The Covid-19 war in the Trump White House

Dr. Deborah Birx, who served as the White House coronavirus response coordinator under former President Donald Trump, said the number of Covid-19 deaths could have "decreased substantially" if cities and states across the United States had aggressively applied the lessons of the first surge. "There were about a hundred thousand deaths that came from that original surge. All of the rest of them, in my mind, could have been mitigated or decreased substantially," she said. The virus has since claimed nearly 550,000 lives in the US.Former CDC Director Dr. Robert Redfield said former Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar wanted him to revise the CDC's Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report (MMWR) -- the agency's roundup of key research on death and disease as well as its recommendations. Redfield said he was asked to change the report "on more than one occasion." Azar responded in a statement to CNN saying, in part: "Any suggestion that I pressured or otherwise asked Dr. Redfield to change the content of a single scientific, peer-reviewed MMWR article is false." Several officials, including Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, pointed the finger at China for not being open enough about the virus. Fauci said it would have made a "significant" difference if American investigators were allowed access into China at the start of the pandemic. He added he was "always" skeptical about the Covid-19 data being reported out of China. "I always had skepticism about it because of what we went through with SARS," Fauci said.