When a ‘disgruntled employee’ exposed Trump’s awful failings

Ahmed Baba, The Independent

When Donald Trump smears a congressional witness first thing in the morning, you know he’s nervous about what they’re about to say. Ahead of Dr Rick Bright’s highly anticipated hearing, the president launched an 8am tweet calling him a “disgruntled employee” who should no longer be working for the government. As usual with most of Trump’s unhinged efforts to intimidate witnesses, the opposite is true.

What we heard was the most in-depth public exhibition of the Trump administration’s failures to protect Americans from a pandemic. Administration officials were warned and they did not act. They knew the extent of the threat coronavirus posed and they lied about it. We are now living with the results of that inaction and disinformation.

Bright’s opening statement to the House Committee on Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on Health was forward-looking, warning that “without better planning, 2020 could be the darkest winter in American history.” But the Q&A portion focused on his whistleblower complaint, meaning that we very quickly got a shocking view of the past.

At the core of Bright’s allegations is that he was removed from his post as director of the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (BARDA), the office responsible for vaccines, in an act of retaliation. Bright says that this was due to him speaking out against “politics and cronyism” driving decisions about the coronavirus response instead of science. He alleges the primary reason for his ousting was due to his opposition to the Trump administration’s promotion of unproven drugs like hydroxychloroquine. He filed a whistleblower complaint corroborating these claims with documentary evidence.

Bright discussed an email he received from Mike Bowen, co-owner of surgical mask producer Prestige Ameritech, about a diminishing supply chain for masks. He pointed to Bowen’s January warning as to what made him realize how unprepared America was for what was coming. Bowen wrote: “Rick, I think we’re in deep s**t. The world.”

Between January and April, Bright warned that we needed to ramp up production of N95 masks, stockpile raw materials, and urgently increase testing capacity. He pushed warnings to the highest levels of the HHS; they were ignored and he was cut out of future crucial meetings. Bright said this “inaction put a lot of lives at risk.” The Trump administration didn’t invoke the Defense Production Act to procure masks and medical equipment until April. Crucial months were lost.

HHS Secretary Alex Azar and Assistant Secretary of HHS Dr Robert Kadlec were allegedly chief among those who ignored the warnings. Bright does credit White House Adviser Peter Navarro with taking the threat seriously. Azar, Kadlec, and Navarro were all invited to testify to their side of the story but they declined.

While some have called these ignored coronavirus warnings the biggest intelligence failure since 9/11, this was not a failure of intelligence. No, this is not 9/11. It’s way worse. The coronavirus death toll is over 84,000 American lives. This was like if President Trump was told about dozens of 9/11s being planned around the US and, as the attacks began to occur, he called fears a Democratic “hoax.” That is not hyperbole. “The invisible enemy,” as Trump has called coronavirus, was already in the US. The only move our president made between January and early March, while it was circulating, was to ban Chinese nationals from entering the country while letting Americans possibly infected by the virus in, all the while failing to ramp up testing.

It turns out Mike Bowen’s emailed prediction to Dr Bright was right. We are now “in deep s**t,” and it’s because of the Trump administration’s wilful incompetence. Trump isn’t responsible for the existence of coronavirus, but he damn sure is responsible for America’s failures to contain it.