Virus whistleblower alleges ongoing retaliation

WASHINGTON (AP) — A government whistleblower ousted from a leading role in battling COVID-19 alleged Thursday that the Trump administration has intensified its campaign to punish him for revealing shortcomings in the U.S. response.

Dr. Rick Bright, former director of the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority, said in an amended complaint filed with a federal watchdog agency that he has been relegated to a lesser role in his new assignment at the National Institutes of Health, unable to lend his full expertise to the battle against COVID-19.

The complaint also said Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar is leading a “coordinated effort” to undermine Bright in his new role, and it formally requests that Azar remove himself from dealing with the case.

Bright, a vaccine expert, was supposed to be working on virus diagnostic tests at NIH. But he “is cut off from all vaccine work, cut off from all therapeutic work, and has a very limited role in the diagnostic work,” said the complaint. “His extremely narrow role is confined to making contracts with diagnostics companies that have already developed diagnostics, to scale up their production.”

Where Bright previously oversaw 200 hundred or more projects at BARDA, he's now been given responsibility for five to eight projects, involving diagnostic tests already approved by the Food and Drug Administration.

The complaint said former colleagues of Bright's at his old agency are now avoiding him. It described a conversation with one such colleague, who is not identified by name.

The complaint quotes the former colleague saying that the agency's new acting director, Dr. Gary Disbrow, had warned him “to be ‘very careful.’”

The complaint said Disbrow explained that Azar “was very angry...