Deborah Birx, former White House COVID Response Coordinator, joins George W. Bush Institute in Dallas

Deborah Birx, who served as the White House COVID response coordinator under former President Donald Trump, joins the George W. Bush Institute in Dallas as a senior fellow, the organization announced Friday.

At the Institute, Birx will contribute to policy initiatives to better prepare the country for another pandemic. This is one of her most recent actions after she was criticized by many as an excuse for Trump’s coronavirus response. She is stepping down from the White House task force when it passes to President Joe Biden’s administration.

Birx has spent four decades as a public health official, spending much of her career fighting the HIV and Aids epidemic, including overseeing the implementation of the US President’s Emergency Plan for Aids Relief (PEPFAR), a program which Bush created. She has previously worked with the institute on her “Go Further” initiative to reduce cervical cancer among women living with HIV living in sub-Saharan Africa.

“President and Mrs. Bush witnessed the impact of the global HIV / Aids epidemic 20 years ago and responded by establishing the Global Fund and PEPFAR,” Birx said in a press release. “They believed that the crisis could be tackled with people, money and compassion for others. We can do the same today by confronting pandemics with empathy and unity in action. ”

Holly Kuzmich, executive director of the Institute, called Birx “an exemplary civil servant and well-known medical expert” in a press release.

“We are grateful that she brought her expertise, her commitment to lifesaving, her compassionate heart and her brilliant mind to the Bush Institute,” Kuzmich said.

Birx will also join air purifier manufacturer ActivePure Technologies, Dallas, as a Chief Medical and Scientific Advisor Reuters, and she was appointed as an independent director of Innoviva Inc., a health-oriented asset management company in San Francisco, according to the San Francisco Business Times.

Birx was a colonel in the U.S. Army and previously served at the ambassadorial level as the U.S. Global Aids Coordinator before being thrown into the national spotlight as the COVID response coordinator of the White House under Trump.

She described the behind-the-scenes experience of working in the Trump White House during the pandemic in an interview with CBS News. Face the Nation, and noted that infrequent masked wear in the White House and cases where she saw Trump present graphs and data she did not make.

“I do not want to be justified,” Birx said in the interview.

While Birx originally won the favor of the former president – and criticism from Democrats – for publicly supporting Trump’s efforts at the outset of the pandemic, she opposed him when he later called on the country to to open while its presidential campaign begins to push up in the summer. She said she often considers terminating the position.

‘I understood that going to the White House and trying to support a comprehensive response to the coronavirus by harnessing the power of the federal government would be a terminal event for my federal career. That’s part of the reason I did not want to do it. that, ”Birx said in the interview.