WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Dr. Deborah Birx, the former Trump White House Coronavirus Task Force coordinator, takes a job in the private sector and joins a manufacturer in Texas who says its COVID-19 air purifiers will be out of business in minutes. get air and within hours from surfaces.
Birx will join ActivePure in Dallas as its chief scientific and medical advisor, she and the company said Friday.
Birx, a global health expert, came to the White House in 2020 to help guide the Trump administration’s response to the pandemic.
But she was criticized for not standing up to former President Donald Trump while downplaying the virus, predicting it would go away, and wondering if taking bleach could help cure infected Americans.
While her friend and former mentor, Dr. Anthony Fauci, was promoted to top medical adviser to Democratic President Joe Biden, Birx was denied a job in the new government.
“The Biden government wanted a clean slate,” she told Reuters in an interview. “I totally understand that.”
Birx left the government earlier this week.
She and Fauci, she said, regularly wondered what could have happened differently in the past year.
“When you have the 100,000 people we lost in the summer and the 300,000 people we lost in the fall-winter wave, you have to ask yourself and know that it didn’t go as well as it should.” said.
“We are all responsible for that.”
The coronavirus has killed more than 530,000 people in the United States, more than any other country.
Birx said she was still sorry and the steps she could have taken to be more effective.
“I’m trying to arrange them,” she said. “We have to be willing to step back and really analyze where we could have been and why we weren’t more effective.”
Birx said she remained concerned about the level of testing in the country, but praised the new administration for modeling mask wearing and other behaviors that help fight the virus.
Trump, a Republican, shunned masks.
“I think the coverage was very good, very consistent,” she said of the Biden team. “That is very important when you ask people to change their behavior.”
In addition to her role at ActivePure, Birx has also joined the George W. Bush Institute as a global health fellow and the biopharmaceutical company Innoviva as a board member, she said.
Reporting by Jeff Mason; Editing by Heather Timmons, Kieran Murray and Himani Sarkar