Now that he has announced he is stepping down in December from his role as both President Joe Biden's chief medical adviser and director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, Dr. Anthony Fauci should make clear what happened over the past 2 1/2 years of the coronavirus pandemic and what we can do to fix it, Dr. Deborah Birx told Newsmax on Tuesday.
Birx who served alongside Fauci as a Trump White House Coronavirus Task Force member, told "National Report" that she was not surprised by the announcement that Fauci was departing, because "we heard implications over the last several weeks that he was really thinking about his last chapter."
When asked about the timing of Fauci's announcement, Birx said, "I think he's done a very careful analysis of how he can really have the greatest impact on changing the future of how the U.S. battles pandemics."
She added that "I imagine he will write a book. I hope he builds on the book I wrote, because I think it is really important to fix what is wrong. Clearly, despite changing presidents, we still have significant loss from COVID and we have an issue with long COVID that has not been addressed or resolved."
Birx emphasized that "what Dr. Fauci will be able to do now is to speak very clearly about where the problems still are in our federal institutions that are holding us back from saving as many American lives as we could and also understanding and treating long COVID."
Asked to comment on the possibilities of investigations of Fauci's handling of the pandemic if the Republicans take control of the House, Birx said, "I'm hoping the Republicans can lead a transparent, bipartisan approach that deals with everything that went wrong," adding that no matter what someone thinks the origin of coronavirus was, "we need to fix [what is going wrong] and find solutions for what is still failing."
Birx also commented on Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director Rochelle Walensky's statement that the agency is "resetting" after admitting it made "dramatic" mistakes in reacting to the pandemic.
Birx said that what was frustrating to her while fighting the pandemic was that "the CDC was utilizing partial data and models and they weren't even diagnosing flu," emphasizing that many of the decisions the CDC made were based "on what we called very small convenient sets of data and that needs to be fixed."
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Brian Freeman ✉
Brian Freeman, a Newsmax writer based in Israel, has more than three decades writing and editing about culture and politics for newspapers, online and television.
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