The former White House coordinator of the COVID Task Force says the contentious Senate hearing that put Dr. Anthony Fauci and his diary under scrutiny shows there is still “persistent anger” over the government’s handling of the pandemic.
In an interview on CBS News’ “The Takeout,” Dr. Deborah Birx said she thought Democratic Sen. John Fetterman, who was Pennsylvania’s lieutenant governor during the pandemic, “got it the most right for all of us.” He wondered, she said, “Did I get the balance right between saving lives and preserving people’s livelihoods?”
“That is a very deep question, and I think what you heard today is still persistent anger over that question not being answered adequately for most Americans,” Birx told CBS News chief Washington correspondent Major Garrett.
“We’ve got to get to that answer, and we have to have a better way forward than this,” Birx said.
And Fauci, she said, is probably at the center of questions about this because he served during both the Trump and Biden administrations, and people on the left and right still harbor deep disagreements about how each side addressed COVID.
Six years after the pandemic, one of the enduring questions is whether the coronavirus originated in an animal in a wet market in Wuhan, China, or emerged from a lab there. Senators asked Fauci repeatedly about this Wednesday, but he invoked the Fifth Amendment in response to all questions during the hearing.
Republican Sen. Rand Paul, who heads the Senate Homeland Security Committee, subpoenaed Fauci to appear before the committee as part of the panel’s investigation into the origins of the coronavirus.
Paul backs the theory that the virus emerged from a laboratory in Wuhan, China, rather than spilling over from animals to humans naturally in a wet market in that city, and he has long accused Fauci and other top health officials of downplaying the possibility of a lab leak and misleading the public.
Fauci has denied that he rejected or downplayed the lab leak theory, insisting that he always kept an open mind about the origins of the coronavirus, though he has asserted at times that the evidence suggests a natural spillover was more likely.
Fauci said during his opening statement Wednesday that he planned to assert the Fifth Amendment, arguing that Paul has an “obvious obsession with calling for my prosecution” and has made “slanderous comments” about him. He then invoked the Fifth Amendment for several hours as Paul and other Republicans criticized him and Democrats defended him.
Birx didn’t express an opinion, but she did say that it’s an important question because “we do need additional guardrails” and “additional policy around these issues.”
“We all know that there have been lab accidents,” she said, adding, “I’m hoping that going forward, we really look at these and have good policies that protect the lab workers, that protect the American public, and really get us ready with trust with the American people.”
She also told Garrett, “All of us need to be quite honest with ourselves,” not only about how information about the coronavirus evolved, but also how countermeasures “should have also evolved.”
Birx pointed out that early in the pandemic, “We didn’t have enough testing out there. We couldn’t stop the spread in any way. Hospitals were being overrun. We didn’t have a supply chain that matched the need.” The first few months “were a crisis,” she said.
Then, additional therapies like monoclonal antibodies and remdesivir enabled the government to “pull back on some of the mitigation,” Birx said.
“But because it was an election year, there were states that persisted in their very tight mitigations, and others that showed us a way that you could open K-12 and higher ed,” Birx said. Tests “really prevented spread,” she said.
She called for a dialogue to figure out “how are we going to do this next time?” Birx said she wants to figure out, how will the U.S. prevent spread, keep schools open, keep businesses open?
“There’s a way to do it,” she said. “And then we have that roadmap, but we need to get that down in real concrete terms, and have both the right and the left agree that that’s the best way forward.”
Garrett also asked Birx about Fauci’s diaries and the idea that he appeared “captivated by his rising international fame.”
She told him, “Well, have you been to his office, you can see that he has a lot of photos of his dealing with high-level influencers and presidents. That is something that means something to him.” But she added, “I don’t think that that clouded his judgment on what he was trying to do for the American people. We all are human, and I hope we step back and allow Dr. Fauci that humanness, at the same time, holding Dr. Fauci, myself and others accountable to really make this a better response next time.”