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Birx Gently Dings Trump, Gets Repaid With Unhinged Rant

The former president released an angry—and untrue—statement lambasting his White House coronavirus task force coordinator as “a proven liar with very little credibility left.”

For the past year, Donald Trump’s coronavirus task force coordinator, Dr. Deborah Birx, has kept quiet about the former president’s pandemic response. But after she told CNN medical correspondent Dr. Sanjay Gupta that the administration’s botched pandemic response led to hundreds of thousands of unnecessary deaths, and revealed the existence of a “very uncomfortable” phone call from an angry Trump after she publicly painted a less-than-rosy picture about the spread of COVID-19, Trump lashed out at Birx in an unhinged—and untrue—statement accusing her and NIH chief Anthony Fauci of being incompetent liars.

“Dr. Birx is a proven liar with very little credibility left,” Trump said in a six-paragraph statement released by his “office.” “Many of her recommendations were viewed as ‘pseudo-science,’ and Dr. Fauci would always talk negatively about her and, in fact, would ask not to be in the same room as her... Dr. Birx was a terrible medical advisor, which is why I seldom followed her advice...She was a very negative voice who didn’t have the right answers. Time has proven me correct.

Trump also attacked Fauci for the statements he gave CNN on the same show. “In a fake interview last night on CNN, Dr. Fauci, who said he was an athlete in college but couldn’t throw a baseball even close to home plate, it was a ‘roller,’ tried to take credit for the vaccine, when in fact he said it would take three to five years, and probably longer, to have it approved,” he ranted.