Former vaccine chief Rick Bright filed a 63-page whistleblower report blasting the Trump administration's 'cronyism' and chloroquine pressure campaign.
He was pressured to invest in drugs and vaccines that lacked scientific merit, because the people selling them had friends in the Trump administration, up to and including the president’s son-in-law,He was forced to transfer funds to acquire drugs for the Strategic National Stockpile, America’s most important reserve of lifesaving medications, based not on health needs but on “political connections and cronyism.
Tensions escalated over the course of the next year, the complaint alleges, as Bright objected repeatedly to Kadlec’s efforts to award multimillion-dollar contracts to Clerici clients. Last fall Bright “rejected pressure by Dr. Kadlec to invest millions of dollars in EIDD-2801, a drug developed at Emory University by a longtime friend of Dr. Kadlec.
The crisis at BARDA came to a boiling point after top agency health officials found themselves under immense pressure to fulfill a vision that Trump had outlined from the White House podium: to build a stockpile of repurposed malaria drugs, hydroxychloroquine and chloroquine, that he claimed had “very, very encouraging early results.”
The next day a health scientist at BARDA noted to colleagues that the guidance from two HHS working groups was to “wait for clinical data on the numerous clinical trials that are ongoing before making recommendations on the use of chloroquine for COVID-19. Currently, there is no data available to support that chloroquine provides clinical benefit in the treatment or prevention of COVID-19.”
Nonetheless, on or around March 23, administration officials devised a plan for Bright’s agency, BARDA, to sponsor a new experimental drug study, under which the chloroquine drugs could be widely disseminated.
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