Deborah Birx, the White House COVID-19 response coordinator under former President Donald Trump, has said that the Trump administration could have prevented tens of thousands of deaths during the early stages of the pandemic.

In closed-door testimony to the Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Crisis on October 12 and 13, excerpts of which were released by the subcommittee on Tuesday, Birx alleges that she "was very clear to the president in specifics of what I needed him to do."

"I believe if we had fully implemented the mask mandates, the reduction in indoor dining ... and we had increased testing, that we probably could have decreased fatalities into the 30 percent less to 40 percent less range," she said.

Birx said that the 2020 election "took people's time away from and distracted them away from the pandemic."

She also criticized Scott Atlas, who was a member of Trump's COVID-19 task force, for encouraging people who were likely to have a mild or asymptomatic case to contract the virus.

More than 400,000 people died of COVID-19 in the U.S. before Trump left office on January 20.

During her time on the task force, Birx faced criticism for not publicly pushing back against former President Trump when he openly contradicted medical advice on how to prevent the spread of the virus.