NEWS | FEATURES
science.org SCIENCEDuring Bright’s decade at BARDA, he over-
saw billions of dollars of investments into
countermeasures against potential chemi-
cal and nuclear threats, as well as drugs and
vaccines for bioweapons and infectious dis-
eases such as pandemic influenza, Middle
East respiratory syndrome, Zika, and then
COVID-19. He also helped shape the govern-
ment’s response to epidemics at home and
abroad, represented the country at WHO, and
regularly briefed Congress. As Bright docu-
ments in his whistleblower suit, he received
“stellar performance appraisals” from no less
than Kadlec.
BRIGHT SAYS TENSIONS with Kadlec predated
the pandemic. The former Air Force officer, he
asserts, believed BARDA should
emphasize protecting against
bioweapons over emerging in-
fectious diseases. But COVID-
made simmering bad blood boil.
Bright and Kadlec battled about
whether to fund specific masks,
drugs, and vaccines to thwart
SARS-CoV-2. Discord also grew
after Bright visited the White
House at the invitation of Pe-
ter Navarro, a trade adviser to
Trump who early on advocated
for more aggressive actions to
stop the emerging virus. Bright
says he lobbied for a crash
program to make COVID-
vaccines—a pandemic “Manhat-
tan Project”—which Navarro
spelled out in a memo on 9 Feb-
ruary 2020 to the White House’s
Coronavirus Task Force. It took
2 months before HHS endorsed
the concept, when it formed Op-
eration Warp Speed.
Kadlec, Bright contends, was
livid about the meetings with
Navarro, which spurred the
White House to push HHS to
ramp up mask production, pur-
chase potentially helpful drugs, and invest
billions in vaccine development. “Kadlec
was very uncomfortable with it,” Bright
says. “He actually could see that pressure
was mounting. There were jokes in the hall-
way about Rick and his new friend, Peter.”
Bright also convinced Congress that to
better respond to the pandemic, BARDA
needed a substantial infusion of fund-
ing that it could control—without ASPR’s
oversight. And then Bright shared with
a reporter concerns about what he later
called in his complaint HHS’s “reckless and
dangerous push” of hydroxychloroquine
and its analogs as COVID-19 treatments.
On 20 April 2020, Kadlec transferred him
from BARDA to the National Institutes of
Health (NIH) to oversee a new project on
COVID-19 diagnostics.
Bright recognized the importance of
ramping up diagnostics, but he charged
that the transfer amounted to retaliation.
In his richly detailed, 63-page complaint—
which included Navarro’s memo as one of
61 exhibits—Bright made allegations of
fraud, cronyism, waste, and abuse of power
within the federal COVID-19 response. Ac-
cording to Bright’s lawyers, the Office of
Special Counsel—an independent federal
agency that oversees the Whistleblower
Protection Act—promptly concluded that
Bright’s complaint documented a “substan-
tial likelihood of wrongdoing” and referred
the matter to HHS for an investigation.On the morning of 14 May 2020, shortly be-
fore Bright was set to testify at a congressio-
nal hearing, Trump attacked. “I don’t know
the so-called Whistleblower Rick Bright,
never met him or even heard of him,” Trump
tweeted. “But to me he is a disgruntled em-
ployee, not liked or respected by people I
spoke to and who, with his attitude, should
no longer be working for our government!”
At the hearing, Bright warned that the
U.S. response to the pandemic had gone
awry. “Without better planning, 2020 could
be the darkest winter in modern history,” he
said. Asked about Trump’s downplaying the
pandemic’s threat in the preceding months,
Bright minced his words—but the criticism
was plain: “I believe Americans need to betold the truth,” he said. “And I believe that
the best scientific guidance and advice was
not being conveyed to the American public
during that time.”
Kadlec, who was not allowed to respond
to Bright’s allegations while he was ASPR,
was outraged. “You want to talk about some
hurt feelings? You got it here, buddy,” says
Kadlec, who now works on the minority
Republican staff of the U.S. Senate health
committee. He acknowledges that they had
different views about BARDA’s role from
the start, but says his mandate required
addressing both bioterror and infectious
disease equally. Kadlec says shifting Bright
to NIH wasn’t retaliation, but rather part of
the war on COVID-19. “This is my militarybackground. The mission was to save lives,
and the immediate mission is, ‘We need
diagnostics—Rick, go over there.’”
“None of [Bright’s] allegations have been
substantiated,” asserts a former HHS law-
yer who helped evaluate the whistleblower
complaint and asked not to be identified.
Many come down to what that lawyer, who
was appointed by the Trump administration,
sees as professional judgment calls. “Rick
did not play well with others,” the lawyer
says. “He wanted to be the guy that called
the shots, and he didn’t want any criticism
or oversight or accountability or checks on
that authority.”
After Bright’s congressional testimony,
Navarro called his former ally “a deserter PHOTO: SHAWN THEW/THE NEW YORK TIMES/ R E D U XRick Bright drew the ire of former President Donald Trump with a whistleblower complaint and congressional testimony about
the federal response to COVID-19.18 7 JANUARY 2022 • VOL 375 ISSUE 6576