Dr. Deborah Birx, the White House coronavirus response coordinator under the Trump administration, said having to lean on data coming out of Europe during the first months of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 was an “indictment of our system.”
Birx applauded recent efforts to overhaul the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in an interview that aired Sunday, saying the U.S. system failed to provide real-time data in the early days of the pandemic. The health expert has long been critical of data coming from the CDC during her tenure for not being comprehensive and behind other countries.
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“First and foremost, in March of 2020, all of our data that I used to warn Americans of who was at risk for severe disease, hospitalization, and deaths came from our European colleagues,” Birx told CBS News’s Margaret Brennan. “That in itself should be an indictment of our system.”
The comment came after Brennan noted that Birx said back in January 2021 that she did not trust the CDC data she was getting during the Trump administration and bemoaned how ethnicity and race of COVID-19 fatalities sometimes was delayed as many as 30 days.
Birx, who said she had requested the CDC improve its system and develop private partnerships, said she believes the agency needs to work on how public health guidance is delivered. She also praised current the CDC director’s plans to reorganize the agency.
“A lot of directors would have just tried to tweak, and tweaking the agency at this point was not going to be successful,” Birx said. “This is an inflection point.”
CDC Director Rochelle Walensky outlined plans to reorganize the agency in a meeting with staff on Wednesday, embracing recommendations from an external review to prioritize public health needs faster and improve the agency’s communication with the public while citing the CDC’s failure to meet expectations in its response to the coronavirus pandemic.
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Birx suggested the path to building public trust in the CDC was to be transparent.
“You really have to work to reestablish that. It can be done, but they have to change how they collect data, how they present data, and how they communicate to the American people,” Birx said.
