Birx said she had a 'very uncomfortable' call with Trump after she did a CNN interview about the pandemic last year

• Dr. Deborah Birx recounted an "uncomfortable" conversation with President Donald Trump last year.
• Birx told CNN the conversation happened after she gave an interview about the pandemic.
• The new interview with Birx is part of a coming CNN documentary about the pandemic.

Dr. Deborah Birx, the former White House coronavirus response coordinator, said she had an "uncomfortable" conversation with President Donald Trump last year after she spoke frankly during a cable-news appearance.

Birx described the exchange in a preview of the coming documentary about the pandemic titled "COVID WAR: The Pandemic Doctors Speak Out," which is scheduled to air Sunday at 9 p.m. ET on CNN.

"It was a CNN report in August that got horrible pushback," Birx said in the clip published Sunday by CNN. "That was a very difficult time, because everybody in the White House was upset with that interview and the clarity that I brought about the epidemic."

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"I got called by the president," she added. "It was very uncomfortable, very direct, and very difficult to hear."

As CNN noted, Birx in August appeared on CNN's "State of the Union" and offered a critical perspective on the state of the pandemic in the US at that time. In the interview, Birx said the pandemic in August differed from a surge earlier in the year because the virus had infiltrated rural communities.

"What we are seeing today is different from March and April," she said at the time. "It is extraordinarily widespread. It's into the rural as equal urban areas."

When asked by CNN's Dr. Sanjay Gupta whether she felt threatened by the former president, she repeated that the exchange had been a "very uncomfortable conversation."

Birx told Gupta she knew she was "being watched."

"Everybody inside was waiting for me to make a misstep so that they could, I guess, remove me from the task force," she said.

Trump had a rocky relationship with his coronavirus taskforce advisors, as he publicly disregarded their advice, though he more publicly sparred with Dr. Anthony Fauci, the longtime director of the US National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.

Fauci has previously spoken out about what it was like working with the former president and said working under Biden was "liberating" in comparison. Trump in an interview in March bragged about having ignored Fauci's recommendations.

"I thought rather than firing him, you know, I listened to him, but I didn't do what he said because frankly, his record is not a good record," Trump said on the "Truth with Lisa Boothe" podcast.

In an interview with The New York Times published in January, Fauci said Trump would sometimes call him after he gave an interview and ask why he hadn't given a more "positive" outlook on the pandemic.

In a recently published clip from the forthcoming CNN documentary, Birx said every COVID-19 death in the US that occurred after the first 100,000 could've been mitigated.

As of Sunday, more than 549,000 people in the US had died from COVID-19, according to data analyzed by Johns Hopkins University. The US's first surge in COVID-19 deaths peaked in April, with the number of reported deaths reaching 100,000 by the end of May.