PATERSON, NJ – U.S. Rep. Bill Pascrell, Jr. (D-NJ-09) today reacted with anger to new claims from whistleblower Dr. Rick Bright, who has filed an official complaint asserting widespread failure, cronyism, and corruption at the highest reaches of the Trump administration’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic.

“These latest allegations by Dr. Bright paint a picture of a government completely and totally out of control,” said Rep. Pascrell, a leading congressional critic of Food and Drug Administration (FDA) politicization. “In an official complaint, Dr. Bright, one of the nation’s leading vaccine experts, asserts that the Department of Health and Human Services has been overrun by astonishing incompetence, self-dealing, and outright corruption dating back to 2017. Dr. Bright further alleges that the Secretary of Health and Human Services demanded the promotion and distribution of an unproven treatment for COVID-19 whose use may be endangering Americans’ lives.

“The only way to turn back this pandemic is through science and reason. A virus cannot be defeated by miracle drugs or political coverups. If Dr. Bright’s claims are even partially true, we have yet more damning proof that yet another branch of our government has been overtaken by Trump’s corruption at the worst possible moment. Americans will continue to die from this government’s unchecked failures.”

On April 8, Rep. Pascrell and Sen. Bob Menendez (D-NJ) wrote to the commissioner of the FDA regarding the FDA’s emergency use authorization of hydroxychloroquine and chloroquine as well as the approval for a clinical trial of a stem cell therapy for the treatment of COVID-19. On April 27, Pascrell and Menendez wrote to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Office of the Inspector General calling for an investigation of the FDA to determine if its decision-making process has been compromised by political pressure to promote unproven therapies to treat COVID-19. A recent large analysis of hydroxychloroquine in COVID-19 patients in U.S. veterans’ hospitals showed no benefit and even noted that there were more deaths among those given hydroxychloroquine versus standard care.