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Dr. Deborah Birx, former White House coronavirus response coordinator, praised the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) for rarely acknowledging failures in its response to COVID-19.
“A lot of managers would have tried to tweak [it]and tweaking the agency at this point isn’t going to be successful,” Birx said during an appearance on Sunday’s “Face the Nation.”
CDC Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky last week ordered a “reset” of the agency. It focuses on rapid dissemination of information and response to new health threats. Some of the moves include internal staffing changes and steps to streamline the data release process.
Birx has previously touted partnerships between private and federal agencies as the best way to achieve these same goals. She reiterated on Sunday that the private sector was “willing to help us.”
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“All the data I use to warn Americans of people at risk of serious illness, hospitalization, or death comes from colleagues in Europe,” Birx said. “That should itself be an indictment of our system.”
“Second, the hospitals were reporting very late through the system that the CDC created. , clinics, hospitals and laboratories, and they didn’t,” she continued. “So I asked all the hospitals to start reporting. And they did.”
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Birx also said the data used to make decisions about COVID-19 policy relied on flawed information, using “convenient data” rather than looking at the whole American population. claimed. Quarantine before returning to work.
But she rejected suggestions that the White House and CDC simply issued guidance to address the worker shortage. She advocated guidance aimed at ensuring that Americans “can survive and thrive.”
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“The way to rebuild public trust is to be transparent, and I think that’s in reporting: better data, better accountability, better transparency,” she said.
As monkeypox continues to spread across the country, the CDC may have to resort to these tools sooner or later. Birx draws some parallels between his response to monkeypox and his response to COVID-19, citing “not enough testing early” and the early availability of a vaccine. I mentioned things that are not.
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“So 5 months went by just like it happened with COVID: underprepared, underengaged, underutilized with the tools we had in real time to prevent these 14,000 people. [cases] — and probably well over 20,000 now,” Birx said.
Fox News’ Stephen Sorace contributed to this report.