The Trump Pandemic

[Brian Peacock]

And now you've just changed the subject - again! I think this is just habitual with you - so I let you off.

[NineBerry]

I did notice that Trump, whenever he is right about some inane thing, makes Dems look stupid because of how reflexively they oppose him.

Like the Biden allegations. It wouldn't mean as much, if we hadn't seem the usual idiots over-reacting to the allegations against Kavanaugh.

I mean, they were MUCH less corroborated than the Biden allegations, but many dems would rather not investigate him too closely.

I think they all know that Biden isn't the real candidate, so they don't care about his fingering ways.

But have you counted how often Biden has "fingered" his nose? It wasn't 21 times. What's going on there? Clearly Trump must know something about that. Why doesn't he say what he knows? I guess he's waiting for the right moment. It's too early now.

[Tero]

Area man spends a month in hospital. Who is going to pay for this all? Biden?

[Cunt]

Listening to Dan Crenshaw interview by Dave Rubin. He blames Trump for the pandemic, surely. Not yet, but I'm sure he'll blame him before too long.

[Seabass]

Surprise! It's as bad as it looks.

“Political Connections and Cronyism”: In Blistering Whistleblower Complaint, Rick Bright Blasts Team Trump’s Pandemic Response

Two weeks after being pushed out of his post, the former head of a $1.5 billion federal health agency formally accuses top officials of pressuring him to approve unproven chloroquine drugs and award pricey contracts to friends of the administration.

He was pressured to invest in drugs and vaccines that lacked scientific merit, because the people selling them had friends in the Trump administration, up to and including the president’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner. He was forced to transfer funds to acquire drugs for the Strategic National Stockpile, America’s most important reserve of lifesaving medications, based not on health needs but on “political connections and cronyism.” He was instructed to use his department’s budget to purchase flu medications of questionable efficacy. And when the COVID-19 crisis erupted, he was pressured to approve a plan that would “flood” cities with unproven and untested doses of chloroquine drugs, from uninspected manufacturing plants in Asia. When his efforts to work through the system failed, he decided he had a “moral obligation to the American public” to ring the alarm about the plan, “which he believed constituted a substantial and specific danger to public health and safety.” In retaliation, he was “smeared,” with officials unfairly accusing him of dropping the ball on vaccine development and PPE preparation.

These are just some of the allegations contained in a blistering, 63-page complaint that Dr. Rick Bright, former head of the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (BARDA), filed today with the U.S. Office of Special Counsel. (Vanity Fair has submitted requests for comment to the White House, the Food and Drug Administration, and the Department of Health and Human Services, and will update this article with any responses.)

Bright has become the first high-level federal whistleblower to publicly allege that the Trump administration has responded to the COVID-19 crisis by unduly pressuring health officials, and putting politics and profit ahead of science. Bright, the government’s top coronavirus vaccine developer, had spent a decade at BARDA, a small but powerful agency within the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), whose mandate is to partner with private companies to help accelerate the development of vaccines, drugs, and diagnostics. According to Bright’s complaint, BARDA manages almost $50 billion worth of contracts and acquisitions, on an annual budget of just over $1.5 billion. He was named director in 2016.

On April 22, after HHS reassigned him to a smaller role at the National Institutes of Health, Bright alleged in a fiery statement that he had been sidelined because he “resisted efforts to fund potentially dangerous drugs promoted by those with political connections.” One of the drugs Bright identified in his statement was the malaria medication hydroxychloroquine, which President Trump had promoted extensively as a “game changer.” Bright said he had “rightly resisted efforts to provide an unproven drug on demand to the American public.”

His original statement prompted an immediate call for investigations. Rep. Frank Pallone Jr. (D-N.J.), chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, asked the HHS inspector general to probe Bright’s departure, and Rep. Anna G. Eshoo (D-Calif.) announced that her subcommittee on health would hold congressional hearings.

Today’s complaint goes much further, enumerating a series of instances in which politics encroached on science. According to the complaint, Bright’s superiors at the Department of Health and Human Services began pressuring him to “ignore expert recommendations and instead to award lucrative contracts based on political connections and cronyism,” starting around the spring of 2017. Bright says he “repeatedly clashed” with his boss, Dr. Robert Kadlec, the assistant secretary for preparedness and response, over the “outsized role” played by Kadlec’s friend John Clerici, a pharmaceutical consultant. That year Clerici tried to get Bright to renew a contract with one of his clients, Aeolus Pharmaceuticals, that was set to expire. “In attempting to justify the extension of this failed contract,” Bright says in his complaint, “Mr. Clerici emphasized that Aeolus’s Chief Executive Officer was a ‘wildcard’ and a friend of Jared Kushner, President Trump’s son-in-law and a Senior Advisor to the President.”

In a statement to the New York Times, Clerici said, “I unequivocally deny all of the allegations lodged by Dr. Bright and his lawyers.”

Tensions escalated over the course of the next year, the complaint alleges, as Bright objected repeatedly to Kadlec’s efforts to award multimillion-dollar contracts to Clerici clients. Last fall Bright “rejected pressure by Dr. Kadlec to invest millions of dollars in EIDD-2801, a drug developed at Emory University by a longtime friend of Dr. Kadlec. EIDD-2081 was presented as a ‘miracle cure’ for influenza, Ebola and nearly every other virus, even though the developer had not yet conducted clinical trials and no data had been compiled to demonstrate either the efficacy or safety of the drug in humans.” That incident, the complaint says, further strained Bright’s relationship with Kadlec, setting the scene for their eventual rupture over COVID-19. “The fact that Dr. Kadlec and his staff repeatedly made decisions to benefit those like Mr. Clerici and his clients, but which were not in the best interest of the health or safety of Americans, continued to be of tremendous concern to Dr. Bright,” the complaint states.

The COVID-19 crisis only magnified the brewing conflict between scientific safeguards and political expediency. In a January 23 meeting, Bright demanded urgent access to funding, personnel, and clinical specimens necessary to develop lifesaving medicines for use in a possible pandemic. He was met with reassurances from HHS brass that the virus’s spread was under control, according to the complaint. Also in January, Mike Bowen, the co-owner of a leading mask manufacturer named Prestige Ameritech, offered to scale up production of N-95 masks. “U.S. mask supply is at imminent risk,” Bowen told Bright, according to the complaint. Bowen reached out again and again in the coming days, but Bright was unable to get Kadlec and HHS to take the threat seriously, the complaint states, leading Bowen to write to Bright, saying, “Rick, I think we’re in deep shit.”

Bright’s allegations, and his refusal to accept his demotion quietly, come as the Trump administration continues to muzzle scientists and remove government watchdogs. On Friday, House Democrats said that the White House had blocked the government’s top infectious disease expert, Dr. Anthony Fauci, from testifying at an upcoming appropriations panel hearing. That same day Trump nominated a new Health and Human Services inspector general, effectively replacing the acting official who had issued a report in early April confirming that hospitals around the country were experiencing widespread shortages of critical medical supplies and protective equipment. The administration had denied that such shortages existed.

The crisis at BARDA came to a boiling point after top agency health officials found themselves under immense pressure to fulfill a vision that Trump had outlined from the White House podium: to build a stockpile of repurposed malaria drugs, hydroxychloroquine and chloroquine, that he claimed had “very, very encouraging early results.”

...

full article: https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2020/05 ... c-response

[Scot Dutchy]

:ftfl:nr:

[NineBerry]

:ftfl:nr:

I agree fully!

[JimC]

Scot's incisive comments have now appeared in multiple threads!

[Scot Dutchy]

For thee same reason.

[JimC]

"For thee"

Shit, Scot's gone all biblical!

[Scot Dutchy]

"For thee"

Shit, Scot's gone all biblical!

Oh please Jim. I bought this machine; a top range MSI Dragon as a treat for myself. The ultimate in gaming laptops. It is mighty powerful but the one weakness is its keyboard. Everybody complains about it who owns one. Keys stop working. I have lost the use of the x and z keys. Of course it happened after the warranty although MSI would replace the whole keyboard but all the hassle of sending it to the dealer (only one in the Benelux) I could not be bothered. The virtual keyboard works fine and I dont have to carry out any work on it. There is one other curious happening when I start up certain letters appear twice especially the e. That is what happened. It is a bit of a pain. It is like having a Ferrari whose windscreen wipers dont work. For the rest it is a brilliant machine. It is two years old but I can still play any game I want at maximum settings.

[JimC]

Just stirring, Scot...

[pErvinalia]

:ftfl:nr:

I agree fully!

:glvbfw:xp:

[Tero]

"Missouri Governor Mike Parson has given the okay for concerts to begin again in the state as early as Monday.

On April 27, Governor Parson released his Show Me Strong recovery plan that details plans for gradually reopening the state's economy starting May 4. The plan allows for retail stores to serve customers in-store at limited capacities and for restaurants to re-establish dine-in services while remaining socially distanced.

A representative from Missouri's Department of Health and Senior Services clarified for Billboard that concerts do not have to adhere to the same occupancy limitations as retail businesses, but event organizers are expected to keep concertgoers six feet or more apart to limit the spread of the novel coronavirus.

Billboard

[Tero]

At least seven coronavirus-affected meatpacking plants shut their doors since the April 28th executive order. That’s in line with the average of eight weekly plant closures in the month leading up to the order.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/inv ... 172526002/