Dr. Rick Bright, who said he was fired last week from his role leading the federal agency tasked with developing a coronavirus vaccine after questioning an anti-malarial drug touted by Trump, will be filing a whistleblower complaint with the Department of Health and Human Services’ inspector general, his lawyers said on Thursday. Bright was responsible for overseeing the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority, which is part of HHS. He claimed on Wednesday that he was “involuntarily transferred” to a “more limited and less impactful position” at the National Institutes of Health after raising concerns about hydroxychloroquine. “The administration is now making demonstrably false statements about Dr. Bright, one of the nation’s leading vaccine, drug and diagnostic experts,” reads a statement from his lawyers Debra Katz and Lisa Banks. “In our filing we will make clear that Dr. Bright was sidelined for one reason only—because he resisted efforts to provide unfettered access to potentially dangerous drugs, including chloroquine, a drug promoted by the Administration as a panacea.”
Bright wrote in his Wednesday statement: “I believe this transfer was in response to my insistence that the government invest the billions of dollars allocated by Congress to address the Covid-19 pandemic into safe and scientifically vetted solutions, and not in drugs, vaccines and other technologies that lack scientific merit.”
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