Good morning. I'm James Holman from the Washington Post and this is the Daily

202 for Wednesday, May 6th. In today's news, federal researchers hypothesize that the coronavirus has mutated and a more contagious strain is spreading.

As we're told to wash our hands, more than 2 million Americans still don't have indoor plumbing.

And baseball is back, but in South Korea.

First though, the big idea.

A former top vaccine official who was removed from his post last month, alleges in a new 89-page whistleblower complaint that he was reassigned to a less prestigious role because he tried to prioritize science and safety over political expediency

and raised health concerns over a drug repeatedly pushed by President Trump as a possible cure for coronavirus.

Rick Bright, the former director of the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority,

was removed on April 20th after having served as a non-political director for nearly four years.

He was reassigned to a much narrower role at the National Institutes of Health.

Bright portrays himself in the complaint as trying to sound the alarm about the virus beginning in early January,

and he has receipts.

E-mails are attached to his complaint.

Bright says he called for the rapid development of treatments and vaccines,

as well as the stockpiling of additional n95 masks and ventilators,

at a time when political leaders at HHS, including Secretary

Alex Azar, appeared to him to be vastly underestimating the threat. He also

notes that he clashed with his boss, Assistant HHS Secretary Bob Cadlick, for at least two years.

Bright alleges in the complaint that Cadlick and others pressured him to buy drugs and medical products for the nation's

stockpile of emergency medical equipment from companies that were linked politically to the

administration and major donors to Trump and that he resisted such efforts.

HHS issued a brief comment last night that did not directly address any of these serious allegations, all it says is that they're

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