Deborah Birx, who served as coronavirus response coordinator for former President Trump, said in a new interview that she and other members of his COVID-19 response team had a resignation pact if one person was removed from the group.
“I actually wasn’t worried about myself being fired because I was dual-hatted, and I would go back to the State Department and my PEPFAR job full-time,” Birx told ABC News, noting her role as the coordinator of the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, the government’s program to combat HIV and AIDS.
“I was very worried about Bob and Steve — because you can hear in the hallways how people were talking about them,” she added, referring to former Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director Robert Redfield and former Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Stephen Hahn.
“And so, I went to the vice president multiple times to call Bob and Steve because I was worried about them feeling like they were at that risk. And I was very clear to the chief of staff that if anything happened to Bob or Steve, we would all leave.”
When asked whether any removals were imminent, Birx said there were times when Hahn “particularly was under a lot of pressure” over vaccine development, and she made sure to remind him she “had his back, no matter what.”
“All of us knew what it was like to be there and in the trenches,” she added. “Although, they got to go home after the task force and back to their agencies. I was still in the White House.
“But they had enough understanding about what was happening in the White House to understand that all of us were at risk at one time or another.”
Birx also addressed the moment she attempted to correct the former president when he raised the possibility of injecting disinfectant into people to treat the virus, saying that she became “paralyzed.”
“I just wanted it to be ‘The Twilight Zone’ and all go away,” she said. “I could just see everything unraveling in that moment.”
Bix has a new book, “Silent Invasion: The Untold Story of the Trump Administration, COVID-19, and Preventing the Next Pandemic Before It’s Too Late,” out on Tuesday.