Thread by @donmoyn

Whistleblower: US company contacted him offering to set up production of N95 masks in *January*. Could not get political appointees to fund it. The company then made and shipped a million masks to China. washingtonpost.com/health/2020/05…

In late January mask manufacturers were telling the US government that China was purchasing masks from them, and they they were hearing rumors that China would restrict its manufacturers from exporting its masks.

No response from political appointees. context-cdn.washingtonpost.com/notes/prod/def…

Whistleblower: I suggested (correctly as it turned out) that virus might already be in US on Jan 23rd, and called for funding. Secretary Azar expressed skepticism, and said US could keep it out of the country.

After that, Bright was no longer invited to high-level meetings.

A good chunk of the whistleblower complaint is about how he could not get any responsiveness from HHS, but Peter Navarro understood the urgency and had a direct line to the White House. HHS appointees did not appreciate Bright working with Navarro.

A good chunk of the whistleblower complaint is also about tensions between Bright and his supervisor. Congress directly allocated Bright's unit, BARDA, a bunch of money in the CARES Act and HHS supervisors were not pleased.

Whistleblower: Bayer donated 3M chloroquine non-FDA approved chloroquine pills. He came under increasing pressure from appointees to find studies to justify the use of the pills, and then from the White House to make the pills widely available to the public.

Full whistleblower complaint here. Big takeaways:
1. Some career staff were raising the alarms about preparedness in January, but were not being heard by political appointees.
2. A lot of federal effort was diverted to act on Trump's chloroquine theory. washingtonpost.com/context/read-r…