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Dr. Birx reveals 'very uncomfortable and very difficult' call with Trump last summer after she publicly warned about severity of pandemic and says 'I felt like I was being watched'

  Dr. Deborah Birx revealed in a documentary that will air Sunday evening that she had a 'very uncomfortable' phone call with   Dona...

 Dr. Deborah Birx revealed in a documentary that will air Sunday evening that she had a 'very uncomfortable' phone call with Donald Trump in August after she warned the press about the severity of the pandemic.

'It was a CNN report in August that got horrible pushback,' Brix told CNN's Chief Medical Correspondent Dr. Sanjay Gupta in the documentary 'COVID WAR: The Pandemic Doctors Speak Out.'

'That was a very difficult time, because everybody in the White House was upset with that interview and the clarity that I brought about the epidemic,' she continued.

'I got called by the President,' Birx, who was serving on Trump's coronavirus response team at the time of the report, detailed. 'It was very uncomfortable, very direct and very difficult to hear.'

Birx deflected when Gupta asked if Trump threatened her during the call.

'I would say it was a very uncomfortable conversation,' she reiterated.

The new documentary will air in full on CNN Sunday at 9:00 p.m.

Dr. Deborah Birx said in the clip of a CNN documentary that she had a 'very difficult and very uncomfortable' phone call with then-President Donald Trump in August 2020 after she spoke to the press about the severity of the COVID-19 pandemic

Dr. Deborah Birx said in the clip of a CNN documentary that she had a 'very difficult and very uncomfortable' phone call with then-President Donald Trump in August 2020 after she spoke to the press about the severity of the COVID-19 pandemic

At the time, Birx was serving on Trump's coroanvirus response team and her comments ran in direct counter-messaging to the administration's downplay of the coronavirus threat

At the time, Birx was serving on Trump's coroanvirus response team and her comments ran in direct counter-messaging to the administration's downplay of the coronavirus threat

Birx spoke with CNN's 'State of the Union' host Dana Bash in August about the seriousness of the spread of COVID-19, which ran in direct counter to the Trump administration's programming and messaging on downplaying the virus' threat.

She warned at the time that the U.S. was entering a 'new phase' of the pandemic as the nation saw a more widespread number of cases.

'What we are seeing today is different from March and April,' she said in the interview. 'It is extraordinarily widespread. It's into the rural as equal urban areas.'

Trump, on the other hand, was insisting the U.S. had done a good job of containing the virus and promising an end to lockdowns and restrictions.

Almost from the start of 2020, Trump's administration had a problem with messaging on coronavirus, with warring voices within the West Wing grappling with how to handle the federal response.

Birx said during the clip of talking with Gupta released Sunday afternoon, that coronavirus deaths should have been less and that there shouldn't have been as big of a second wave.

'I look at it this way – the first time we have an excuse,' Birx said of the first wave of COVID-related deaths. '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.


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