The director of a US government agency responsible for developing treatments and vaccines for the new coronavirus, Rick Bright, said on Wednesday that he was dismissed from his post for political reasons, because of his opposition to the widespread use of chloroquine, drug touted by Donald Trump.
Rick Bright until recently headed the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority, a partner of two companies developing vaccines against Covid-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus. He was transferred to the National Institutes of Health, according to the Stat website. "I believe that my transfer is due to the fact that I insisted that the government invest the billions of dollars allocated by Congress for the Covid-19 pandemic in safe and scientifically validated solutions, not in drugs, vaccines and other technologies without scientific merit, " said Rick Bright in a statement to the New York Times Wednesday.
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"I am speaking because to fight this deadly virus, science, not politics and cronyism, must guide us , " he continues. He said that he opposed the leaders of the Department of Health, appointed by the president, on chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine, old anti-malaria drugs which are used by doctors against Covid-19 but without having still clinical studies demonstrating their effectiveness, despite the risk of cardiac complications. "Specifically, and contrary to unwelcome guidelines, I have limited the wide use of chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine, promoted by the administration as a panacea, but which clearly lack scientific merit," says Rick. Bright.
He says he fought to restrict the use of these drugs to hospitalized patients only, instead of “on demand” authorization by the general public. The US government had finally granted emergency authorization for hospitals. Complaining about his dismissal in the middle of a pandemic, he warned that he would ask the Inspector General of Health to investigate "the way this administration politicized the work" of his ex-agency, and "put pressure on me and other conscientious scientists to fund companies with political connections . "
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On Tuesday, a panel of American experts under the aegis of the National Institutes of Health advised doctors to treat their Covid-19 patients with the dual treatment hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin, a dual therapy promoted in France by Doctor Didier Raoult. Donald Trump himself called chloroquine "a gift from the sky" in March, but recently he refrained from quoting the drug, the scientists who advise it remaining at this stage reserved, in particular Dr. Anthony Fauci, director from the Institute of Infectious Diseases.
