Donald Trump, who hawks wondrous COVID-19 elixirs from the White House lectern as if he were a nineteenth-century patent-medicine salesman, knows nothing about pandemic planning, vaccine development, antiviral drugs, or how to design the diagnostic tools required to track an epidemic such as the one that has devastated the nation he leads.

Rick A. Bright, perhaps more than any other federal health official in the United States, has devoted his career to studying those very issues: first, at the Centers for Disease Control, where for a decade he evaluated the comparative merits of antiviral drugs, and then as the scientific director of the Influenza Vaccine Project at PATH, an international, nonprofit global health organization based in Seattle. Since 2010, Bright has worked for the federal government at BARDA, the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority. He began as the director of the agency’s Influenza and Emerging Infectious Diseases Division, and, since 2016, he has been the head of the agency itself.

This week, Bright was abruptly fired from his job because he insisted that the federal government rely on science when making scientific decisions. Bright said in a statement yesterday that he was fired, in particular, because he insisted that hydroxychloroquine, the anti-malaria drug Trump has repeatedly touted as a “miracle cure” for COVID-19, be tested rigorously.

In an era when the President of the United States withdrew all American funding for the World Health Organization in the middle of a global pandemic, Bright’s adherence to the primacy of data doomed him. Anthony S. Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease, has also consistently failed to echo Trump’s enthusiasm for hydroxychloroquine. At a daily White House briefing, on April 5th, as Trump continued to put forth the notion, without any basis in fact, that this drug could conquer the virus, a reporter asked Fauci, who is the nation’s leading infectious-disease expert, to comment. Trump refused to let him speak.

Fauci, though, is the public face of the epidemic-response team and immensely popular. To fire him, simply because he tells the truth, carries a political risk that Trump is apparently unwilling to take—for now.

Bright, a deeply reserved man who is not known to the public, was easier to toss aside. At Wednesday night’s briefing, Trump ridiculed a reporter who suggested that Bright was gifted and highly qualified. “Why did you say that he has great gifts or gifts?” Trump asked. “What, do you know him?” Bright, for his part, has made it clear that he has no intention of shuffling off to some lesser job at the National Institutes of Health without a fight. In his statement yesterday, he accused the Trump Administration of putting “politics and cronyism ahead of science.” He elaborated that, “specifically, and contrary to misguided directives, I limited the broad use of chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine, promoted by the Administration as a panacea, which clearly lack scientific merit.” Bright also said that he has engaged two attorneys to represent him in a whistle-blower case against the government. He said that he resisted “efforts to provide an unproven drug on demand to the American public.’’

Bright’s colleagues in the field were astonished at his sudden removal. Bruce Gellin, who runs the global immunization program for the Sabin Vaccine Institute, spent fifteen years as the director of the National Vaccine Program Office, a position in which he worked often with Bright. Gellin told me, “Rick was able to advance our national pandemic preparedness for drugs, diagnostics, and vaccines,” adding, “He knows the science and embraces cutting-edge technology like few others.’’ Margaret A. Hamburg, who was the commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration under President Barack Obama, also worked closely with Bright. “This is hard to understand,’’ she said. “Rick is exactly the person you want to have at the table when planning new programs, especially in the midst of a pandemic.’’

I have known Bright for years. He is measured, technical, and scientific in his approach to problems. For that reason, I found his statement startling. It is a good thing that Bright spoke out. This week, preliminary data from a large study showed that coronavirus patients given hydroxychloroquine were no less likely to need mechanical ventilation and had higher death rates than those who were not. The study, which reviewed veterans’ medical charts, was posted Tuesday on MedRxiv, a preprint server, meaning that it was not peer reviewed or published in a medical journal. The research was funded by the National Institutes of Health and the University of Virginia. (Such a study is not conclusive; it is too soon to know the ultimate results. But no responsible physician would read it and say, Hey, let’s get this drug out to millions of people right away.)

Late last year, at a panel discussion on the future of influenza pandemics, Bright explained his fundamental concerns: the country was not investing enough in creating vaccines that could potentially limit the impact of the annual flu season as well as potential pandemics. “We can make better vaccines and make them faster,” he said. “But three hundred and fifty-one billion dollars every year is our economic cost for seasonal influenza, and a pandemic goes into the trillions of dollars. We have to take that sense of urgency and economic assets to explain this disruption and the lives lost.” It had been a continual frustration to Bright—as well as to Fauci and many others—that political leaders don’t seem to learn this lesson.

We are entering a dangerous new phase of the COVID-19 pandemic. Rick Bright’s vision has never been needed more. Even now, the President refuses to acknowledge the severity of the pandemic or how far we are from being able to safely “open” the country. That is a depressing reality, and we will need leaders to help explain and guide us to a safer and healthier future. Rick Bright has always been one of those leaders. Bright said in his statement, “Sidelining me in the middle of this pandemic and placing politics and cronyism ahead of science puts lives at risk and stunts national efforts to safely and effectively address this urgent public-health crisis.” Every one of those words is true. Unfortunately, it is no longer clear that we live in a country where expertise matters.

A Guide to the Coronavirus