain or a monster or someone who had some reckoning to come to because of all the mistakes he made and he foisted on the American public,” Garrett said. “I’d like your evaluation of that line of criticism.”

“I think all of us need to be quite honest with ourselves about how not only the information evolved, but the needs for the relevant, what we call, countermeasures, should have also evolved,” Birx responded.

“What do I mean by that? When this first hit, we didn’t have enough testing out there. We couldn’t stop the spread in any way. Hospitals were being overrun. We didn’t have a supply chain that matched the need.

“And so the first part in the few months were a crisis,” she said. “But once we got additional therapies, monoclonal antibodies, long-acting monoclonal antibodies, Remdezivir, where there were actually additional treatments, then you can pull back on some of the mitigation.”

Birx added:

But because it was an election year, there were states that persisted in their very tight mitigations and others that showed us a way that you could open K-12 and higher ed. And I saw it myself. If you gave higher ed tests, they really prevented spread.

And so we should have a dialogue about how are we going to do this next time? How are we going to prevent spread? How do we keep K-12 open? How do we keep higher ed open? How do we keep businesses open? And there’s a way to do it. And then we have that roadmap, but we need to get that down in real concrete terms and have both the right and the left agree that that’s the best way forward.

Birx was famously photographed looking noticeably uncomfortable when Trump suggested during a 2020 press conference that injecting disinfectants like bleach could treat COVID-19.

She told ABC News in 2021, “Frankly, I didn’t know how to handle that episode,” adding, “You can see how extraordinarily uncomfortable I was.”

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