Dr. Deborah Birx, President Donald Trump’s former Covid response coordinator, expressed confidence Sunday that the United States could respond effectively to Africa’s current Ebola outbreak despite having vacancies in key public health positions.
Speaking on “Face the Nation,” CBS’s Nancy Cordes noted that there currently are no confirmed leaders for the Centers for Disease Control or the Food and Drug Administration, nor is there someone occupying the position of surgeon general.
Birx said that could be concerning but that there are layers of professional leadership. “Yes, it’s important to have the leads of all of these agencies,” she told Cordes. “I think people have been nominated to at least the CDC, so I think that’s very important. But we do have a deep bench in many of these agencies, and I really, I know them. They’re great people.”
She added: “I think this interagency response is already putting assets, people, and money on the ground.”
Birx, who helped coordinate the global response to the 2014 Ebola outbreak, also said it was not clear if the Trump administration’s decision to withdraw from the World Health Organization and to trim international aid would in any way harm the response to the current outbreak.
“I think it’s a great question, and we need to really look at that,” Birx said, but she added that she believed the cuts may not have been as deep as portrayed.
“I’ve actually been reassured by the numbers that are there on paper,” she said.
Birx’s title from February 2020 through the end of Trump’s first term was White House coronavirus response coordinator; she reported directly to then-Vice President Mike Pence. Birx also served under both Trump and then-President Barack Obama as the nation’s global AIDS coordinator.
The current outbreak, which is believed to have started weeks ago, is centered in the Democratic Republic of Congo and Uganda; a complicating factor in that region is that the DRC is the site of ongoing military conflict. The CDC announced travel restrictions to contain the outbreak on Monday, and it expanded those restrictions on Friday.
One thing that concerned Birx was that it took some time to detect the outbreak, increasing the possibility that people could have been unknowingly infected.
“The problem with this particular outbreak,” Birx said, “is there was probably two, three, or four cycles of infection before it was even reported, and so a lot of the numbers you’re seeing, and the rapid rise of the numbers, is because it went undetected and underreported for probably three or four weeks.”
“That resulted in a lot of case reporting all at once, and so I can’t really tell you what the slope of new cases are,” she said.