Former Trump COVID Coordinator: Underestimating COVID Reinfections Is a ‘Huge Mistake’

More than three years removed from her tenure as the White House’s Coronavirus Response Coordinator, Deborah Birx, M.D., is no longer mincing words when it comes to how she feels the government handled — or mishandled — COVID-19 in 2020.

During an interview with News Nation’s Chris Cuomo on Wednesday, Dr. Birx, who worked under the Trump administration, called out the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention for trying to use “19th century” tactics to track the virus “when we have 21st century technology.”

“It’s really important that we understand what went wrong that first entire year,” Dr. Birx said. “The first thing was that they weren’t willing to understand that COVID was a very different virus than flu.” 

She continues by saying that the U.S. was late to testing for COVID, late to considering its asymptomatic spread and “very late” to recognizing that the virus could easily spread through the air. She blames this on the CDC’s emphasis on symptom-tracking as a means of keeping tabs on the virus’ spread.

She says that none of these things were realized soon enough.

“We didn’t act fast enough. We didn’t test fast enough,” she continued. “I mean, we allowed all the people to come in from all over the world just tracing symptoms. They clearly had asymptomatic disease and were spreading the virus.”

Former President Donald Trump issued the first COVID-related travel ban in late January of 2020, around a month after China reported its first outbreak of the virus. In March, that ban extended to dozens of European countries. That decision was met with mixed reviews, with many calling the ban a mistake.

At that time, very little was known about COVID, how it spread or how serious of a threat it was to public health. More than four years after the first case was reported in China, experts have gained a wealth of knowledge about the virus and its acute threat to public health has largely been quelled. However, Dr. Birx says that we still have a long way to go in understanding the full ramifications of COVID.

“We’re learning something different every single month about what this virus is capable of doing,” she warned, adding that this is especially true when it comes to multiple infections and the effects of long COVID.

“To pretend that we know everything that this virus is doing and to be cavalier about getting repetitive COVID infections is really a huge mistake,” she said. “There’s a lot of destruction that mild and moderate COVID can do.”

She said that there are still gaps that need to be filled in long COVID research to better treat those struggling with the lingering effects of the virus.

Although COVID numbers have drastically decreased since the virus reached some of its highest peaks in 2021 and 2022, it continues to cause serious illness and death in tens of thousands of people. In 2023, more than 72,000 people died from COVID in the U.S., and nearly 35,000 people were hospitalized with the virus during the week after Christmas.