WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Dr. Deborah Birx, former coordinator of Trump’s White House Coronavirus task force, takes a job in the private sector, joining a Texas manufacturer that says its purifiers clean COVID-19 in a few minutes and surfaces in a few hours.
Birx will join ActivePure in Dallas as chief scientific and medical advisor, she and the company said Friday.
A global health expert, Birx came to the White House in 2020 to help lead the Trump administration’s response to the pandemic.
But she was criticized for not standing up to former President Donald Trump, while he reduced the virus, predicted it would go away, and wondered if bleach ingestion could help cure infected Americans.
While his friend and former mentor, Dr. Anthony Fauci, was promoted to become top medical adviser to Democratic President Joe Biden, Birx did not get a job in the new administration.
“The Biden administration wanted a clean slate,” she told Reuters in an interview. “I understand that completely.”
Birx left the government earlier this week.
She and Fauci, she said, regularly wondered what could have been done differently in the past year.
“When you have the 100,000 people we lost during the summer and the 300,000 people we lost during the fall-winter growth, you have to ask yourself and know that it didn’t go as well as it should have been, “she said. said.
“We are all responsible for this.”
Coronavirus has killed more than 530,000 people in the United States, more than any other country.
Birx said he is still processing regrets and the measures he could have made more effective.
“I’m trying to order them,” she said. “We have to be willing to take a step back and really look at where we could have been and why we weren’t more efficient.”
Birx said he was concerned about the level of testing in the country, but praised the new administration for modeling the wearing of a mask and other behaviors that help fight the virus.
Trump, a Republican, avoided the masks.
“I think the messaging was very good, very consistent,” she said of the Biden team. “It’s very important when you ask people to change their behavior.”
In addition to her role at ActivePure, Birx has joined the George W. Bush Institute as a member of global health and biopharmaceutical company Innoviva as a board member, she said.
Reporting by Jeff Mason; Editing by Heather Timmons, Kieran Murray and Himani Sarkar