A Trump administration health official said in a whistleblower complaint Tuesday that top officials within the Department of Health and Human Services “pressured” him for years to award contracts based on “political connections and cronyism.”
Dr. Rick Bright, former head of the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (BARDA) — the government’s top vaccine procurer — was removed from his role on April 20 and reassigned to a narrower role at the National Institutes of Health. Bright, who ran BARDA since 2016, initially said his removal stemmed from “clashes with political leadership” over his resistance to the promotion of anti-malarial drug hydroxychloroquine as an unproven treatment for coronavirus.
In his full 89-page complaint, Bright points to repeated clashes with his former boss, HHS assistant secretary for preparedness and response Robert Kadlec, whom Bright accuses of pushing him to secure contracts for drugs that were “not meritorious” but were personally linked to him. Bright also says he urged his superiors to take up the offer of a major U.S. manufacturer that offered to produce N-95 masks at theoutset of the pandemic, but was rebuffed.
Bright’s lawyers, Debra Katz and Lisa Banks — who also represented Christine Blasey Ford — called Bright’s removal from BARDA “retaliation, plain and simple.”
HHS said in a statement Tuesday that Bright’s transfer was for a “critical” role on testing.
“Dr. Bright was transferred to NIH to work on diagnostics testing — critical to combating covid-19 — where he has been entrusted to spend upwards of $1 billion to advance that effort,” HHS spokeswoman Caitlin Oakley stated. “We are deeply disappointed that he has not shown up to work on behalf of the American people and lead on this critical endeavor.”
Bright told reporters on a Tuesday call that the Trump administration “was rushing blindly into a potentially dangerous situation” by accepting a donation of 3 million chloroquine pills from Bayer that were produced in India and Pakistan — “facilities that had not been inspected by the FDA.”
Current and former HHS officials have pushed back on Bright’s claims, telling Politico that his reassignment was “more than a year in the making,” and that Bright supported the acquisition of tens of millions of doses of the drug he now maligns.
“If Bright opposed hydroxychloroquine, he certainly didn’t make that clear from his email — quite the opposite,” said one official, who has seen copies of the internal email exchanges.
Bright included emails in his complaint showing that he preferred a “pilot” program for hydroxychloroquine rather than “a national roll out.” The FDA ultimately issued an authorization for chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine from the national stockpile that is limited to hospitalized coronavirus patients not able to participate in a clinical trial.