Former Trump coronavirus coordinator Birx works for Texas air purifier maker

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Dr. Deborah Birx, a former coordinator of Trump’s White House Coronavirus Task Force, takes on a private-sector job and joins a Texas manufacturer that says its purifiers clean COVID- 19 of the air in a matter of minutes and of the surfaces in a few hours.

Birx will join Dallas-based ActivePure as a scientific medical advisor and chief, she and the company said Friday.

A global health expert, Birx arrived at the White House in 2020 to help lead the Trump administration’s response to the pandemic.

But he was criticized for not standing up to former President Donald Trump while he downplayed the virus, predicted it would go away, and wondered if ingesting bleach could help cure infected Americans.

While his friend and former mentor, Dr. Anthony Fauci, was promoted to become a top medical adviser to Democratic President Joe Biden, Birx failed to get a job in the new administration.

“The Biden administration wanted a clean slate,” he told Reuters in an interview. “I fully understand.”

Birx left the government earlier this week.

She and Fauci, she said, regularly wondered what could be done differently over the past year.

“When you have the 100,000 people we lost during the summer and the 300,000 people we lost due to the fall-winter rise, you have to ask yourself and you have to know that it hasn’t gone as well as it should have state, ”he said. dit.

“We’re all responsible for that.”

The coronavirus has killed more than 530,000 people in the United States, more than any other country.

Birx said he was still processing complaints and that the measures he could have taken would be more effective.

“I try to classify them,” he said. “We need to be willing to step back and really analyze where we might have been and why we haven’t been more effective.”

Birx said she was still concerned about the level of evidence in the country, but praised the new administration for modeling the behavior of the mask and other behaviors that help fight the virus.

Trump, a Republican, shunned masks.

“I think the messaging has been very good, very consistent,” he said of Biden’s team. “That’s really important when people are asked to change their behaviors.”

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, he said.