Whistleblower warns of the ‘darkest winter’
WASHINGTON — A Trump administration health official who filed a whistleblower complaint last week plans to tell Congress Thursday that without a sciencebased national response to the pandemic, 2020 will be the “darkest winter in modern history.”
“Our window of opportunity is closing,” Rick Bright will tell the House Energy and Commerce Health Subcommittee, according to his prepared testimony.
The mortality of the pandemic could be “unprecedented” and ultimately outstrip the 50 million casualties of the 1918 influenza epidemic, wrote Bright, who was recently transferred from his position as Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority director.
“If we fail to develop a national coordinated response, based in science, I fear the pandemic will get far worse and be prolonged, causing unprecedented illness and fatalities,” his testimony reads. “The undeniable fact is there will be a resurgence of the COVID19 this fall, greatly compounding the challenges of seasonal influenza and putting an unprecedented strain on our health care system.”
Bright wrote in his formal whistleblower complaint that he was demoted from his post as director of BARDA in retaliation for challenging the pace of the Trump administration’s emergency response.
Officials at the Department of Health and Human Services, which oversees BARDA, are expected to rebut Bright’s testimony by underscoring that Bright requested the emergency use authorization from the FDA for those donations of chloroquine.