Getty Coronavirus Response Coordinator Dr. Deborah Birx listens as US President Donald Trump speaks during the daily briefing at the White House.
Dr. Deborah Birx, a key leader in Donald Trump‘s White House Coronavirus Task Force addressed the elephant in the room while speaking with CNN’s Jake Tapper on Sunday morning.
The White House’s coronavirus response coordinator, who’s been working closely alongside Dr. Anthony Fauci to help America fight the pandemic spread of COVID-19, found herself in the national media spotlight after Trump decided to offer up his own possible cure during his press conference on Thursday.
“It bothers me that this is still in the news cycle,” Birx, told CNN’s State of the Union. “I worry that we don’t get the information to the American people that they need when we continue to bring up something that was from Thursday night. Because I think we’re missing the bigger pieces of what we need to be doing as an American people to continue to protect one another.”
After serving two decades in the Army as an immunology clinician, and working as the former Ambassador-at-Large and US Global AIDS Coordinator from 2014 to 2020, she is highly qualified to speak on the novel coronavirus, however, it’s proven difficult for anyone who listened to Trump speak on April 23 to simply brush off his bold suggestions to kill COVID-19.
While the President has since tried to claim that his comments were made in sarcasm, this is what Trump said on Thursday: “So supposing we hit the body with a tremendous, whether it’s ultraviolet or just very powerful light, and I think you said that hasn’t been checked, but you’re going to test it?”
“[What if] you brought the light inside the body, in which you can do, either through the skin or in some other way. And I think you said you’re going to test that too? Sounds interesting. Right and then I see the disinfectant knocks it out in a minute, one minute. Is there a way we can do something like that? By injection inside or almost a cleaning. As you know it gets inside the lungs. So it would be interesting to check that.”
Dr. Birx Seemed to Defend President Trump While Speaking With Fox News on Saturday
While appearing on Fox News’ Watters World on Saturday, Birx first spoke out on Trump’s viral comments from Thursday’s press briefing and seemed to defend the President.
She said, “I think the media is very slicey and dicey about how they put sentences together in order to create headlines. We know for millennials in other studies that some people may only read the headlines. And if there’s not a graphic, they’re not going to look any further than that.”
“And I think we have to be responsible about our headlines,” she continued. “I think often, the reporting maybe accurate in paragraph three, four, and five. But I’m not sure how many people actually get to paragraph three, four, and five. And I think the responsibility that the press has is to really ensure that the headlines reflect that science and data that is in their piece itself.”
Dr. Birx’s Initial Facial Reaction to Trump’s Disinfectant & Sunlight Injection Comments Went Viral
Here is Dr. Birx’s reaction when President Trump asks his science advisor to study using UV light on the human body and injecting disinfectant to fight the coronavirus.
Afte bring ridiculed in the media and on heavily slammed on Twitter, with doctors speaking out to reiterate that no one should drink or inject themselves with cleaning disinfectants, Trump addressed his controversial comments on Friday from the White House.
He said, “I was asking a sarcastic, and a very sarcastic question to the reporters in the room about disinfectant on the inside. But it does kill it, and it would kill it on the hands, that would make things much better. That was done in the form of a sarcastic question to the reporters.”
Birx also addressed on Sunday that her facial expression following Trump’s comments were misinterpreted by the media.
“We have made it clear, and when he turned to me, I made it clear and he understood that it was not as a treatment. And I think that kind of dialogue will happen,” Birx said.
“I think what got lost in there, which is very unfortunate in what happened next, is that study was critically important for the American people.”
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