Ousted HHS Official Dr. Rick Bright Files Whistleblower Complaint

By Julia Conley
A federal scientist filed a formal whistleblower complaint Tuesday, weeks after being reassigned from his position at the Health and Human Services Department following a clash with Trump administration officials over untested Covid-19 treatments that the president was promoting.
Dr. Rick Bright, an immunology expert and until last month the director of the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (BARDA), said in addition to retaliation for objecting to President Donald Trump's public insistence that hydroxychloroquine was effective at treating Covid-19, he faced sustained pressure from HHS officials since the beginning of the Trump administration to steer millions of dollars in contracts to the client of lobbyist John Clerici.
Clerici has a "longstanding connection" to Dr. Robert Kadlec, assistant secretary for preparedness and response at HHS, according to the complaint.
Multiple times beginning in 2017, when Trump took office, Bright was pressured to extend a government contract to Aeolus Pharmaceuticals, a client of Clerici's. In addition to being Clerici's client, Aeolus's CEO was a friend of Jared Kushner, Trump's son-in-law and senior advisor.
Bright refused to extend the contract, leading to discord between him and his superiors at the department. The tension steadily grew as Kadlec and other officials urged Bright to transfer $40 million from BARDA to the Strategic National Stockpile in 2018 to purchase a drug made by manufacturer Alvogen, another of Clerici's clients, among other disagreements.
According to the complaint, "Dr. Kadlec's frustration with and animus towards Dr. Bright reached its breaking point when, after the emergence of Covid-19, Dr. Bright resisted efforts to fall into line with the administration's directive to promote the broad use of chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine and to award lucrative contracts for these and other drugs even though they lacked scientific merit and had not received prior scientific vetting."
Bright also wrote in the 89-page complaint that he encountered pushback in January when he called on HHS to begin developing resources in preparation for treatment and vaccine research as the Covid-19 pandemic reached the United States.
"It was clear to Dr. Bright almost immediately that the virus was highly contagious, spreading rapidly, and could have a high mortality rate," the complaint reads. "Dr. Bright and his staff recognized the urgent need to obtain genetic sequencing information about the virus and to acquire viruses and clinical specimens from people infected with the virus to share with laboratories and companies... Dr. Bright initially encountered indifference which then developed into hostility from HHS leadership, including Secretary Azar, as Dr. Bright and his staff raised concerns about the virus and the urgent need to act."
The department leadership grew increasingly hostile toward Bright after he communicated with members of Congress, the press, and some White House officials—including trade advisor Peter Navarro—about the need to act urgently to confront the pandemic.
As CNN reports, Bright is now scheduled to testify to Congress as early as next week on the charges included in his complaint:
Dr. Rick Bright, the ousted director of the office involved in developing a coronavirus vaccine who formally filed… https://t.co/kRl2Y7RZmP— CNN (@CNN)1588711972.0
Bright filed the whistleblower complaint with the Office of Special Counsel about two weeks after being reassigned to the National Institutes of Health. According to the complaint, after removing Bright from his post at BARDA, HHS officials "unleashed a baseless smear campaign against him, leveling demonstrably false allegations about his performance in an attempt to justify what was clearly a retaliatory demotion."
The complaint calls for a reversal of Bright's reassignment as well as a full investigation into his charges of cronyism at the department.
Reposted with permission from Common Dreams.
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By Peter Giger
The speed and scale of the response to COVID-19 by governments, businesses and individuals seems to provide hope that we can react to the climate change crisis in a similarly decisive manner - but history tells us that humans do not react to slow-moving and distant threats.
A Game of Jenga
<p>Think of it as a game of Jenga and the planet's climate system as the tower. For generations, we have been slowly removing blocks. But at some point, we will remove a pivotal block, such as the collapse of one of the major global ocean circulation systems, for example the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC), that will cause all or part of the global climate system to fall into a planetary emergency.</p><p>But worse still, it could cause runaway damage: Where the tipping points form a domino-like cascade, where breaching one triggers breaches of others, creating an unstoppable shift to a radically and swiftly changing climate.</p><p>One of the most concerning tipping points is mass methane release. Methane can be found in deep freeze storage within permafrost and at the bottom of the deepest oceans in the form of methane hydrates. But rising sea and air temperatures are beginning to thaw these stores of methane.</p><p>This would release a powerful greenhouse gas into the atmosphere, 30-times more potent than carbon dioxide as a global warming agent. This would drastically increase temperatures and rush us towards the breach of other tipping points.</p><p>This could include the acceleration of ice thaw on all three of the globe's large, land-based ice sheets – Greenland, West Antarctica and the Wilkes Basin in East Antarctica. The potential collapse of the West Antarctic ice sheet is seen as a key tipping point, as its loss could eventually <a href="https://science.sciencemag.org/content/324/5929/901" target="_blank">raise global sea levels by 3.3 meters</a> with important regional variations.</p><p>More than that, we would be on the irreversible path to full land-ice melt, causing sea levels to rise by up to 30 meters, roughly at the rate of two meters per century, or maybe faster. Just look at the raised beaches around the world, at the last high stand of global sea level, at the end of the Pleistocene period around 120,0000 years ago, to see the evidence of such a warm world, which was just 2°C warmer than the present day.</p>Cutting Off Circulation
<p>As well as devastating low-lying and coastal areas around the world, melting polar ice could set off another tipping point: a disablement to the AMOC.</p><p>This circulation system drives a northward flow of warm, salty water on the upper layers of the ocean from the tropics to the northeast Atlantic region, and a southward flow of cold water deep in the ocean.</p><p>The ocean conveyor belt has a major effect on the climate, seasonal cycles and temperature in western and northern Europe. It means the region is warmer than other areas of similar latitude.</p><p>But melting ice from the Greenland ice sheet could threaten the AMOC system. It would dilute the salty sea water in the north Atlantic, making the water lighter and less able or unable to sink. This would slow the engine that drives this ocean circulation.</p><p><a href="https://www.carbonbrief.org/atlantic-conveyor-belt-has-slowed-15-per-cent-since-mid-twentieth-century" target="_blank">Recent research</a> suggests the AMOC has already weakened by around 15% since the middle of the 20th century. If this continues, it could have a major impact on the climate of the northern hemisphere, but particularly Europe. It may even lead to the <a href="https://ore.exeter.ac.uk/repository/handle/10871/39731?show=full" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">cessation of arable farming</a> in the UK, for instance.</p><p>It may also reduce rainfall over the Amazon basin, impact the monsoon systems in Asia and, by bringing warm waters into the Southern Ocean, further destabilize ice in Antarctica and accelerate global sea level rise.</p>The Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation has a major effect on the climate. Praetorius (2018)
Is it Time to Declare a Climate Emergency?
<p>At what stage, and at what rise in global temperatures, will these tipping points be reached? No one is entirely sure. It may take centuries, millennia or it could be imminent.</p><p>But as COVID-19 taught us, we need to prepare for the expected. We were aware of the risk of a pandemic. We also knew that we were not sufficiently prepared. But we didn't act in a meaningful manner. Thankfully, we have been able to fast-track the production of vaccines to combat COVID-19. But there is no vaccine for climate change once we have passed these tipping points.</p><p><a href="https://www.weforum.org/reports/the-global-risks-report-2021" target="_blank">We need to act now on our climate</a>. Act like these tipping points are imminent. And stop thinking of climate change as a slow-moving, long-term threat that enables us to kick the problem down the road and let future generations deal with it. We must take immediate action to reduce global warming and fulfill our commitments to the <a href="https://www.ipcc.ch/sr15/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Paris Agreement</a>, and build resilience with these tipping points in mind.</p><p>We need to plan now to mitigate greenhouse gas emissions, but we also need to plan for the impacts, such as the ability to feed everyone on the planet, develop plans to manage flood risk, as well as manage the social and geopolitical impacts of human migrations that will be a consequence of fight or flight decisions.</p><p>Breaching these tipping points would be cataclysmic and potentially far more devastating than COVID-19. Some may not enjoy hearing these messages, or consider them to be in the realm of science fiction. But if it injects a sense of urgency to make us respond to climate change like we have done to the pandemic, then we must talk more about what has happened before and will happen again.</p><p>Otherwise we will continue playing Jenga with our planet. And ultimately, there will only be one loser – us.</p>By John R. Platt
The period of the 45th presidency will go down as dark days for the United States — not just for the violent insurgency and impeachment that capped off Donald Trump's four years in office, but for every regressive action that came before.
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