Tony's Diary Package — page 129

April 22, 2020 -- Interesting day - Rick Bright has gone rogue. Due to his poor performance as head of BARDA, Alex (+/-) Kadlec removed him from his post. We (Francis and I) thought that he would stay at BARDA and spend 50% of time at NIH in order to coordinate BARDA with NIH vaccine activities, We all had always felt that he was making bad decisions in his giving hundreds of inillions of dollars to Phartma companies without any requirements to coordinate with NIH and his choices were poor to begin with. HOWEVER, in what turned out to be the most incompetent and botched HR move, they fired him by just taking his name and picture off the HHS/BARDA website without even telling him. They then assigned him to be an NIH employee under Francis taking with him from BARDA $1 Billion to work on diagnostics with Bruce Trumberg of NBIB. Rick reacted by going public, hiring a lawyer, claiming whistleblower status and saying he was fired because he was pushing back against HHS and political pressure to fund bad science and certain companies and that he objected to pushing HC. In fact, there are e-mails and memos showing that he himself was pushing HC and giving millions to get it out there. He is an abject LIAR! Georgia Governor Kemp is actually ignoring the guidelines for "Opening Ameica Again" by skipping to phase 2 and opening beaches, massage parlors, tatoo shops. Crazy!. A couple of days ago Deb waffled about condemning it, but today she convinced the POTUS to back off in supporting Gov. Kemp (R-GA). During the presser, I came out unambiguously saying that Kemp was wrong and if I were his advisor, I would tell him not to do that since it risks a rebound. It seems that the WH is putting me out to the press much less than usual over the past week to week and %. We shall see. The relationship between me and Katie and Hogan and Devin seems really good and so I do not know what is going on. Could be just a coincidence. My PMR is under control -- starting to slowly taper the 15 mg prednisone. Have been on pred. for 36 days PRESS: White House Presser