WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Former Trump White House coronavirus coordinator Dr. Deborah Birx takes a job in the private sector and joins a Texas manufacturer who says the COVID-19 cleaners air cleaning and within hours of surfaces.
Birx will join ActivePure in Dallas as chief scientific and medical adviser, she and the company said Friday.
Birx, a global health expert, came to the White House in 2020 to help guide the Trump administration’s response to the pandemic.
But she is criticized for not standing up to former President Donald Trump as he turned off the virus, predicted it would disappear, and questioned whether the use of bleach could help cure the infected Americans.
While her friend and former mentor, Dr. Anthony Fauci, was promoted to a top medical adviser to Democratic President Joe Biden, Birx did not get a job in the new administration.
“Biden’s government wanted a clean slate,” she told Reuters in an interview. “I fully understand that.”
Birx left the government earlier this week.
She and Fauci, she said, frequently asked themselves what could have been done differently over the past year.
“If you have the 100,000 people we lost during the summer, and the 300,000 people we lost during the fall-winter boom, you need to ask yourself and know that it did not go as well as it should have. not, “she said. said.
“All of us are responsible for that.”
The coronavirus has killed more than 530,000 people in the United States, more than any other country.
Birx said she still regrets processing and that the steps she could take to be more effective.
“I’m trying to arrange them,” she said. “We need to be willing to step back and really analyze where we could have been and why we were no longer effective.”
Birx said she remains concerned about the level of testing in the country, but she praised the new government for modeling masked behavior and other behaviors that fight the virus.
Trump, a Republican, has deviated from masks.
“I think the messages were very good, very consistent,” she said of the Biden team. “It’s really important when you ask people to change their behavior.”
In addition to her role at ActivePure, Birx has also joined the George W. Bush Institute as a global health fellow and the biopharmaceutical company Innoviva as a board member, she said.
Reporting by Jeff Mason; Edited by Heather Timmons, Kieran Murray and Himani Sarkar