'I just can't': Dr. Deborah Birx privately blasted the Trump White House's COVID-19 strategy while publicly giving it 'cover,' emails show

• Dr. Deborah Birx raised alarms about Trump's COVID-19 strategy, while publicly covering for it.
• New emails obtained by Congress show Birx objecting to the herd-immunity approach.

Dr. Deborah Birx, the former White House coronavirus-response coordinator, said the Trump White House's approach to COVID-19 would contribute to an "unacceptable death toll," especially among people of color, while publicly giving the strategy "cover," newly published emails show.

On August 24, 2020, Birx pulled out of a planned White House roundtable featuring a small group of outside medical experts advising the White House, according to new emails obtained by the House select subcommittee on the coronavirus.

The group included people who publicly advocated for limiting coronavirus restrictions and pushed a herd-immunity strategy that, in theory, would have focused on protections for the most vulnerable populations, like older people, and limited mitigation strategies (like masking and social distancing) for the rest of the population.

Trump's prepared remarks for the roundtable said that "unending lockdowns" were "not a science based approach — and it would inflict grave harm on our children and our entire society."

On the morning of August 25, 2020, Birx wrote an email to Vice President Mike Pence's chief of staff at the time, Marc Short, explaining why she couldn't be part of the roundtable.

"I can't be part of this with these people who believe in herd immunity and believe we are fine with only protecting the 1.5M Americans in LTCF and not the 80M+ with co-morbidities in the populations included in the unacceptable death toll among Native Americans, Hispanics, and Blacks," Birx wrote to Short, referring to long-term-care facilities as LTCF.

Most experts said at the time that isolating vulnerable people from the rest of the population was not feasible because of the highly transmissible nature of COVID-19 and that getting to herd immunity through infecting most of the population (before the rollout of vaccines) would lead to a staggering number of deaths. The higher rates of transmission would have also made it exceedingly hard to shield the most vulnerable.

Birx said the death toll could rise to 500,000 by the time the US had a vaccine, adding: "Without masks and social distancing in public and homes we end up with twice as many deaths — we are a very unhealthy nation with a lot of obesity etc."

The group at the August 25, 2020, White House roundtable included Dr. Scott Atlas and Dr. Jay Bhattacharya of Stanford, the Harvard biostatistician Martin Kulldorff, Dr. Cody Meissner of Tufts University, and Dr. Joseph Ladapo, who was at the University of California, Los Angeles, at the time and is now Florida's surgeon general.

"These are people who believe that all curves are predetermined and mitigation is irrelevant — they are a fringe group without grounding in epidemics, public health, or on the ground common sense experience," Birx said of the group.

Birx then said she was "happy to go out of town or whatever gives the WH cover for Weds," adding that she could do an event in Annapolis, Maryland, with Gov. Larry Hogan and perhaps Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nation's top infectious-disease expert and the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.

Later that morning, Birx forwarded the email she sent to Short to Fauci, then-Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Stephen Hahn, and then-Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director Robert Redfield with the added message: "I just can't."

About the same time in 2020, Birx left the Washington, DC, area on a nationwide tour to promote COVID-19-mitigation strategies around the country.

October 2020 emails in the same batch obtained by the select committee included discussions between Fauci and Dr. Francis Collins, now the outgoing National Institutes of Health director, on how they could best refute the claims of those pushing the herd-immunity strategy advocated in the Great Barrington Declaration.

Collins called the declaration a "proposal from the three fringe epidemiologists," adding: "There needs to be a quick and devastating published take down of its premises."