Dr. Deborah Birx, a key member of the White House Coronavirus Task Force during the Trump administration, has taken a job with a Texas-based manufacturer of air purifiers that says its machines can clean the CCP virus from the air in minutes and from surfaces within hours.
Dallas-based ActivePure announced that Birx is joining the company as chief scientific and medical adviser.
Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the U.S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and a former mentor to Birx, picked up a position in the Biden administration. Birx left the public sector last week.
“The Biden administration wanted a clean slate,” she told Reuters in an interview. “I understand that completely.”
Birx said she regularly asks herself what could have been done differently last year.
“When you have the 100,000 people we lost over the summer, and the 300,000 people we lost over the fall-winter surge, you have to ask yourself and have to know that it didn’t go as well as it should have,” she said. “All of us are responsible for that.”
Birx said she was still processing regrets and steps she could have taken to be more effective.
“I’m trying to rank order them,” she said. “We have to be willing to step back and really analyze where we could have been and why we weren’t more effective.”
In addition to her role at ActivePure, Birx has also joined the George W. Bush Institute as a global health fellow and the biopharmaceutical company Innoviva as a board member, she said.
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