Birx: Someone was delivering a ‘parallel set of data’ on coronavirus to Trump

Deborah Birx, the former White House coronavirus response coordinator, said Sunday that her efforts to advise then-President Trump about the pandemic were complicated by people presenting him with “a parallel set of data.”

“I saw the president presenting graphs that I never made, so I know that someone — or someone out there or someone inside — was creating a parallel set of data and graphics that were shown to the president. I know what I sent up, and I know that what was in his hands was different from that,” Birx said on CBS’s “Face the Nation.” “You can’t do that.”

{mosads}Asked by host Margaret Brennan who provided the former president with such data, Birx said she was unsure but that she suspected at least some of the data had been provided by former White House adviser Scott Atlas, who is not an expert on infectious diseases and repeatedly battled with Birx and other experts about the best way to contain the pandemic.

“I don’t know who else was part of it, but I think when the record goes back and people see what I was writing on a daily basis that was sent up to White House leadership … they will see that I was highly specific on what I was seeing and what needed to be done,” she said.

Asked by Brennan whether the White House chief of staff or any other officials were “saying, ‘Wait a second. This is our official coordinator. Listen to her and her only,’” Birx said she was unaware whether anyone told Trump that but that “no one said that to me.”

Dr. Deborah Birx on #Covid19 #disinformation inside the #Trump White House: “I saw the president presenting graphs that I never made” she tells @margbrennan

“Someone inside was creating a parallel set of data and graphics that were shown to the president”

More on @FaceTheNation pic.twitter.com/1TMlIdvnWR

— Face The Nation (@FaceTheNation) January 24, 2021

Brennan went on to ask whether Birx believed Trump was distracted by the political implications of the virus and his reelection campaign.

“I always wonder that, and, I mean, the worst possible time you can have a pandemic is in a presidential election year. I think the White House personnel were very focused on this pandemic in March and April,” she said. “I think once the country began to open, and it was clear to me that they weren’t going to follow my really gated criteria that I had worked hard on.”