When appearing on CNN’s State of the Union this Sunday morning, Dr. Deborah Birx described the novel coronavirus as “extraordinarily widespread” in the United States and stressed that this pandemic is not a matter of rural and urban divide. “To everybody who lives in a rural area,” the White House coronavirus task force coordinator said in a viral clip, “you are not immune or protected from this virus.” She added that if you live in a home with multiple generations, and there’s an outbreak in your area, “you need to really consider wearing a mask at home, assuming that you're positive,” especially if you share a home with people who have comorbidities. “No matter where you live in America, you need to wear a mask and socially distance, do the personal hygiene pieces,” she added.
If all of this sounds like common sense, and the sort of advice you’ve been following yourself for months, you might relate to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who also appeared on the Sunday show circuit—and was none too enthused with Dr. Birx.
First, here is Birx on the current state of the pandemic, where she argues it’s “different from March and April.”
During her appearance on ABC’s This Week, Pelosi got pretty direct. “I think the president has been spreading disinformation about the virus and she is his appointee so, I don’t have confidence there, no,” she stated in response to a question about having confidence in Birx.
Here is that clip.
Noting that she respects Pelosi, Birx said that she “will stake my 40-year career on those fundamental principles of using data to implement better programs and save lives.” She also referred to a recent article from The New York Times into the Trump administration’s failures in pandemic response, saying it was “unfortunate” the paper “wrote this article without speaking to me.” In that regard, she claimed, she has “never been called pollyannish, or non-scientific, or non-data driven.”
For areas with a “high caseload” and “active community spread,” Birx said on CNN, “just like we’re asking people not to go to bars, not to have household parties, not to create large spreading events, we’re asking people to distance-learn at this moment so we can get this epidemic under control,” in regard to the debate about schools reopening this fall. She also deferred to CDC guidelines. This question was framed about whether areas with a 5% positivity rate or more—and as we know, plenty of counties are already there—should stay closed and do distance-learning only.
Here is that clip.