The First Shots by Brendan Borrell

Author:Brendan Borrell [Borrell, Brendan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780358566182
Published: 2021-10-26T00:00:00+00:00

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The next day, May 14, at ten a.m., Anna Eshoo, a California Democrat, pounded her gavel inside room 2123 of the Rayburn House Office Building. She was leading a hearing called “Protecting Scientific Integrity in the COVID-19 Response.” Eshoo had been the one who had helped Bright secure his BARDA appropriation, and she had invited him to testify before the nation. She expressed disappointment that Azar and Kadlec had “refused to testify today” and asked “for a moment of silence in honor of the over eighty thousand Americans who have lost their lives from COVID-19.”

With a flag pin on his lapel and his gray hair meticulously combed to the side, Bright leaned forward and closed his eyes. All was quiet in the room but for a few clicks of a camera. He then removed his face mask and read his testimony. “Today, the world is confronting a public health emergency unlike any we’ve seen in over a century,” he said. “Without better planning, 2020 could be the darkest winter in modern history.”

Bright’s legal team had publicly released its sixty-three-page whistleblower complaint, painting Bright as the lone hero inside the ASPR. He had gone from being a big supporter of the agency stocking up on supplies of chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine that emergency department doctors were clamoring for to crying foul over the way the White House wanted to push the unproven drugs out to pharmacies. His attacks were not focused on the president’s misstatements, however, but on Bob Kadlec, who, he said, was a Trump flunky who posed a “danger to public health” and had abused his authority, broken the law, wasted funds, and censored scientific research for his own corrupt ends. That whole chloroquine thing? That was Kadlec’s fault. The N95 mask shortages? Kadlec’s fault as well.

Bright also got his payback on Michael Callahan for the dressing-down Callahan had given him in February. Bright alleged that Callahan and Kadlec had skirted BARDA’s “rigorous” review process in order to run a clinical trial on famotidine, a generic heartburn drug that Callahan’s Chinese colleagues had suggested might work against COVID-19. “This contract was just one more example of Dr. Kadlec’s actions in bypassing all rules and procedures designed to ensure public safety and to avoid corruption in the award of billions of dollars in government funds,” Bright’s complaint read. Kadlec was already a black sheep inside the Trump administration and now he was also a villain to the world. Callahan told Kadlec he blamed himself for Bright. “I helped create this monster,” he said. “I brought him to government when he was nothing.”

Over nearly four hours of testimony, Bright repeated the charges in his whistleblowing complaint, claiming that Kadlec had set the vaccine effort back. He also pointed out that Kadlec had failed to properly ramp up supplies of remdesivir, the drug Bright had hounded Callahan about back in February. As Callahan had predicted, remdesivir wasn’t saving lives or even reducing the amount of virus in a patient’s respiratory tract.

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