Mainstream media has elevated National Institutes of Health whistleblower Dr. Rick Bright to heroic status after his congressional testimony denounced Trump’s Covid-19 response as borderline criminally negligent.
Bright, the director of the US Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (BARDA) until he was unceremoniously dismissed last month, painted a disturbing picture of a government flying blindly into disaster on Thursday during his testimony on the administration’s Covid-19 response before a subcommittee of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce.
“We’re in deep shit” — Bright talks about a moment from this winter when he realized the US government was unprepared for the coronavirus pic.twitter.com/gT5hCPXmZ6
Warning Congress that “the window is closing to address” the outbreak that has killed tens of thousands of Americans and threatening the “darkest winter in modern history” if his warnings continued to be ignored, Bright was warmly embraced by Democrats on the committee. They readily lapped up his damning claims about the Trump administration’s health policy: failure to plan properly for the Covid-19 outbreak, refusal to take his warnings about running low on personal protective equipment seriously, insistence on hyping hydroxychloroquine despite the absence of placebo-controlled studies proving its efficacy against the virus.
“You’re an American hero,” Rep. George Butterfield (North Carolina) fawned, while New Jersey Rep. Frank Pallone likened the fired vaccine expert to one of John F. Kennedy’s “profiles in courage.”
Bright filed a whistleblower complaint earlier this month alleging cronyism and an aversion to scientific rigor among the political appointees running the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), which supervises BARDA. He claimed he was fired over his unwillingness to promote the malaria drugs chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine as potential cures for Covid-19, as well as his warnings about the country’s short stock of medical supplies.
HHS, however, had a scathing response ready for Bright’s claims, accusing him of colluding with “partisan attorneys” and spreading “misinformation” about the agency.
U.S. HHS just destroyed Dr. Rick Bright… pic.twitter.com/IogcbvXXvN
While Republicans on the committee attempted to grill Bright about his refusal to accept hydroxychloroquine as a potential Covid-19 treatment, highlight pieces missing from his whistleblower complaint, and trace stockpile deficiencies into previous presidential administrations, their voices were largely drowned out.
The chorus of media and blue-check cheerleaders greeted Bright’s testimony as gospel, and the scientist himself as a doomsday prophet.
Dr. Rick Bright says “lives were lost” due to delayed mask production: “Nurses in hospitals today are wearing N95-marked masks from other countries that are not providing sufficient protection … Nurses are rushing into hospitals thinking they’re protected, and they’re not.” pic.twitter.com/5HevsdmiBN
Doctors who violate their oath have caused such horrifying harm from the Tuskegee experiment to Nazi Germany to the Vanderbilt radiation study in pregnant women. Dr. Bright stood up against using hydroxychloroquine in humans and lost his job. But he kept his integrity. Thank you.
Beyond deficiencies in the national stockpile, Bright also linked the administration’s failure to “educate” Americans about wearing masks and social distancing months before the pandemic arrived in the US to further deaths.
Dr. Bright w/ a damning statement on Trump administration’s virus response: “We did not forewarn people. We did not train people. We did not educate them on social distancing and wearing a mask as we should have in January and February. All those…could have…saved more lives.”
Dr. Bright: “Lives were endangered, and I believe lives were lost.” “We were forced to procure the supplies from other countries without the right quality standards, so even our doctors and nurses … today are wearing N95-marked masks” that don’t provide sufficient protection.
Ultimately, Americans would be doomed if the Trump administration didn’t start listening to the scientists, Bright warned, noting that even Trump’s much-vaunted “Warp Speed” vaccine initiative was doomed to failure.
US pandemic response in 11 words:”We have no single point of leadership and no master plan.”Dr. Rick Bright#RickBright#itsthatsimple
Bright says it will be “catastrophic” if every American does not have access to a coronavirus vaccine due to a supply shortage, and decisions have not been made about who would be vaccinated first https://t.co/JYg6TXvFVKpic.twitter.com/pulQ38QGOG
Trump has dismissed Bright as a “disgruntled employee,” while admitting he’d “never met him or even heard of him.” Health and Human Services secretary Alex Azar snarled that “his allegations do not hold water,” insisting “everything he’s complaining about was done.”
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