STAT’s Nicholas Florko takes a long hard look at why Rick Bright, a bureaucrat at an obscure federal agency, burst onto the political stage this week with allegations that the Trump White House put politics ahead of science to advance an untested malaria drug as a coronavirus treatment — explosive claims that beg the question: Why was Bright involved in decisions about the drug at all?
Bright does not work at the Food and Drug Administration, which governs nearly all of the nation’s decisions about whether medicines are safe and effective. Nor is he a member of the Trump administration’s sprawling coronavirus task force, a body that includes the surgeon general, the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and even the undersecretary of transportation.
The Trump administration, though, did involve him in a controversial decision to use an arcane emergency authorization process to beef up U.S. supplies of the malaria drug, hydroxychloroquine. Bright says he pushed back vehemently and was subsequently demoted as a result. The Department of Health and Human Services, which oversees his old post, says Bright was the one who requested the emergency authorization in the first place.
We haven’t heard the end of the Rick Bright saga.