- Dr. Deborah Birx raised alarms about Trump's COVID strategy while publicly covering for it.
- New emails obtained by Congress show Birx objecting to the "herd immunity" approach.
- "I just can't," Birx wrote in an August 25, 2020 email to other top US officials.
Dr. Deborah Birx, the White House coronavirus response coordinator, warned that the Trump White House's approach to COVID-19 would contribute to an "unacceptable death toll" especially among people of color while publicly giving the strategy "cover," newly published emails show.
On Monday, August 24, 2020, Birx pulled out of a planned White House roundtable featuring a small group of outside medical experts advising the White House, new emails obtained by the House Select Committee probing the Trump administration's response to the coronavirus show.
The group included those publicly advocating limited coronavirus restrictions and pushing a herd immunity strategy, that, in theory, would have "focused protections" for the most vulnerable populations, like the elderly, with limited mitigation strategies (like masking and social distancing) advised for the rest of the population.
Trump's prepared remarks for the roundtable said that "unending lockdowns" is "not a science based approach — and it would inflict grave harm on our children and our entire society."
On the morning of the 25th, Birx wrote a longer email to former Vice President Mike Pence's then-chief of staff Marc Short explaining why she couldn't "be part" of the roundtable.
"I can't be part of this with these people who believe in herd immunity and believe we are fine with only protecting the 1.5M Americans in [long-term care facilities] and not the 80M+ with co-morbidities in the populations included in the unacceptable death toll among Native Americans, Hispanics, and Blacks," Birx wrote to Short.
Most experts argued at the time that isolating vulnerable people from the rest of the population was not feasible because of the highly transmissible nature of COVID-19, and, prior to the rollout of vaccines, getting to herd immunity through infecting most of the population would lead to an unacceptably high number of deaths. The higher rates of transmission would also make it exceedingly hard to shield the most vulnerable.
Birx warned that the death toll could rise to 500,000 by the time the US had a vaccine, saying, "without masks and social distancing in public and homes we end up with twice as many deaths — we are a very unhealthy nation with a lot of obesity etc."
The group at the August 25 White House roundtable included Dr. Scott Atlas and Dr. Jay Bhattacharya of Stanford, Harvard biostatistician Martin Kulldorf, Dr. Cody Meissner of Tufts University, and Dr. Joseph Ladapo, who was at UCLA at the time and is now Florida's surgeon general.
"These are people who believe that all curves are predetermined and mitigation is irrelevant — they are a fringe group without grounding in epidemics, public health, or on the ground common sense experience," Birx said of the group.
Birx then offered that she was "happy to go out of town or whatever gives the WH cover for Weds," adding that she could do an event in Annapolis with Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan possibly with Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nation's top infectious disease expert at the National Institutes of Health.
Later that morning, Birx then forwarded her email to Short to Fauci, then-FDA Director Stephen Hahn, and then-CDC Director Robert Redfield with the message: "I just can't."
At around the same time in 2020, Birx left the Washington, DC area on a nationwide tour to promote COVID-19 mitigation strategies around the country.
October 2020 emails in the same batch obtained by the Select Committee also included discussions between Fauci and Dr. Francis Collins, the now-outgoing NIH director, on how they could best refute those pushing the herd immunity strategy advocated in the Great Barrington Declaration.
Collins called the Declaration a "proposal from the three fringe epidemiologists," adding, "there needs to be a quick and devastating published take down of its premises."