Trump Fires Inspector General Ahead of Damning Whistleblower Complaint About Bogus Coronavirus Cures

https://theintercept.com/2020/05/04/rick-bright-hhs-whistleblower-coronavirus/

Sharon Lerner
May 4 2020, 2:54 p.m.

On Friday, while Rick Bright was in the process of filing what promises to be a damning whistleblower complaint to the Inspector General of the Department of Health and Human Services, President Donald Trump announced that he was firing the inspector general, Christi Grimm, and nominating a handpicked replacement.

Two weeks ago, Bright, who, as deputy assistant secretary for preparedness and response for HHS, oversaw the government’s purchase and funding of vaccines, treatments, and tests for the coronavirus, said he had been forced out of his job because he refused to cave to pressure to adopt scientifically unproven treatments for Covid-19.

“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,” wrote in a statement released by his lawyers, as The Intercept reported at the time.

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While Trump’s enthusiasm, which sent online demand for the drug surging 1,000 percent, has since fizzled, he has now put his faith in another drug: Gilead Pharmaceutical’s remdesivir. On Friday, Trump met with Gilead CEO Dan O’Day to announce that the Food and Drug Administration would be giving the drug emergency use authorization as a treatment for Covid-19.

“We’re going to be having some really incredible results,” Trump predicted.

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While incredible results usually precede FDA authorization, with remdesivir, that has changed. The decision was made based on a single study, the results of which have yet to be made public in their entirety but are said to show that Covid-19 patients who received the drug tended to recover more quickly. While the study showed a benefit, it was modest and only about the amount of time it took patients to recover;

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The approval comes as Gilead, which paid out $874 million in cash dividends to shareholders and made $1.3 billion in stock buybacks in the first quarter of this year, has sharply increased its lobbying. The company, whose former top lobbyist, Joe Grogan, is a member of the White House coronavirus task force, spent $2.45 million on lobbying in the first quarter of 2020, up from $1.86 million in the first quarter of last year.

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