'Bank of BAR­DA': In­ves­ti­ga­tion finds HHS raid­ed pan­dem­ic pre­pared­ness funds for decade be­fore Covid-19

Be­fore 2020, few Amer­i­cans had ever heard of the Bio­med­ical Ad­vanced Re­search and De­vel­op­ment Au­thor­i­ty, BAR­DA, or its far-flung mis­sion to stave off fu­ture pan­demics and bio-threats. Al­leged­ly, that made it a pret­ty good tar­get for oth­ers in HHS who need­ed to scav­enge some ex­tra cash.

Over the last decade, oth­er HHS of­fi­cials raid­ed BAR­DA’s cof­fers and mis­ap­pro­pri­at­ed mil­lions of dol­lars that Con­gress had ear­marked to fund vac­cine re­search and pre­pare for pub­lic health emer­gen­cies like Covid-19, ac­cord­ing to a new re­port from the US Of­fice of Spe­cial Coun­sel, which in­ves­ti­gat­ed a whistle­blow­er re­port.

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