40% of US COVID-19 deaths could have been avoided.

Dr. Deborah L. Birx, President Donald J. Trump’s Covid-19 response coordinator, told a congressional committee investigating the federal pandemic response that Trump White House officials asked her to change or delete parts of the weekly guidance she sent state and local health officials, in what she described as a consistent effort to stifle information as virus cases surged in the second half of 2020.

Dr. Birx also told the committee that Trump White House officials withheld the reports from states during a winter outbreak and refused to publicly release the documents, which featured data on the virus’s spread and recommendations for how to contain it.

Dr. Birx became a controversial figure during her time in the Trump White House. A respected AIDS researcher, she was plucked from her position running the government’s program to combat the international H.I.V. epidemic to coordinate the federal Covid response.

But her credibility came into question when she failed to correct Mr. Trump’s unscientific musings about the coronavirus and praised him on television as being “attentive to the scientific literature.”

Her account of White House interference came in a multiday interview the committee conducted in October 2021, which was released on Thursday with a set of emails Dr. Birx sent to colleagues in 2020 warning of the influence of a new White House pandemic adviser, Dr. Scott Atlas, who she said downplayed the threat of the virus. The emails provide fresh insight into how Dr. Birx and Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, the government’s top infectious disease expert, grappled with what Dr. Birx called the “misinformation” spread by Dr. Atlas.