Ousted US Scientist: Trump Ignored Virus Warnings

By Staff, Agencies 

A US federal scientist who says he was removed from his post after disputing the efficacy of an unproven malaria drug to combat coronavirus has filed a whistleblower complaint revealing that his warnings were dismissed by US President Donald Trump’s administration.

Dr. Rick Bright, who led the office overseeing the development of a vaccine, says officials launched a “baseless smear campaign” against him and levelled “demonstrably false allegations about his performance in an attempt to justify what was clearly a retaliatory demotion” following his opposition to the broad use of chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine.

He argued to White House officials that the use of the drugs, which the federal Food and Drug Administration later warned against using, lacked “scientific merit” while the administration pushed to “flood” parts of the US with drugs “imported from factories in Pakistan and India that had not been inspected by the FDA”, the complaint says.

Ignored by the White House, Bright felt an urgency to “inform the American public that there was insufficient scientific data to support the use of these drugs for Covid-19 patients” and ”believed that Americans needed to have this critical information available to them to better inform them of the risks before taking the medicine”.

His attorneys argue that his removal from the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority after speaking with a reporter and members of Congress about his concerns violated the Whistleblower Protection Act.

The 89-page complaint offers one of the first detailed reports from the Trump administration’s botched response to the pandemic, marked by delays and undermining scientists and health experts, as well as weeks of chaos and discussions among top White House officials as they scrambled to respond to the looming public health crisis.

It also glimpses the inner workers of the agency and Dr. Bright’s repeated attempts to rebuff funding requests for unproven and unfounded drugs requested by the administration despite immense “political pressure” to boost funding for drug manufacturers with political connections over the last several years.

Under pressure from the Trump administration to promote anti-malaria drugs for several weeks, Dr. Bright says he “exhausted all efforts to protect patients” from the unproven drug and “wrestled with what he felt was both a moral and a professional obligation to save lives and protect Americans”.

“He knew that providing this information to a journalist would place him further at odds with HHS leadership,” the complaint says. “However as the death toll mounted exponentially each day, Dr. Bright concluded he was left with no choice, and he had a clear obligation to the American public, particularly those vulnerable as a result of illness from Covid-19, to protect it from drugs which he firmly believed constituted a substantial and specific danger to public health and public safety.”

Dr. Bright shared emails with a journalist that reported the administration’s attempts to push the drug.