Dr. Deborah Birx, who worked as the Trump administration’s response coordinator, recently revealed that someone gave former President Donald Trump “parallel data” about COVID-19 that conflicted with her own.
What’s going on?
Birx said on Sunday on CBS’s “Face the Nation” that she gave President Trump hard numbers to help fight the COVID-19 pandemic. However, there was someone else giving up other numbers, she said.
- “Someone out there, or someone inside, was creating a parallel set of data and graphics that were shown to the president,” she said Sunday on CBS’s “Face the Nation.” “I know what I sent up, and I know that what was in his hands was different.”
Birx told “Face the Nation” that she consistently thought about quitting her job, too. She had been selected by Vice President Mike Pence to lead out on the coronavirus response, but continued to face problems that added stress to her job.
For example, Birx said President Trump started to receive and share “a parallel data stream coming into the White House that were not transparently utilized.”
- “I saw the president presenting graphs that I never made,” she said.
Context
Birx’s comments come as Dr. Anthony Fauci, one of the top infectious disease experts in the country who worked with the Trump administration on the COVID-19 response, expressed his disappointments with the Trump response in an interview with The New York Times.
Fauci told The New York Times that President Trump would call him to “express disappointment in me that I was not being more positive. He added that Trump surrounded himself “with people saying things that didn’t make any scientific sense.”
- Fauci said Birx had “much more of a painful situation” because she was closely tied to the White House.
Fauci told The New York Times he never considered walking away.
- “I always felt that if I did walk away, the skunk at the picnic would no longer be at the picnic,” Fauci said. “Even if I wasn’t very effective in changing everybody’s minds, the idea that they knew that nonsense could not be spouted without my pushing back on it, I felt was important.”