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, Jared Kushner. He was forced to transfer funds to acquire drugs for the Strategic National Stockpile, America’s most important reserve of life-saving medications, based not on health needs but on “political connections and cronyism.” He was instructed to use his department’s budget to purchase flu medications of questionable efficacy. And when the COVID-19 crisis erupted, he was pressured to approve a plan that would “flood” cities with unproven and untested doses of chloroquine drugs, from uninspected manufacturing plants in Asia. When his efforts to work through the system failed, he decided he had a “moral obligation to the American public” to ring the alarm about the plan, “which he believed constituted a substantial and specific danger to public health and safety.” In retaliation, he was “smeared,” with officials unfairly accusing him of dropping the ball on vaccine development and PPE preparation.
These are just some of the allegations contained in a blistering, 63-page complaint that Dr. Rick Bright, former head of the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (BARDA), filed today with the U.S. Office of Special Counsel. (Vanity Fair has submitted requests for comment to the White House, the Food and Drug Administration, and the Department of Health and Human Services, and will update this article with any responses.)
Today’s complaint goes much further, enumerating a series of instances in which politics encroached on science. According to the complaint, Bright’s superiors at the Department of Health and Human Services began pressuring him to “ignore expert recommendations and instead to award lucrative contracts based on political connections and cronyism,” starting around the spring of 2017. Bright says he “repeatedly clashed” with his boss, Dr. Robert Kadlec, the assistant secretary for preparedness and response, over the “outsized role” played by Kadlec’s friend John Clerici, a pharmaceutical consultant. That year Clerici tried to get Bright to renew a contract with his client, Aeolus Pharmaceuticals, that was set to expire. “In attempting to justify the extension of this failed contract,” Bright says in his complaint, “Mr. Clerici emphasized that Aeolus’s Chief Executive Officer was a ‘wildcard’ and a friend of Jared Kushner, President Trump’s son-in-law and a Senior Advisor to the President.”
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