Pandemic doctors speak out

Dr. Deborah Birx, the White House coronavirus task force coordinator under President Trump, reflected on her time under the former president and what she considered “fault number one” in responding to the coronavirus pandemic.

More on Birx: She has been a government employee since 1980 when she joined the Army shortly after receiving her medical degree, and is now one of the country’s top immunologists.

Dr. Deborah Birx, who served as the White House coronavirus response coordinator under former President Donald Trump, said that she received a “very uncomfortable” and “very difficult” phone call from Trump after speaking publicly about the spread of Covid-19.

Birx said the phone call followed her appearance on CNN in August.

“I got called by the President,” Birx said. “It was very uncomfortable, very direct and very difficult to hear.” 

Gupta asked, “Were you threatened?” 

Birx responded, “I would say it was a very uncomfortable conversation.” 

Dr. Stephen Hahn, former commissioner of the US Food and Drug Administration, said in a CNN special report Sunday night that he still stands by the agency’s decision to issue an emergency use authorization, or EUA, for the drug hydroxychloroquine to treat Covid-19. That EUA was later revoked.

At the time, former President Trump frequently touted the use of hydroxychloroquine for the treatment of Covid-19.

“My lesson from that is that the discussion around medical interventions for a public health emergency are best held by medical experts,” Hahn said.

“When the President, from whatever podium he was at, talked about a therapeutic or some medical intervention, that became a political football, frankly,” Hahn said. “It was an unfortunate situation.”

One of the saddest sights former Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Dr. Stephen Hahn says he witnessed while a member of the White House coronavirus task force was the politicization of mask-wearing. 

Mask wearing today: A single-layer mask isn’t really effective in blocking aerosols, studies show, and even homemade two- and three-ply fabric masks are only partially protective, somewhere in the 50% to 60% range of effectiveness.

Surgical masks, also called medical-grade masks, are made of three layers of nonwoven fabric typically made from plastic. The colored top layer of fabric is made of medical-grade spunbond polypropylene, which is a resin polymer heat-bonded into a weblike structure.

A 2020 study found surgical masks were about 50% effective at protecting the wearer from other people’s aerosols and between 60% and 70% effective at protecting others.

But put a surgical mask under a cloth mask and you get “over 91% removal efficiency for particles,” said Joseph Allen, an associate professor at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and the director of the school’s Healthy Buildings program, in a recent interview.

Dr. Anthony Fauci didn’t mince words when he described how he felt seeing his previous boss, President Trump, calling on states to “liberate” themselves in April 2020 while large swaths of the country remained shutdown due to the coronavirus pandemic.

More context: Trump lashed out on April 17, 2020, at Democrats, trying to pass the buck for his handling of the coronavirus pandemic and hoping to pass the blame for an economy ravaged on his watch.

The strategy of division was on full display with Trump aiming ire at Democratic governors in key battleground states through a series of three rapid-fire Tweets: “LIBERATE MICHIGAN!” “LIBERATE MINNESOTA!”

Dr. Robert Redfield, a trained virologist who led the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention under President Trump, reflected on the failed coronavirus test kits the organization had produced early on in the pandemic.

What happened exactly: On February 5, 2020, the CDC said it would begin shipping test kits to health labs throughout the country, but in subsequent days public labs found a defect. 

When public labs first receive any test kit, they first verify that it works.

“It gave them an inconclusive result, so the test was not valid,” said Scott Becker, the CEO of the Association of Public Health Laboratories. 

A CDC official said on February 12 a part of the test needed to be remanufactured.

The United States did not know how much emergency supply the nation had access to at the start of the coronavirus pandemic, Dr. Robert Kadlec, former US assistant secretary of Health and Human Services, said in a CNN special report Sunday night.

Kadlec has come under fire in a whistleblower complaint that alleges he was slow to respond to the pandemic threat in the early days. Kadlec told Gupta that he would “challenge some of the accuracies” of that complaint.

“We had no systems in place. The way to find out how many ventilators were being used is to call up and see. Well, who are the manufacturers? We don’t know,” Adm. Brett Giroir, who served as US Health and Human Services assistant secretary under President Trump, said in the documentary.

“What’s the supply chain? We don’t know,” Giroir said. “How many tests do we have in the stockpile? Well, there was no test in the stockpile. How many swabs do we have? We didn’t have a single swab. So all of this was starting from scratch.”

Watch:

Dr. Robert Redfield, the former director of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, told CNN’s Dr. Sanjay Gupta he believes the origin of the Covid-19 pandemic is a lab in China — a controversial theory without evidence.

“If I was to guess, this virus started transmitting somewhere in September, October in Wuhan,” Redfield told Gupta. “That’s my own feelings. And only opinion. I’m allowed to have opinions now.”

Redfield, a virologist who led the CDC under former President Donald Trump, said he thinks the virus originated inside a lab in China and “escaped,” not necessarily intentionally.

There is no clear evidence to support the “lab leak” theory, although it has played an ongoing role in conspiracies and speculation, including statements from Trump. The World Health Organization has called it “extremely unlikely.”

Watch Dr. Redfield speak with Dr. Sanjay Gupta:

Dr. Robert Kadlec, the former top disaster response official at the Department of Health and Human Services, said he believes China had roughly a month head start in preparing for the coronavirus pandemic

Kadlec was the HHS assistant secretary for preparedness and response, known as the ASPR.

More context: According to Dr. Robert Redfield, a trained virologist tapped by President Trump back in 2018 to lead the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention after a long career in public health, his counterpart at the China CDC, Dr. George Gao, was initially left in the dark about the magnitude of the public health problem until early January.

He described a private phone call he had with Gao in early January 2020, when Gao became distraught and started crying after finding “a lot of cases” among individuals who had not been to the wet market.

Gao, Redfield said, “came to the conclusion that the cat was out of the bag.”

The Chinese government has rejected accusations made by the United States and other Western governments that it deliberately concealed information relating to the virus, maintaining that it has been upfront since the beginning of the outbreak. 

Watch:

Dr. Anthony Fauci said one of the biggest hurdles to navigate at the start of the pandemic was working with Chinese scientists and officials to determine what Covid-19 information out of the country to trust. 

Fauci said his skepticism was influenced by the SARS outbreak.

Fauci added: “I think if we had sent our people into Wuhan and [were] able to talk to the Chinese scientists in a conversation that might have lasted an hour, you could have gotten so much information.”

China’s take: Chinese President Xi Jinping has said the country acted in an “open, transparent, and responsible manner” in its handling of the coronavirus pandemic.

Xi made the comments while awarding medals to four people for their outstanding contributions during the pandemic at a ceremony in September in Beijing.

Among the four were the country’s top respiratory disease expert, Zhong Nanshan, according to Chinese state broadcaster CCTV. 

Watch:

Dr. Deborah Birx, who served as the White House coronavirus response coordinator under former President Donald Trump, said in a CNN documentary clip released Saturday that she thinks the United States could have saved the hundreds of thousands of lives lost to Covid-19 following the pandemic’s first surge.

So far during the pandemic, the United States has seen more than 548,000 deaths due to Covid-19.

“I look at it this way – the first time we have an excuse. There were about 100,000 deaths that came from that original surge,” Birx said. “All of the rest of them, in my mind, could have been mitigated or decreased substantially.”

In other words, the Trump administration and the country could have done more.

Watch:

Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said that the rise in Covid-19 hospitalizations and deaths across New York City early on in the pandemic was when he realized just how important a vaccine would be.

“Was there a moment, Dr. Fauci, when you said, ‘OK this is the big one?’ ” CNN Chief Medical Correspondent Dr. Sanjay Gupta asked Fauci about the pandemic during “COVID WAR: The Pandemic Doctors Speak Out.”

Watch Dr. Fauci explain:

Having spent his entire professional life working around infectious diseases, Dr. Anthony Fauci said metaphors are very common and when it comes to viruses like Covid-19, “they have a mind.”

More on Fauci’s history: Since 1984, he has been the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.

He has served under seven US presidents, starting with Ronald Reagan, and in 2008 he was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

As the nation’s top infectious disease expert, Fauci has worked on the federal response to AIDS, Ebola, the Zika virus and anthrax scares, just to name a few.

Watch:

Dr. Deborah Birx, the White House coronavirus task force coordinator under President Trump, and Dr. Anthony Fauci, joined CNN along with four other doctors to speak candidly about their experience serving under the Trump administration at the height of the pandemic.

The pair, who worked closely with one another during the HIV epidemic, drew on that collective experience when working with Trump.

Fauci described what became known as “the doctors’ group,” which consisted mainly of the pair and Dr. Robert Redfield, the former Centers for Disease Control and Prevention director, Dr. Stephen Hahn, the former commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration, Dr. Brett Giroir, the former coronavirus testing czar under Trump, and Dr. Jerome Adams, the former surgeon general. Of all four of them, Fauci said Birx “had a much more difficult situation, she had an office right there in the West Wing.”

“Boy, she did a lot of good,” Fauci added. “She knocked herself out getting up at 3 o’clock in the morning, putting that data together, presenting it every day.”

More on Birx: In late January, Birx said she “always” considered quitting Trump’s White House coronavirus task force and was troubled by colleagues’ perceptions that she had become political, she told CBS in a clip from an interview in January. 

“I mean, why would you want to put yourself through that, um, every day?” Birx said.

“Colleagues of mine that I had known for decades — decades — in that one experience, because I was in the White House, decided that I had become this political person, even though they had known me forever,” she said. “I had to ask myself every morning: Is there something that I think I can do that would be helpful in responding to this pandemic? And it’s something I asked myself every night.”

When asked whether she had ever considered quitting, she replied, “Always.”

Watch the exchange:

Dr. Deborah Birx, who served as the White House coronavirus response coordinator under former President Trump, reveals in a CNN special report that “all the doctors” on the White House coronavirus task force have received death threats.

Reports emerged early in the pandemic that Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, was forced to beef up security due to an increase in death threats.

“My daughters got the same rude text messages. I mean, you can’t even imagine what those text messages looked like,” Birx said. “A lot of sexual references, saying, ‘The country would be better off if you were dead.’ ‘You’re misleading the country.’ ‘Your tongue should be cut out.’ “

Birx said she originally took the threats to the US Department of State, but eventually she “didn’t have time.”

 Watch her interview with Dr. Sanjay Gupta:

This past January, just a few days after the inauguration of President Joe Biden, six of the doctors responsible for the previous administration’s Covid-19 response agreed to sit down — in strict confidence — and talk with CNN about the events of the past year.

Over the period of a few weeks, in Houston, Washington, DC, and Baltimore, CNN secured nondescript, large hotel ballrooms with plenty of space and ventilation to allow these extraordinary one-on-one conversations to take place with Dr. Deborah Birx, Dr. Anthony Fauci, Dr. Brett Giroir, Dr. Stephen Hahn, Dr. Robert Kadlec and Dr. Robert Redfield.

Watch, “COVID WAR: The Pandemic Doctors Speak Out,” at 9 p.m. ET on CNN.