CNN White House Correspondent Jim Acosta said the transfer of a Health and Human Services official was the latest “casualty” on President Trump’s “war on scientists.”
Acosta told CNN host Anderson Cooper that the dismissal of Dr. Rick Bright, the director of the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority at the Department of Health and Human Services, was evidence of Trump’s “war on scientists.”
“What are you learning about Rick Bright and the clash that’s happening here?” Cooper asked Acosta.
“He sounds like he’s the casualty, Anderson, of the president’s war on scientists, war on science in the administration,” Acosta responded. “Dr. Bright is going to file a whistleblower complaint. He is protesting his removal from his position leading that agency that is charged with vaccine development.”
“It sounds like he’s been pushed out of this job into another job, and he doesn’t even know what that job is going to be yet,” Acosta added.
Bright contests that he was ousted from his position at the Department of Health because he said hydroxychloroquine, an anti-malaria drug touted by the president as a potential cure, needed further vetting. Bright led a departmental project to develop a vaccine for the coronavirus.
“I believe this transfer was in response to my insistence that the government invest the billions of dollars allocated by Congress to address the COVID-19 pandemic into safe and scientifically vetted solutions, and not in drugs, vaccines, and other technologies that lack scientific merit,” Bright said in a statement on Wednesday.
“I am speaking out because to combat this deadly virus, science — not politics or cronyism — has to lead the way.”
