The Trump administration downplayed the seriousness of the pandemic until it triggered a steep decline in the stock market in February and early March.
Whistleblower complaint details Trump administration’s corruption and obstruction of anti-pandemic efforts
7 May 2020
On Tuesday, Dr. Rick Bright, the ousted director of the government agency overseeing the development of a coronavirus vaccine, filed an 89-page whistleblower complaint that provides further details on the Trump administration’s cover-up of the dangers from the virus and opposition to any coordinated effort to prevent its spread. It also catalogues corruption and insider dealing in awarding government contracts to drug firms and other companies, including those with ties to the Trump family.
Bright, who headed the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (BARDA) since 2016, was removed from his post on April 20 after he leaked information concerning his opposition to the promotion of hydroxychloroquine by the White House and top officials in the Department of Health and Human Services to a Reuters reporter, who published an article on the internal administration conflict on April 16.
His formal complaint was filed with the Office of Special Counsel, which is tasked with shielding whistleblowers from retaliation by government officials. In it, Bright asks to be restored to his position at the head of BARDA and for the launching of an investigation into his removal.
Dr. Rick Bright (Wikipedia)
In the complaint, Bright relates in considerable detail his repeated warnings beginning in early January of the dangers of the virus to the US population and the need to address the shortage of critical supplies such as masks, respirators and swabs. Citing emails and other communications, he explains that his efforts evoked skepticism and hostility from his superiors in the Department of Health and Human Services, including HHS Secretary Alex Azar.
Bright also describes his battles with his superiors at HHS over President Trump’s promotion of the anti-malaria drug hydroxychloroquine. While documenting disputes with his superior, Dr. Robert Kadlec, over the awarding of contracts to drug companies connected to an industry consultant and associate of Kadlec, Bright says his removal was triggered by his opposition to making hydroxychloroquine available to the general public without its having been properly tested as a treatment for COVID-19.
“I was pressured to let politics and cronyism
drive decisions over the opinions of the best
scientists we have in government,”
Bright told reporters after he filed his complaint. In the document, he asserts that he was removed from his leading role in the vaccine program and shunted into a lower-level position at the National Institutes of Health because he tried to “prioritize science and safety over political expediency.”
He notes that weeks before his removal, when he was pressing for urgent action to address the coronavirus threat, he was excluded from meetings on the issue.
The Trump administration downplayed the seriousness of the pandemic until it triggered a steep decline in the stock market in February and early March. Once the bipartisan drive began toward the end of March to pass the $2.2 trillion CARES Act, guaranteeing unlimited supplies of government cash to protect the wealth of major investors, the stock market turned around and began a record surge that has continued into May.
With the enactment of the bailout, passed unanimously in the Senate, including the votes of Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, and overwhelmingly backed by the Democrats in the House, Trump began his campaign for a return to work and reopening of businesses, despite the continuing rise in infections and deaths from the pandemic.
Following Bright’s removal, administration officials accused him of having poorly managed his office, mistreated staff and failed to consult with his superiors. However, his most recent performance review from May 2019, according to CNN, which obtained a copy, praised Bright’s management of his office and included no criticisms.
Bright is scheduled to testify next week before the House of Representatives’ Health Subcommittee, headed by Democratic congresswoman Anna Eshoo of California.
The whistleblower complaint states: “Dr. Bright pressed for urgent access to funding, personnel and clinical specimens, including viruses, which he emphasized were all critically necessary to begin development of lifesaving medicines needed in the likely event that the virus spread outside of Southeast Asia. Secretary Azar and Dr. Kadlec responded with surprise at Dr. Bright’s dire predictions and urgency and asserted that the United States would be able to contain the virus and keep it out of the United States.”
Bright cites a January email from the co-owner of a mask production firm saying he was willing to reactivate idled N95 mask production lines with government assistance, an offer that was ignored.
Bright told reporters that he and other scientists found the administration’s “eagerness to push blindly forward without sufficient data” on the hydroxychloroquine “alarming.” He said: “I could not in good conscience ignore the scientific recommendations to limit access to those drugs under the direct care of a doctor, and instead allow political ambition and timelines to override scientific judgment.”
He added that one Trump official who appeared to recognize the gravity of the outbreak was Trump’s trade adviser Peter Navarro, who warned about the danger of a major health crisis in the US. Navarro was pushing for an early emphasis on the virus primarily from the standpoint of scapegoating China for the pandemic and using it to escalate Washington’s trade war and military preparations against Beijing.
There are numerous ties between the Trump administration and companies involved in the production of hydroxychloroquine. One of the largest shareholders in the main producer of the drug, the French firm Sanofi, is Fisher Asset Management, an investment company run by Ken Fisher, a major donor to Republicans, including Trump.
Another investor in the firm is Invesco, the fund previously run by Wilbur Ross, Trump’s commerce secretary. As of 2019, Trump reported that his three family trusts each had investments in a mutual fund whose largest holding was Sanofi.
Azar himself, a multimillionaire, was a top executive at the pharmaceutical giant Eli Lilly and lobbyist for the drug industry before joining the Trump administration.
At one point, the whistleblower complaint states that Bright called for an investigation by the inspector general “to help break up the ‘cottage industry’ of marketing consultants and political influence into these contracts.”
Much of the complaint is a detailed account of Bright’s long-running battle with Dr. Kaldec, HHS assistant secretary for preparedness and response (ASPR), over cronyism in the awarding of contracts. One section is headed: “Since 2017, Dr. Bright Has Objected to HHS Leadership’s Cronyism and Award of Contracts to Companies with Political Connections to the Administration.”
Speaking of the tensions between Bright and Kaldec, the document states, “Their relationship had been tense since approximately 2018, when Dr. Bright began raising repeated objections to the outsized role Dr. Kadlec allowed industry consultants to play in securing contracts that Dr. Bright and other scientists and subject matter experts determined were not meritorious.”
In particular, Bright singles out the outsized role played by John Clerici, “an industry consultant to pharmaceutical companies with a longstanding connection to Dr. Kadlec, in the award of government contracts.” The complaint cites as an example “the efforts of ASPR staff and Mr. Clerici to pressure Dr. Bright to extend a contract with Mr. Clerici’s client, Aeolus Pharmaceuticals,” whose CEO was “a friend of Jared Kushner, President Trump’s son-in-law and a senior advisor to the president.”
Kushner is playing a key behind-the-scenes role in the administration’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic.
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The American oligarchy decides for death
5 May 2020
It is becoming increasingly obvious that the Trump administration has embraced an approach to the pandemic that will—and that it knows will—result in the deaths of tens of thousands of people in the coming weeks and months.
On Sunday night, Trump nonchalantly stated that he now expects 100,000 people to die from COVID-19 in the United States, up from his previous estimates of approximately 60,000.
Referring to death numbers like he was negotiating a real estate deal, Trump stated, “I used to say 65 thousand, and now I’m saying 80 or 90. And it goes up and it goes up rapidly. But it’s still going to be, no matter how you look at it, at the very lower end of the plane.” He added separately, “And look, we’re going to lose anywhere from 75, 80 to 100 thousand people.”
That is, an additional 40,000 people, by Trump’s own count, will die—40,000 people with children, spouses, families and loved ones, who would not have died if appropriate measures were taken to contain the virus.
This is, in fact, a vast underestimate. The president’s remarks were followed Monday by the publication by the New York Times of an internal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) report that projects that there will be 200,000 new cases per day by the end of this month, and by June 1 an expected 3,000 daily deaths.
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This would push the death toll into the hundreds of thousands, as the report shows that actual daily deaths have consistently outpaced government projections. At that rate, more than a quarter million people would be dead by the end of the summer, and more than a million within a year.
The CDC figures make clear that the Trump administration’s guidelines, released in mid-April, marked the abandonment of any official effort to contain the pandemic. As the World Socialist Web Site warned on April 17, the White House and the ruling class were seeking to “normalize death on a massive scale, in which outbreaks of COVID-19 are seen as the cost of doing business.”
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As the death toll mounts, the Trump administration’s internal calculations are being released in dribs and drabs. At the end of March, when the US death toll had just surpassed 4,000, Trump declared that a total of 100,000 deaths would be “a good job” by his administration. Today, the official death toll has surpassed 70,000 and is still climbing at an average pace of more than 1,750 per day.
However, even this is a significant undercount of deaths that have resulted from COVID-19 infections and the stress that has been put on health systems by the pandemic. Excess deaths, those on top of the average number of weekly deaths, exceed reported deaths by as much as two times in many states. On top of this, Florida and Tennessee, two states that have already moved to reopen, are actively suppressing their official death tolls.
It must be stated again: The White House is deliberately and consciously implementing measures that it knows will lead to tens of thousands additional deaths. There is a sociopathic character to these policies, but they follow a ruthless class logic. The gangster in the White House expresses the demands of the financial oligarchy, which controls the entire political system.
The pandemic gave the ruling elite the pretext to carry out policies that otherwise would have come under extreme scrutiny and been met with popular hostility. Without the crisis caused by COVID-19, it would be difficult to justify a $10 trillion handout to the rich—unanimously supported by the entire political establishment, Democratic and Republican.
With the bailout secured, it is, as far as the ruling class is concerned, time to get back to the business of extracting surplus value from the working class, regardless of how many will die.
There are only two concerns that the ruling class has in implementing this policy.
First, there is the problem of how to get workers back to work under unsafe conditions. The response here is economic blackmail and impoverishment. Millions of workers who have been thrown out of work overnight will never see an unemployment payment. With many states now lifting all restrictions on business operations, workers will be forced back to work under the threat of being cut off from all aid if they refuse to do so.
Second is the problem of legal responsibility on the part of companies for the death of their workers. Trump set the agenda last month by using the Defense Production Act to order slaughterhouses, a center of the outbreak with thousands of workers already infected and dozens of workers dead, to remain open and to indemnify the corporations from being sued for any worker deaths.
On Monday, Senate Majority leader Mitch McConnell told Fox News Radio that any future bailout package should indemnify all employers. “We have brave health care workers battling the virus, entrepreneurs who will reopen their economy, all of whom deserve, in my view, strong protections from the opportunistic lawsuits… arguing that somehow the decision they made with regard to reopening adversely affected the health of someone else.”
With companies being freed of any responsibility for the lives of their employees, the strategy of the ruling class now is to withhold as much information as possible about the growing number of infections and deaths, and to give the impression that it is safe to return to work and to normal life, even as the coronavirus rampages through communities across the country.
Workers will and must reject the false choice being put forwarded by the ruling elite—starve or risk death from COVID-19. This “choice” is premised on the idea that the capitalist system is inviolable and that the interests of the corporate-financial oligarchy will dictate the response to the pandemic.
The development of opposition in the working class requires the formation of independent rank-and-file safety committees in every workplace and factory to ensure safe working conditions and to fight for the closure of all non-essential production. The organization and operation of workplaces cannot be left in the hands of the capitalists, whose only interest is in producing profits!
The effort of the working class to fight for life over profit, for a scientific and rational response to the pandemic that mobilizes all social resources to combat the coronavirus, will bring workers into an ever more direct and open conflict not only with the Trump administration, but with the corporate and financial oligarchy that is dictating policy—and the capitalist system upon which its wealth and power rests.
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