WHISTLE BLOWER BRIGHT's COMPLAINT COULD PROVE THAT TRUMP FAILED MISERABLY TO ACT ON THE CORONA VIRUS -- + opening too soon hazard!

It's long but revelatory and lives are at stake as putting people back to work too soon shows the disease increasing:
Whistle-blower ties interagency hostility to pandemic response - 

By Sheryl Gay Stolberg, Sharon LaFraniere, Michael D. Shear, and and Ben Protess, New York Times

WASHINGTON — The call in early February from the White House Situation Room came as a surprise to Rick Bright: Peter Navarro, President Trump’s trade adviser, wanted him to come present his ideas for fighting the coronavirus, alone. 

Bright, whose tiny federal research agency was pursuing a coronavirus vaccine, had long been at odds with his boss at the Department of Health and Human Services, Robert Kadlec. His White House visits, twice in a single weekend, only exacerbated those tensions. “Weekend at Peter’s,’’ Kadlec quipped in the subject line of an e-mail that expressed his displeasure. 

The hostility between these two key officials in the government’s response to a pandemic that has claimed more than 80,000 American lives and counting burst into public view  when Bright — who was abruptly dismissed last month as head of the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority — filed a formal whistleblower complaint. 

The document accuses Kadlec and other top administration officials of corruption, “cronyism,’’ and putting politics ahead of science. Whether the charges are ultimately proven, the 89-page complaint along with other documents and interviews expose troubling infighting at the Health and Human Services Department, the sprawling agency that includes BARDA, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, National Institutes of Health, the Food and Drug Administration, and other arms of government, as officials there struggled to combat the worst public health crisis in a century. 

“BARDA is the front edge of the global response, in terms of organizing the financing, laying down the bets on what’s coming forward as the options on vaccines and therapies,’’ said J. Stephen Morrison, a global health expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, adding that the infighting had consequences. “They need to move with incredible skill and judgment and speed.’’
The infighting extends beyond Bright and Kadlec. Fierce battles have erupted between Alex Azar, the health and human services secretary, and Seema Verma, the Medicare and Medicaid administrator. 

Azar has also clashed with a senior White House policymaker, Joe Grogan. But the consequences of such clashes were brought to life by Bright’s complaint. 

E-mail messages show that, as early as January, when Trump was saying the outbreak was “totally under control,’’ Bright was pressing for the government to stock up on masks and drugs and to commence a “Manhattan Project’’ effort to develop a vaccine. 

But Bright was largely sidelined by personal disputes with Kadlec and his aides, some of which long predated the coronavirus, the documents suggest. By the time the pandemic arrived in force, the relationship between them had become toxic, with Bright increasingly left out of key decisions. His ideas about battling the threat “were met with skepticism,’’ the complaint says, “and were clearly not welcome.’’


On Friday, lawyers for Bright said the federal watchdog agency handling his complaint, the Office of Special Counsel, had notified them that it had found “reasonable grounds’’ to believe he was retaliated against and was seeking his reinstatement while it investigated. 

Azar must now decide whether to reinstate Bright. An HHS spokeswoman, Caitlin Oakley, declined to comment on a “personnel matter.’’ But, she said, the agency “strongly disagrees with the allegations and characterizations in the complaint from Bright.’’ 

With a $1.6 billion annual budget, BARDA was created in the aftermath of the Sept, 11, 2001, attacks to partner with industry to develop drugs, vaccines, and other “medical countermeasures’’ that could be stockpiled to combat a bioterror attack or pandemic threat. Bright had been in charge for less than a year when Kadlec was confirmed by the Senate as assistant secretary for preparedness and response in 2017. 

The two men came from different worlds. Kadlec spent 20 years in the Air Force and helped write the legislation that created BARDA. He advised President George W. Bush on biodefense. Bright, who grew up poor in small-town Kansas, began his career at the CDC. An influenza expert, he considered a pandemic to be the nation’s biggest threat. 

Bright’s allies say he was viewed with suspicion in the Trump administration as an “Obama holdover.’’ One of his earliest clashes with Kadlec centered on a long-running contract BARDA had with a small biotechnology company that Bright believed was tied to Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law and senior adviser. 

The company, Aeolus Pharmaceuticals, was developing a drug to treat the effects of radiation from a potential nuclear attack when BARDA employees decided not to extend the contract in early 2017. John McManus, the company’s chief executive, said in an interview that the decision was based on a deeply flawed process, and appealed it directly to Bright. 

In August 2017, Bright’s complaint says, John Clerici, a consultant and Aeolus board member who is close to Kadlec, pleaded the company’s case to Bright over coffee and emphasized that McManus was “friends with Jared’’ and “has Hollywood connections.’’ 

McManus said he does not know Kushner or anyone in his family, and he disputed nearly all of Bright’s claims about Aeolus. Clerici said the “conversation never happened.’’ 

A review of corporate, political, and nonprofit records shows only a distant and indirect connection between Aeolus and the Kushner family. Some of Kushner’s relatives have donated to National Jewish Health, a hospital that co-owned several patents licensed by Aeolus, and Kushner’s father and sister sit on the hospital’s council of national trustees. Bright, though, said “the political pressure’’ from Kadlec and his underlings “became undeniable,’’ and “had no place in a system designed to award funding based on scientific merit.’’ In the end, he stood by BARDA’s decision to not extend the contact with Aeolus. The company folded within months. McManus lost his job. 

In the fall of 2019, with Aeolus bankrupt, McManus landed at Partner Therapeutics, a Massachusetts-based company represented by Clerici that also appears in Bright’s complaint.
 
Bright said that in September 2019, before McManus arrived, Kadlec handed out a $55 million, no-bid contract to the company (Partner Therapeutics) to prevent it from going out of business. Partner Therapeutics, with 200 employees, produces and sells one drug, Leukine, that can be used to treat excessive exposure to radiation. 

In 2018, the federal government decided to buy more anti-radiation drugs for the Strategic National Stockpile. Bright’s division, following the recommendation of a panel of experts, had chosen California pharmaceutical giant Amgen, which produces two similar drugs. 

Bright was so alarmed about what he claimed were “inappropriate and possibly illegal communications’’ between Clerici, Kadlec, and other HHS officials, the complaint says, that he called for an inspector general to “inspect their phone records.’’ After that, he says, he was cut out of meetings about the contract. 

There is no evidence that an inspector general investigation was ever conducted and allies of Kadlec say he did some things Bright wanted, including putting the contracting team under BARDA’s jurisdiction. But the request for the investigation added to the bitterness between them. 

Eventually, Kadlec overruled him, Bright says, and awarded the sole-source contract to Partner Therapeutics, “on the basis of industrial mobilization’’ — the interest of the federal government to keep more than one supplier of an important type of drug in business.

The consequences of a pandemic response of opening up too soon:
Meanwhile these countries either defied it or opened up too soon, causing outbreaks, and that's what could happen here. Belarus, which has not locked down despite increasing case numbers, saw tens of thousands of people turn out to mark Victory Day, the anniversary of Nazi Germany’s defeat in 1945. That was in contrast to Russia, which skipped the usual grand military parade in Red Square. Worldwide, 4 million people have been confirmed infected by the virus, and more than 275,000 have died, including over 78,000 in the United States, according to a tally kept by Johns Hopkins University. ...Seoul shut down nightclubs, hostess bars, and discos after dozens of infections were linked to people who went out last weekend as the country relaxed its social-distancing guidelines. Many of the infections were connected to a 29-year-old man who visited three nightclubs before testing positive. Mayor Park Won-soon said health workers were trying to contact some 1,940 people who had been at the three clubs and other places nearby. The mayor said gains made against the virus are now threatened “because of a few careless people.’’ Health officials in Germany faced outbreaks at three slaughterhouses in what was seen as a test of the government’s strategy for dealing with any resurgence of the virus during the easing of the restrictions. At one slaughterhouse, in Coesfeld, 180 workers tested positive.