Most deaths from coronavirus in the US were preventable, says former Trump administration official

Once the United States exceeded the threshold of 100,000 deaths from covid-19, all those that came after could have been “mitigated or lowered considerably,” according to the former coordinator of the White House task force against it. coronavirus, Deborah Birx.

The statements of Birx, included in a program that the CNN network will broadcast this Sunday and of which the channel advanced some extracts, have generated controversy in a country where the death toll from the pandemic is already close to 550,000.

“The first time, we had an excuse”, He said Birx, who coordinated last year the team against him covid-19 in the White House of the former US president Donald Trump.

“There were about 100,000 deaths that came from that original outbreak (of covid-19 in the United States). The rest of them, in my opinion, could have been mitigated or considerably lowered ”, added the doctor.

In the excerpt advanced by CNN, Birx It did not clarify how the deaths beyond the first 100,000, which were reached at the end of last May, could have been prevented or reduced.

Birx, a diplomat and doctor who left the government team against the covid-19 When President Joe Biden came to power in January, he did not share the fame he has achieved in USA the other key figure in the federal response to the pandemic, chief epidemiologist Anthony Fauci.

Unlike Fauci, who often contradicted the statements of Trump about the pandemic and now advising Biden on the virus, Birx He was criticized for being silent or even praising the management of the now former president.

In January, the doctor confessed to CBS News that she thought about resigning many times because she felt that the White House was censoring the science-based information she had to contribute about the pandemic, in addition to prohibiting her from speaking to the media for a time. .

In his interview this Sunday with CNN, Birx He also assured that he had a “very uncomfortable” conversation with Trump last August, after she gave an interview to the same chain in which she warned that the covid-19 was “extraordinarily widespread” in the country.

“It was a very difficult time, because everyone in the White House was angry about that interview, because of the clarity with which I spoke about the epidemic. The president called me. It was very uncomfortable, very direct and very difficult to hear ”, Birx indicated.

USA It is the country most affected by the pandemic in absolute terms, with more than 30.2 million infections and almost 549,000 deaths, according to the independent count from Johns Hopkins University.