The Covid-19 war in the Trump White House

After working under the Trump administration US officials have revealed the challenges they faced last year during the fight against COVID-19, including tension behind closed doors. Here are some most terrible revelations from CNN's documentary, "COVID WAR: The Pandemic Doctors Speak Out":

Dr Deborah Birx, who served as coronavirus response coordinator under former President Donald Trump, said the number of Covid-19 deaths could have "decreased substantially" if 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.

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 key research on death and disease as well as its recommendation. 

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 at china for not being open 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" sceptical 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.