WASHINGTON (Pakistan Point News / Sputnik - 15th May, 2020) The US response to the coronavirus (COVID-19) is insufficient and the Federal government needs to listen to its scientists if more lives are not to be unnecessarily lost, former government vaccine developer Rick Bright said on Thursday.
Bright was allegedly fired for challenging President Donald Trump's recommendation that he promote an unproven drug for the pandemic.
"We've known for quite some time that our stockpile was insufficient," Bright told a congressional hearing. "There is no master coordinated plan on how to respond to this outbreak. We don't have a strategy or plan in place that identifies each of those critical components and we don't have a designated agency that is sourcing critical components and coming up with a strategy to make sure that we have those supplies when we need them. We need this comprehensive national strategy that's end-to-end and includes every component to make sure we can respond and protect American lives."
As an example, Bright referred to the initial shortage of N-95 respirator masks for health care workers.
"I'll never forget the emails," he said. "I received one indicating that while we are supposed to be a mass supplier of N-95 respirator masks, supply was completely decimated and said 'we're in deep shit and the world is' and we need to act, and I pushed that forward to the highest levels. I got no response. From that moment, I knew that we were going to have a crisis for our care workers because we were not taking action. We were already behind the ball."
He said because of such indifference "lives were endangered and lives were lost" because there were "nurses rushing into hospitals thinking they were protected when they were not."
Bright said the Trump administration needs to listen to scientists who challenged the president with valid counsel, citing his own removal as a top government vaccine developer when he refused to endorse the malaria drug, hydroxychloroquine, that Trump wanted promoted as a COVID-19 prescription.
"We need to unleash the voices of the scientists in our public health system in the United States so that they can be heard and their guidance needs to be listened to and we need to be able to convey that information to the American public, so that they have the truth about the real risk and dire consequences of this virus if they don't follow those guidelines," Bright said.
The former vaccine developer's testimony came a day after Trump publicly disagreed with White House health adviser Anthony Fauci's caution against any rush in reopening schools by the autumn season that begins in September. Fauci, the nation's top infectious diseases expert, said children were proven not completely immune to the COVID-19, prompting Trump to remark that he was "surprised" by the scientist's stance, saying it was "not an acceptable answer".
