I may never be ready to offer Debbie Birx redemption

And she was a big part of that.

The White House coronavirus task force coordinator under former President Donald Trump says she believes the COVID-19 death toll in the country would have been “decreased substantially” had the previous government responded more effectively in the early days of the outbreak.

Dr Deborah Birx said that while the initial surge in March last year caught health officials off guard, better messaging and coordination from the government could have reduced the number of deaths later.

  alJazeera

And...why were they caught off guard? The Obama team handling the transition briefed them on the very real danger of a pandemic, and reports of this specific one were known in the international community from at least January last year.

“There were about 100,000 deaths that came from that original surge,” Birx said in an interview with CNN. “The rest of them, in my mind, could have been mitigated or decreased substantially.”

And yet, she stood up and spouted whatever nonsense she was told to spout.

In the CNN report, Admiral Brett Giroir, who headed the government’s testing effort, said the administration had lied about the number of publicly available tests, conflating available “components” needed to make the tests with ready-to-use tests.

And did Giroir say anything at the time? What's that? No?

Meanwhile, Dr Robert Redfield, director of the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention under Trump, told the network that then-health secretary Alex M Azar and his allies had pressured him to revise weekly COVID-19 morbidity and mortality reports.

And he, of couse, did it.

Birx, who has faced criticism for not standing up more forcefully in public to Trump’s misinformation about the pandemic, recounted a “very uncomfortable” call with the former president after describing how widespread the virus was in an interview with CNN in August last year, during which she told people living in rural areas that they were not immune.

Poor baby. An uncomfortable call. Let's hear from covid patients about comfort. The ones who didn't die, of course.

“Everybody in the White House was upset with that interview and the clarity that I brought about the epidemic,” Birx said.

“I got called by the president. It was very uncomfortable, very direct, and very difficult to hear.”

Debbie would like us to believe, contrary to her actual role, that she's a hero in this story.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.