WASHINGTON -- Several top doctors in the Trump administration offered their most pointed and direct criticism of the government response to the coronavirus last year. They also admitted their own missteps in a CNN special that aired Sunday night, saying that some statements the White House fiercely defended last year were misleading or outright falsehoods.
"When we said there were millions of tests available, there weren't, right?" said Brett Giroir, who served as the nation's coronavirus testing czar, referencing the administration's repeated claims last March that anyone who sought a test could get one. "There were components of the test available, but not the full-meal deal."
"People really believed in the White House that testing was driving cases, rather than testing was a way for us to stop cases," said Deborah Birx, who served as White House coronavirus coordinator.
Birx also said that most of the virus-related deaths in the United States after the first 100,000 in the spring surge could have been prevented with a more robust response. "That's what bothers me every day," she said.
CNN's special with Giroir, Birx and other senior physicians was pitched as a tell-all with former Trump officials, who are increasingly speaking out about what went wrong after more than 400,000 people in the United States died of covid-19 during the Trump administration. That total is now nearly 550,000.
But the finger-pointing and portrayals of some episodes prompted critics to say that former Trump administration officials who managed the pandemic response have turned to a new project: managing their legacies.
"It's ridiculous," said Ashish Jha, dean of Brown University's public health school and a prominent pandemic commentator.
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"Brett Giroir knew we had a problem with testing. With PPE [personal protective equipment]. With vaccine distribution. He told me as much. But he felt he needed to say what the administration wanted to hear publicly."
"They were all complicit in a narrative to downplay the threat because they felt that's what Trump wanted," said a former senior Trump administration official who spoke on condition of anonymity.
"They manipulated their statements to please Trump right up until the point that it was painfully clear they had made a bad personal trade."
Former President Donald Trump on Monday also rebuked his former deputies for the interview, calling Birx and Anthony Fauci, the government's top infectious-disease expert and now chief medical adviser to Biden, "two self-promoters trying to reinvent history to cover for their bad instincts and faulty recommendations, which I fortunately almost always overturned."
"Dr. Fauci and Dr. Birx moved far too slowly, and if it were up to them we'd currently be locked in our basements as our country suffered through a financial depression," Trump said in a lengthy statement that mocked Fauci's wild ceremonial pitch at a baseball game last year and insulted Birx's hearing.
Trump called Fauci "the king of 'flip-flops" and accused him of "moving the goalposts to make himself look as good as possible." He said Birx "is a proven liar with very little credibility left."
CNN also interviewed Fauci, who was publicly critical of aspects of Trump's response last year -- unlike some of his political counterparts. The career civil servant has continued to speak out since Biden's inauguration, recently lamenting the "lost opportunity" when Trump chose to get vaccinated in private rather than in public, and defending his own decision to stay in government service last year.
"When people just see you standing up there, they sometimes think you're being complicit in the distortions emanating from the stage," Fauci told The New York Times. "But I felt that if I stepped down, that would leave a void. Someone's got to not be afraid to speak out the truth."
The CNN special is among the first of a slew of in-progress books and other projects plumbing the Trump administration's oft-chaotic response to the coronavirus, providing former officials an opportunity to air their side of the story -- often in a far more favorable light than previously reported.
"I was marginalized every day. I mean, that is no question. The majority of the people in the White House did not take this seriously," said Birx, who increasingly broke with the administration on its testing strategy and mitigation efforts as the year progressed. Birx said she was personally rebuked by Trump after warning in an August interview that Americans needed to take strict safety precautions because the virus was "extraordinarily widespread."
"He felt very strongly that I misrepresented the pandemic in the United States, that I made it out to be much worse than it is," she said. "I feel like I didn't even make it out as bad as it was."
Robert Redfield, former director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said political meddling with his agency's Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Reports went further than had been reported last year. Redfield alleged that Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar personally intervened to try to change reports that political officials did not like.
"I was on more than one occasion called by the secretary and his leadership, directing me to change the MMWR. He may deny that, but it's true," Redfield told CNN.
"Any suggestion that I pressured or otherwise asked Dr. Redfield to change the content of a single scientific, peer-reviewed MMWR article is false," Azar told The Washington Post.
Birx used her CNN interview to criticize Scott Atlas, a radiologist who was installed as a high-level White House adviser in August 2020 despite his lack of infectious-disease experience. Trump quickly came to favor him over Birx and other officials.
"I told people I would not be in a meeting with Dr. Atlas again. I felt very strongly that I didn't want an action that legitimized in any way his position," said Birx. CNN said Atlas didn't respond to a request for comment.
While tell-alls are a regular Washington phenomenon as officials exit government and offer more candid personal perspectives on White House policy battles, some longtime hands noted the stakes are elevated in this case because of the historic importance of the coronavirus -- and the United States' poor performance.
"I think what makes the urgency greater is that the event was a once-in-a-100-year pandemic," said William Pierce, a senior director at public-affairs firm APCO Worldwide and a former senior health official during the Bush administration. "Histories are going to be written about this for the next 100 years."
Information for this article was contributed by Dan Diamond of The Washington Post and by staff members of The Associated Press.