There are a lot of unsung heroes that have been amazing during the multiyear pandemic we've been enduring and one in particular was chastised and even punished by the Trump administration for trying to help people curb the pandemic. His name is Rick Bright and you likely never heard of him. Rick Bright drew the ire of former President Donald Trump with a whistleblower complaint and congressional testimony about the federal response to COVID-19. Trump spread lies about him, and Trump followers sent death threats to Rick Bright, and tried to discredit him and even attacked his personal life. (Basically, they are deplorables.). But Bright persevered and is now a leader in the current Administration where he should be. This is his story from SCIENCE Magazine>>>>>
THE PANDEMIC WHISTEBLOWER
Rick Bright raised the alarm about the Trump administration’s response to COVID‑19. Now, he wants to build an alert system for future threats
In May 2020, with anonymous callers vowing to kill him and similar threats mounting on social media, Rick Bright gave up his cellphone and went into hiding for more than a month. “If I heard tires rolling over the road in the middle of the night in the driveway where I was staying, it was panic,” says the 55-year-old immunologist, who until that month had been a powerful, if obscure, U.S. government public health official.
HE REACTED TO THE BAD COVID RESPONSE - The threats began after Bright filed a whistleblower suit alleging he had been demoted from the top job at the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (BARDA) for protesting the government’s COVID-19 contracts and what he saw as its misguided, plodding response to the growing pandemic. He accused his bosses of trying to steer taxpayer dollars to firms run by “cronies” or “for political purposes.” The “straw that broke the camel’s back,” the complaint stated, is that he publicly criticized hydroxychloroquine—the antimalaria drug then-President Donald Trump had touted as a coronavirus remedy—as useless.
The suit and his congressional testimony that soon followed catapulted Bright into the public eye. A 60 Minutes story described him as “the highest ranking government scientist to charge the federal government’s response to the coronavirus pandemic has been slow and chaotic.”
TRUMP BADMOUTHED HIM - Trump took to Twitter to assail him, but many of Bright’s peers in public health cheered him. “He was one of the very early people to tell the American people what was going on,” says Nicole Lurie, who during former President Barack Obama’s administration oversaw BARDA as assistant secretary for preparedness and response (ASPR) at the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). “He had a lot of guts.”
Bright’s abrupt, tumultuous exit from BARDA, where he had for 4 years overseen a $1 billion–plus research budget aimed at protecting the country from pandemics and bioweapons, marked but one more dramatic chapter in a rough-and-tumble life. Now, in a bold gamble on his ability to make something from nothing, the Rockefeller Foundation has hired Bright to head a new bid to protect the world from future pandemics.
Rockefeller will give the Pandemic Prevention Institute (PPI) $150 million in seed money over the next 3 years to tap and quickly share pathogen surveillance data gathered by myriad sources. “We’re setting out to build an environment for sharing data around the world at all levels—not just governments—that will allow us to make smarter decisions,” Bright says. “I’m wildly supportive that the Rockefeller’s doing this,” says Eric Lander, director of the White House’s Office of Science and Technology Policy, which recently issued its own ambitious, multibillion-dollar prescription to better address pandemics. Rajiv Shah, Rockefeller’s president, is certain Bright can turn PPI into a powerful force. “Rick is absolutely the best person on the planet to lead it,” Shah says. Bruce Gellin, an epidemiologist who for 15 years led HHS’s National Vaccine Program Office and is one of PPI’s first 16 employees, says, “Rick is a 50-year-vision person. That’s what he does.”
But even some admirers wonder how Bright’s new venture will stand out among efforts by governments, academia, industry, and the World Health Organization (WHO) that share PPI’s elusive aspiration, including several new ones with similarly large backing. And his detractors charge that Bright can be arrogant. “His ego is bigger than his managerial skills,” says physician Robert Kadlec, Lurie’s successor as ASPR under Trump and the main target of Bright’s blistering whistleblower complaint.
Lurie sees it differently. Bright, she says, has no fear of speaking what he perceives as truth to power. “Even when it was unpopular, it was something he did, whether it was about programmatic stuff or individuals,” she says. “If Rick didn’t respect somebody, it was difficult for him to play along without saying something.”
BRIGHT’S HARDSCRABBLE ROOTS (See article for his full career) - Bright also helped shape the government’s response to epidemics at home and abroad, represented the country at WHO, and regularly briefed Congress. - FULL STORY IN SCIENCE
BRIGHT SAYS TENSIONS with Kadlec predated the pandemic. The former Air Force officer, he asserts, believed BARDA should emphasize protecting against bioweapons over emerging infectious diseases. But COVID-19 made simmering bad blood boil. Bright and Kadlec battled about whether to fund specific masks, drugs, and vaccines to thwart SARS-CoV-2. Discord also grew after Bright visited the White House at the invitation of Peter Navarro, a trade adviser to Trump who early on advocated for more aggressive actions to stop the emerging virus. Bright says he lobbied for a crash program to make COVID-19 vaccines—a pandemic “Manhattan Project”—which Navarro spelled out in a memo on 9 February 2020 to the White House’s Coronavirus Task Force. It took 2 months before HHS endorsed the concept, when it formed Operation Warp Speed.
Kadlec, Bright contends, was livid about the meetings with Navarro, which spurred the White House to push HHS to ramp up mask production, purchase potentially helpful drugs, and invest billions in vaccine development. “Kadlec was very uncomfortable with it,” Bright says. “He actually could see that pressure was mounting. There were jokes in the hallway about Rick and his new friend, Peter.”
Bright also convinced Congress that to better respond to the pandemic, BARDA needed a substantial infusion of funding that it could control—without ASPR’s oversight. And then Bright shared with a reporter concerns about what he later called in his complaint HHS’s “reckless and dangerous push” of hydroxychloroquine and its analogs as COVID-19 treatments. On 20 April 2020, Kadlec transferred him from BARDA to the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to oversee a new project on COVID-19 diagnostics.
Bright recognized the importance of ramping up diagnostics, but he charged that the transfer amounted to retaliation. In his richly detailed, 63-page complaint—which included Navarro’s memo as one of 61 exhibits—Bright made allegations of fraud, cronyism, waste, and abuse of power within the federal COVID-19 response. According to Bright’s lawyers, the Office of Special Counsel—an independent federal agency that oversees the Whistleblower Protection Act—promptly concluded that Bright’s complaint documented a “substantial likelihood of wrongdoing” and referred the matter to HHS for an investigation.
TRUMP ATTACKS BRIGHT - On the morning of 14 May 2020, shortly before Bright was set to testify at a congressional hearing, Trump attacked. “I don’t know the so-called Whistleblower Rick Bright, never met him or even heard of him,” Trump tweeted. “But to me he is a disgruntled employee, not liked or respected by people I spoke to and who, with his attitude, should no longer be working for our government!”
BRIGHT'S WARNING COMES TRUE IN 2020, 2021 - At the hearing, Bright warned that the U.S. response to the pandemic had gone awry. “Without better planning, 2020 could be the darkest winter in modern history,” he said. Asked about Trump’s downplaying the pandemic’s threat in the preceding months, Bright minced his words—but the criticism was plain: “I believe Americans need to be told the truth,” he said. “And I believe that the best scientific guidance and advice was not being conveyed to the American public during that time.”
Kadlec, who was not allowed to respond to Bright’s allegations while he was ASPR, was outraged. “You want to talk about some hurt feelings? You got it here, buddy,” says Kadlec, who now works on the minority Republican staff of the U.S. Senate health committee. He acknowledges that they had different views about BARDA’s role from the start, but says his mandate required addressing both bioterror and infectious disease equally. Kadlec says shifting Bright to NIH wasn’t retaliation, but rather part of the war on COVID-19. “This is my military background. The mission was to save lives, and the immediate mission is, ‘We need diagnostics—Rick, go over there.’”
“None of [Bright’s] allegations have been substantiated,” asserts a former HHS lawyer who helped evaluate the whistleblower complaint and asked not to be identified. Many come down to what that lawyer, who was appointed by the Trump administration, sees as professional judgment calls. “Rick did not play well with others,” the lawyer says. “He wanted to be the guy that called the shots, and he didn’t want any criticism or oversight or accountability or checks on that authority.”
MORE UGLY REPUBLICAN SLAMS (and They referred to COVID as the "China Virus") - After Bright’s congressional testimony, Navarro called his former ally “a deserter in the war on the China virus.” When Bright appeared on 60 Minutes a few days later, Trump lashed out at him again, tweeting that he “fabricates stories,” “spews lies,” and is “a creep.” Bright says unknown people subsequently began to call his relatives about his personal life, trying to dig up dirt about boyfriends, even though he is openly gay. “It was disgusting,” he says.
FINALLY REDEEMED - Bright’s fall from grace didn’t last long. President-elect Joe Biden made him an adviser on a COVID-19 transition team. In August 2021, HHS settled the whistleblower suit with Bright, agreeing to back pay and damages for “emotional stress and reputational damage,” according to his lawyers. They add that HHS has a separate, ongoing investigation into his allegations about contract improprieties and inappropriate responses to the pandemic. (HHS would not confirm or deny this.) And Bright is trying again to head off pandemics, this time from outside government.
PPI’S VAST OFFICE SPACE in Washington, D.C., isn’t just pandemic empty—it’s startup empty. As Bright begins to fill its cubicles with disease modelers, global health specialists, political scientists, epidemiologists, and health economists, he recognizes that his vision for PPI also still has many blanks to fill in—and knows he is entering an increasingly crowded and well-funded field. With backing from Germany, WHO will supplement its long-standing outbreak alert network with a hub in Berlin to analyze the incoming data and better plan responses. CDC is similarly launching a new group to aid local U.S. officials facing a spreading pathogen. “No one can do it all,” Bright says. “We have to now come together to decide how we divide and conquer this ecosystem.”
BRIGHT LOSES HIS MOTHER - URGES VACCINES AND BOOSTERS - In August 2021, Bright’s mother was living with a relative who tested positive for SARS-CoV-2. She had received two doses of a vaccine, but she was at high risk of severe COVID-19. On 17 August, his mother died of what he is certain was COVID-19. “I’m heartbroken beyond words that this pandemic has now taken my mom,” Bright tweeted. “Please get vaccinated, tested & please wear a high quality mask (over mouth & nose). I’m in so much pain from losing my mother, trust me, I don’t want anyone else to feel this pain.”
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