Dear Diary — May 31, 2021
Global – 169,600,000/3,500,000; USA – 33,100,000/591,400 Very few cases, probably as a result of holiday weekend: June 1, 2021 – Global – 170,400,000/3,500,000; USA – 33,100,000/591,500 A couple of interesting things today. Did the governor's call or I spoke about the possible need for boosters. In addition I had an interesting podcast with Chelsea Clinton . She is really a very nice person, much sweeter than I anticipated. Also had our usual weekly meeting with secretary Becerra. Also, we had an important meeting with the deputies in the SCIF to discuss the broad plans for the government’s response to COVID-19 including sharing vaccines with other nations. • I am absolutely furious today because the print version people of the National Geographic film group has published the list of my statements and words of wisdom in a book which they are claiming was written by me. It is listed in Amazon and Borders Books as a book “by” Anthony Fauci. This has triggered the usual frenzy from the far right crazies on social media saying that I am a hypocrite making a lot of money on the pandemic. Many of ask how much royalties I am making from the book. I have gone ballistic big demanding of the Nat Geo people that they correct this publicly and make it very clear that I did not write this book nor am I getting any royalties from it. When I allowed them to use my words from former speeches and commencement addresses, I assumed that they were going to use this merely as promotional material for the documentary. The fact that they made this into a book that they are selling in my mind isn't egregious violation of trust and collegiality. I am not going to cooperate at all in the promoting of this film. • In a Buzzfeed analysis of emails of mine that were FOIA’d, there is an email from me to Morgan Fairchild which clearly demonstrates that in February I was warning about the possibility of a global pandemic in contrast to what people are accusing me of, namely, saying that there was no risk to us. This is a very important email:
PRESS: Jasmeen Abutaleb and Damien Paletta’s Washington Post article about my emails: https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/interactive/2021/tony-fauciemails/?no_nav=true&tid=a_classic-iphone CNN with Elizabeth Cohen; Wisconsin NPR radio; June 2, 2021 – Global – 170,800,000/3,600,000; USA – 33,100,000/592,200 • I gave a taped speech today to the opening session of the G7 meeting taking place in England. I spoke about the similarities between the COVID-19 pandemic and the HIV aids pandemic. I called upon all partners to collaborate and to continue to support science. Secretary Becerra is representing the United states at the health component of the G7 meeting. Also, in line with my participation virtually in the G7 meeting , I took part in a discussion on the G7 global vaccine confidence summit. It was a discussion together with John Nkengasong, the director of the African CDC moderated by Vivienne Parry. We discussed the issue of vaccine hesitancy in various countries throughout the world particularly in the United states and in southern Africa. Nat Geo film people are also very upset about the shit storm caused by the book people and have come out with a statement that it is their book, not mine and I have not received any royalties or other payments from the book or the documentary. Unfortunately, the damage is already done. • Met with POTUS and VPOTUS in Oval with Jeff Zients and Natalie Quillian. I discussed with him the mechanisms and implications for the mRNA vaccine platform technology. He was very grateful for the discussion and as usual vice president Harris asked excellent questions. He told the story that when he was at Rehobeth beach in Delaware with his family, three burly MAGA-type men approached him and started trash talking him. The Secret Service were very discreet and did not want to make a scene; however his daughter Ashley jumped in front of them and started screaming at them to stay away from her father. The lesson of the story was that young women have more guts and fire then certain Secret Service agents.
PRESS:The story on my emails is in the print version of the Washington Post this morning; Month of Action (promo video); Podcast with the George Bush Foundation – All the Best with Sam LeBlond; WGN Donilon Report (Leland Vittert) – was not the original person to interview me and attacked me about e-mails and Wuhan; NPRE “Science Friday” with Ira Flatow; Time Health Summit Interview by Alice Park with Stephjane Bancel; Time Children’s Interview; NBC Nightly News; MSNBC with Nicole Wallace; CNN defends me on the e-mails issue: Thousands of emails from and to Fauci during the pandemic's early days were published. Here's what they show about him By Christina Maxouris and Paul LeBlanc, CNN Updated 6:01 PM ET, Wed June 2, 2021 June 3, 2021 – Global – 171,300,000/3,700,000; USA – 33,100,000/592,800 Numbers continue to come down: • Writeups by CNN and Washington Post regarding my emails are making me look very good. They show that I never criticize president trump and that I am always very courteous and measured in my responses. Even with that the crazies such as senator Rand Paul are saying things like “I told you so “, implying that my emails are validating what they have been saying about me. Total nut cakes! The right-wing fringe social media are ablaze with anti-Fauci stuff • while all this is going on, incredibly the far right maniacs in certain states such as Arizona are trying to yet again force an unvalidated recount in an attempt to still overthrow the election and reinstate Trump. What is happening to our country ????
PRESS: CNN “New Day” with John Berman; MSNBC – Morning Joe; The alleged Fauci ‘smoking gun’ Washington Post: emails By Aaron Blake Senior reporter June 3, 2021 at 12:42 p.m. EDT In any case, like most data dumps that have careful redactions, the Fauci email trove has no smokinggun evidence of wrongdoing. You could make the case, as I and others have, that Fauci had certain prejudices and dispositions that were deeply unhelpful in his leadership of the pandemic response — and you’ll find evidence of those here. He had a very strong bias against existing drugs and for new and experimental ones. He has been slippery on masks and clearly was willing to say things in public that he thought “helped” the response even if they weren’t strictly true. Trump tears into Fauci after release of New York Post: early COVID emails By Mark Moore The Health 202: Five takeaways from Washington Post: Fauci's email exchanges By Paige Winfield Cunningham Reporter June 2, 2021 at 8:30 a.m. EDT with Alexandra Ellerbeck Early in the coronavirus pandemic, Anthony S. Fauci expressed skepticism that deaths in the United States would top 500,000. He called the public’s fascination with him “surrealistic.” And he assured China’s top public health official that “We will get through this together.” Hundreds of pages of emails obtained by The Post and BuzzFeed News through Freedom of Information Act requests confirm the way Fauci is already viewed by many — as diplomatic, tactful and responsive to inquiries from the public, a quality which often kept him up late at night answering emails. “The correspondence from March and April 2020 opens a window to Fauci’s world during some of the most frantic days of the crisis, when the longtime director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases was struggling to bring coherence to the Trump administration’s chaotic response to the virus and President Donald Trump was seeking to minimize its severity,” The Post's Damian Paletta and Yasmeen Abutaleb write. “Fauci’s actions during that period and beyond remain an intense focus for many Americans and political leaders,” they add. “During daily televised briefings at the White House, Fauci emerged as an at times reluctant — and polarizing — media star: To Trump supporters, he was a contrarian who seemed to undermine the president at every turn, while others viewed him as a reassuring voice of reason.” “The emails show that he was inundated with correspondence from colleagues, hospital administrators, foreign governments and random strangers — about 1,000 messages a day, he says at one point — writing to seek his advice, solicit his help or simply offer encouragement.” Here are five takeaways from Fauci’s emails. 1. Fauci stayed far away from any Trump-bashing. Trump blasted the public health expert throughout the pandemic, at one point threatening to fire him after the November election. And from time to time, Fauci would criticize the administration's response in interviews, although almost always indirectly (in October, he told The Post the country needed an “abrupt change” in public health behaviors). In Fauci's correspondence, he was even more circumspect. In April 2020, Marc Short, Vice President Mike Pence’s chief of staff, emailed Fauci about some apparent crossed wires before Easter Sunday. At the time, Trump was starting to butt heads with public health officials as he tried to move on from the pandemic. “You correctly noticed the symptoms but misdiagnosed the root cause,” Short wrote in a heavily redacted email that closes: “Apologies for a poor poker face.” Fauci responded: “Thanks for the note. Understood. I wish you a peaceful and enjoyable day with your family.” In another exchange, a former acquaintance wrote to Fauci that “The leadership from the top is utterly lacking and incompetent and dangerous to the American people.” “Thank you for your note,” Fauci wrote back. “I hear you!” 2. Fauci didn't like the public adoration. “Our society is really totally nuts,” Fauci wrote in an email he forwarded, which included the link to an article titled “'Cuomo Crush and Fauci Fever' — Sexualization of These Men Is a Real Thing on the Internet.” On March 31, a colleague at the National Institutes of Health sent Fauci an article from The Post with the headline, “Fauci socks, Fauci doughnuts, Fauci fan art: The coronavirus expert attracts a cult following.” “Truly surrealistic. Hopefully, this all stops soon,” Fauci replied. In another note, he added: “It is not at all pleasant, that is for sure.” 3. Fauci accepted a sort-of apology from the director of China's public health agency. George Gao, director of the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention, had been quoted in Science magazine as saying the United States was making a “big mistake” by not telling people to wear masks in spring 2020. Gao, who has long been friends with Fauci, reached out personally to clarify his remarks. “I saw the Science interview, how could I say such a word ‘big mistake’ about others? That was journalist’s wording. Hope you understand,” Gao wrote to Fauci in a March 28 email. “Lets work together to get the virus out of the earth.” “I understand completely. No problem,” Fauci wrote back. “We will get through this together.” 4.Fauci defended himself to colleagues. In April 2020, prominent oncologist Ezekiel Emanuel wrote to Fauci that he was “perplexed” by his “seeming strong endorsement” of remdesivir. Fauci had publicly praised the antiviral drug, which had appeared effective in treating coronavirus patients. “Was it just a bit forced?” Emanuel wrote. “My reading was the data was weak and in normal times for normal disease it is not enough to approve. And very unlikely to really impact COVID-19 disease pattern- -regardless of supply issues.” Fauci resisted the characterization, replying that he didn't “'strongly' endorse it.” “I specifically said it was not a knockout drug and was only a baby step in the direction of developing more and better drugs,” Fauci wrote. “I said that it was important because it proved in a well-powered, randomized, placebo-controlled clinical trial that one can suppress the virus enough to see a clinical effect, as modest as the effect was. I do not think I forced anything.” In an email the following day, Emanuel sent another email apologizing to Fauci and inviting him over for dinner “on the porch.” In another email, Fauci pushed back against Gregg Gonsalves, a prominent Yale School of Public Health epidemiologist, after Gonsalves had appeared to insinuate that Trump was influencing him and other public health leaders. “Gregg: I am surprised you included me in your note,” Fauci wrote. “I genuflect to no one but science and always, always speak my mind when it comes to public health. I have consistently corrected misstatements by others and will continue to do so.” 5.Fauci corresponded with a wide array of people. He didn't just hear from administration and public health officials. The emails also show exchanges with members of Congress and regular citizens. Fauci certainly didn't answer every single email he received, but the tranche shows he made an effort to respond amid the many demands on his time. “The medical director of the National Football League Players Association asked Fauci for a confidential briefing on how to safely start the next NFL season,” Damian and Yasmeen write. “A documentary filmmaker working on a forthcoming Disney-backed biopic asked to ride along as Fauci drove to work. An adviser to Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates expressed concern about Fauci’s health. And a senior House Republican told Fauci to ‘keep being a science truth teller’ despite skepticism about the virus from other GOP lawmakers and Trump himself.” “I was getting every single kind of question, mostly people who were a little bit confused about the mixed messages that were coming out of the White House and wanted to know what’s the real scoop,” Fauci said in a recent interview. “I have a reputation that I respond to people when they ask for help, even if it takes a long time. And it’s very time consuming, but I do” respond. Thousands of emails from and to Fauci during the pandemic's early days were published. Here's what they show about him While many federal government staffers prefer the phone to email, this correspondence offers a rare glimpse into Fauci's frantic schedule and polite, to-the-point demeanor during the time he emerged as a rare source of frank honesty within the Trump administration's Covid-19 task force. But they also reveal the weight that came with the role. By Christina Maxouris and Paul LeBlanc, CNN June 4, 2021 – Global 171,800,000/3,700,000; USA – 33,100,000/593,400 • I had my usual every two-week meeting with my English colleagues doctor Chris Whitty and Patrick Valance. The discussion was somewhat disturbing since they seem to be having 2 issues simultaneously in the UK. They were controlling the B.117 variants very well and were preparing to open up. however, the B.1. 617variant appears to be much more effective in transmitting than the B.117. and so they are experiencing a surge of the B 617. They were planning to open up the country , but now they are having second thoughts since they are afraid that the new variant will create a second major surge for them. I will bring this up to our own medical team since we do have a low level of B.1.617 in our own country and if a certain proportion of people (mostly in the red states )do not get vaccinated, we may be faced with the same problem that the Brits are facing. • The onslaught against me but the radical right continues. The right wing press is intensifying their attacks on me as well as the right wing congressman and senators. some of the valid press such as the Washington Post , the LA Times , and others are calling out the lies of the far right. POTUS defends me: Kyle Griffin @kylegriffin1 Pool report: Biden left the room to a shouted question regarding whether he has confidence in Dr. Fauci. Suddenly, POTUS's head peeked around the corner, and he answered: "Yes I'm very confident in Dr. Fauci." 6/4/21, 11:30 AM • I did a kickoff event for the month of action – “We can do this”. I did it together with congressman Cedric Richmond who is director of the office of public engagement. We address the people who will be the trusted messengers going out into the community to try and encourage people to get vaccinated. Very important and very strange briefing of me by the CIA in the NIH SCIF this afternoon (5:00 PM). I received an extremely strange an unexpected briefing today by the CIA related to the origin of the virus. Beth Cameron from NSC was listening in on one of the other screens. And as it turns out she was as baffled as I was by the briefing. It was very similar to some of the very disappointing briefings that I had previously received in prior years from the CIA. A young woman whose name was Camille Hartman gave most of the briefing. She was accompanied by what was probably the senior male CIA person and another young woman. Camille in my mind was almost pathetic in her naivety an obvious lack of appreciation of any of the science of what she was talking about. She gave instances of things that she said were gotten by CIA intercepts of conversations in China, particularly in Wuhan. her major point was that she feels but the Chinese have not been transparent about what was going on in their labs since there were no reports publicly of what they found out from intercepts. This included the transfer of Pangolin viruses from a group in Beijing two Wu Han. They felt that this was being used in a study using transgenic mice. I have no idea why this was any great concern to them since it would be perfectly natural for a lab that studies coronavirus to look at Pangolins. In addition, she spoke about the observation that WIV was sampling Pangolins and several members of WIV took a trip to obtain Pangolins. They also spoke about the fact that they have information from sources that unknown experiments well conducted by the military in Wu Han. The thing that blew me away about how naive and uninformed they are was the fact that they mentioned that they had word that in July of 2020 there was a super spreading event in China related to passage of virus in the laboratory. This astounded Beth and I for the same reason. Why would they suspect that a super spreading event that occur in the middle of a major outbreak in China was related to the passage of virus in the laboratory? The naivete of the briefing stunned both Beth and me. Also, in the matter in which she was asking me questions almost made me believe she was grilling me prompting me to say somewhat tongue in cheek whether I should have a lawyer with me. I got on the phone with Beth immediately after the briefing and she was very upset saying that she was going to check up the chain who and why this briefing was called and why there was no forwarding material to prepare us for what they were doing. There is something very fishy about all of this.
PRESS: BBC Radio; White House regional press (3 stations); Mediaite: Chris Wallace Defends Fauci From ‘Highly Political’ Attacks: His Lab Leak Emails Contain ‘No Smoking Gun’ https://bit.ly/3ciVYik June 5, 2021 Global – 172,200,000/3,700,000; USA – 33,200,000/594.,000 40th anniversary of the first cases of AIDS reported in MMWR - a lot of appropriate attention is being paid to the 40th anniversary. There were several articles in the press recounting the early days and focusing on my role . I did a number of print and TV and radio interviews. The attacks on me continue to ramp up. Trump planning on blasting me during his speech tonight at a Republican party gathering. Caught in crosshairs, Fauci calls GOP
PRESS: descriptions of his emails 'profoundly misleading' By Michael Warren, Kaitlan Collins, Gabby Orr and Daniella Diaz, CNN June 6, 2021 - Global - USA Today I fly up to New York City with first lady doctor Jill Biden to promote vaccinations among the African American community. We will be visiting the Abyssinian church in Harlem. The vicious assault on me continues . Most recently House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy has called for me to be fired. What an amazing coward he is. The entire extreme right wing republican group in the House and Senate have completely sold their soul to the infinitely lying ex president trump. • I spoke with Jeff Zients this morning and he told me that Ron Klain told him that President Biden is 100% behind me (see above). June 7, 2021 – Global – 173,000,000/3,700,000; USA – 33,200,000/594,800 • Eventful day - I went to New York today with first lady doctor Jill Biden for two reasons: 1st )to visit the Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem in order to thank them for setting up a vaccine clinic and to encourage them to continue to advocate for young people to get vaccinated. I flew up with the first lady on one of the Air Force planes assigned to the White House and had a great conversation with her on the plane up as well as on the plane down. She is an amazingly natural and one person with whom I believe we have now started a good friendship. The people at the Abyssinian church or extremely kind to me in saying how much they appreciated that I was there and all of them wanting to take selfies with me. We stayed at the Bowery hotel at the interface between Chinatown and the Bowery. i was surprised that we picked the hotel Since where we want to go for the TV hit the following morning was way Uptown. Brett Rowland and I had a great Italian dinner at the Primi restaurant in the Bowery. The following day the first lady and I appeared together on the Kelly Ripa and Ryan Seacrest Show (KABC). It was very lighthearted and enjoyable. Another very important aspect of the day is that as I was getting ready to take off with the motorcade from the White House on the way to Andrews Air Force Base, the president came walking down the back alley , the Secret Service called me out of the car , and the president put both his hands on both my shoulders and said “I just want to tell you that I am behind you 1000%”; and he repeated again “I am behind you 1000%.” He said “those people are crazy they have no idea what they're talking about and just don't pay any attention to them.” • Back to the dark side. Scott Gottlieb had appeared on Face the Nation and mentioned in an attempt to help me then I had actually gone to Europe in Jan/Feb. 2020 to brief health ministers about the possibility that the virus could have been constructed an escape from the laboratory. He did this to indicate that I was not hiding anything because I already knew that this was a possibility and so I didn't change my mind currently by saying that a lab leak is a possibility since I was talking about it openly back then. As it turns out, he was a little bit mixed up because on January 31st, 2020 I received a call from Jeremy Farrar who conferenced in Christian Andersen to tell me that Ed Holmes and Christian had seen a copy of the sequence of the virus and felt that there was a possibility that because of the unusual furin cleavage site that this could possibly have been a constructed virus. as indicated in my notes of January 31st and February 1st , 2020, since I am not an evolutionary biologist I called together by phone a group knowledgeable scientist together with Francis Collins and a few other people to discuss this. After a considerable amount of discussion about half of the people felt that this was possibly a constructed virus and the other half were convinced that this was a natural occurrence. A few weeks later Christian Andersen got together with Bob Garry and Andrew Rambaut to examine this more carefully and they came to the conclusion that they were convinced that this. was a natural occurrence and a jump from the animal reservoir. They published their data in a preprint server in February followed by a nature paper in March of 2020 . That is the reason why it appears that a I briefed people which I did not . I was briefed by them . Scott had said that I had briefed a group of international health people he seemed to have gotten some of the story wrong , but overall he was correct. Cases continue to come down: June 8, 2021 – Global – 173,3000,000/3,700,000; USA – 33,200,000/595,300 NEWS CLIPPING — THE PRESS — CONDENSED (1 SOURCE PAGE) “Cases continue to come down: Far right still slamming away. It is very clear that this is a well-organized effort.
PRESS: Interview with Dutch newspaper NRC Handelsbad – Bas Blokker interviewer; Smithsonian Channel TV Documentary…” Column: The Terrific article in the LA Times strongly defending me: right’s attack on Fauci shows it has nothing in its policy tank but slogans By MICHAEL HILTZIK BUSINESS COLUMNIST JUNE 8, 2021 5 AM PT Another great article in the Miami Herald defending me: Despite Trump’s new round of bullying, Fauci says COVID likely didn’t leak from a Chinese lab | Opinion BY ANDRES OPPENHEIMER JUNE 08, 2021 09:13 AM, UPDATED 19 MINUTES AGO LA TIMES – MICHAEL HILTZIK: Column: A Nobel laureate backs off from claiming a ‘smoking gun’ for the COVID-19 lableak theory June 9, 2021 – Global – 173,700,000/3,700,000; USA – 33,200,000/595,600 Today the president went to England on the first leg of the trip involving the G7 summit. With regard to COVID-19, he has a very important message to deliver which I am very pleased about. He will announce that the United States will give away 500 million doses of the Pfizer vaccine to countries that do not have the capability of getting their own vaccine. I have been pushing for this for some time with Jeff and I have even spoken to the President and VP about the need to take a leadership role in getting vaccines to the lower and middle income countries. This is a first step towards vaccinating the world and to having the United States resume our leadership role throughout the world. I will continue to push to have technology transfer to the developing world so that ultimately they may be able to make their own vaccine. But for now, the role of the United states as a world leader has been clearly affirmed by the President's action
PRESS: CNN with Erika Hill; Podcast with former Congressman Pete Sessions; MSNBC “Meet the Press Daily” with Chuck Todd; Wall Street Journal Tech Summit; My picture was on the 1st page of the Style Section of the Washington Post together with Jill Biden and Debra Frazier-Howse Washington Post: Biden administration to buy 500 million Pfizer coronavirus vaccine doses to donate to the world By Tyler Pager and Emily Rauhala June 10, 2021 – Global – 174,000,000/3,800,000; USA – 33,200,000/596,000 Cases still low: • I had a really nice conversation with Chuck Todd this morning. He had texted me to ask what I thought of the interview yesterday. I told him that I thought it was absolutely terrific, but I wanted some advice from him . I asked him whether he thought that I should pull back from publicly defending myself against the slanderous attacks since that might call more attention to them. He completely agreed and said that Fox News and people like Tucker Carlson would use anything I say as the theme for their next show. Chuck is really an excellent journalist and although he must maintain his objectivity and reporting it is very clear that he is really being a friend in understanding the difficult position that I am in. • Did Fireside chats with Irini Sereti; Bio Annual Meeting Fireside chat with Julie Gerbelding; “Reaching adolescents” interview with Vivek Murthy Only in our
PRESS: Univision Interview with Ilia Calderone; Washington Post - anti-truth hellscape could Anthony Fauci become a supervillain Anthony S. Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, listens during a Senate hearing last month. (Stefani Reynolds/Pool/AP) By Margaret Sullivan Media columnist June 10, 2021 at 7:00 a.m. EDT June 11, 2021 – Global – 174,500,000/3,800,000; USA – 33,300,000/597,000 Press are beginning to push back and point out how ridiculous the criticism of me is (see below in Vanity Fair) • Did multiple outreach chats today with mayor Muriel Bowser, with the college challenge event and with two White House arranged interactions with young “influencers “ • Also have a zoom meeting with David Kessler , Peter Staley, and James Krellenstein. Peter and James have been pushing to have the United States government make a major investment in Lanza, which is the company that produces the doses for Moderna. David explained to them that there is enormous capacity with the mRNA companies themselves and so was not particularly amenable to going straight to Lanza. I have been trying to broker an understanding between Peter and James and David , but I'm not so sure how successful I would be • . The data were extremely exciting with a 90.4% vaccine efficacy and 100% efficacy against severe disease. We are becoming almost complacent with these spectacular results about vaccine efficacy . However, this result will add an important component to our armamentarium
PRESS: NDTV New Delhi, India; Republicans Are One Week Away From Demanding Anthony Fauci Be Deported to Wuhan Conservatives are obsessed with the baseless idea that the veteran immunologist had something to do with COVID-19’s origins. By Bess Levin June 12, 2021 – Global USA • had our usual medical team meeting with Jeff this AM (Sat). The important good news is that the president's announcement a 500 million doses of vaccine going to low and middle income countries is going across very well throughout the world. As the president has said, “America is back “ in our rightful leadership role. • Had a very good conversation today with Hugo Crosthwaite and Taina Caragol. Hugo is a famous artist who will be doing a commissioned “motion” portrait of me for the National Portrait Gallery. Taina works for the NPG. The theme of the portrait is the show that I have been the symbol of truth and science and have been attacked by the forces of untruth and evil. His prior work is in an unusual medium where he those pencil drawings of a person Anne photographs them to look like a mini movie picture. I have seen some of his work and it is extraordinary and spectacular. I am looking forward to seeing what the result will be. The results should be sometime at the end of the year. No, Fauci is not profiting from a
PRESS: New York Times (Davey Alba) - coming book on lessons he’s learned from his public service. The above article points out the fact that despite Nat Geo making it very clear that I received no money from their book the far right including many GOP congressman I still insisting that I was profiting while people were dying. The extraordinary crazyness continues. June 17, 2021 – Global USA Participated in Faith Vaccine Roundtable – young Muslim messengers
PRESS: NPR “Morning Edition” with Leila Fadel; did the White House Press Conference – I announced the new $3.2 billion Antiviral Program for Pandemics, which a 2 pillar program for Development and Discovery of antivirals for COVID-19 and other viruses of pandemic potential; Great Article in Politico that describes the lies of the Trump people about the “lab leak” theory: Top Trump officials pushed the Covid-19 lab-leak theory. Investigators had doubts. New documents and interviews show how the president and his senior aides cherry-picked evidence and sidelined the government’s own virus sleuths. NEWS CLIPPING — POLITICO — CONDENSED (3 SOURCE PAGES) “A Northwell Health lab technician uses the Abbott ID NOW Covid-19 rapid tester on a participant before a news conference on April 14, 2021, in Elmont , N.Y. | Mary Altaffer, Pool/AP Photo By ERIN…” 2016. And Trump wasn’t invited to speak at the grandfather’s funeral as presidents traditionally do. If George P. Bush’s name had been George P. Jones, his political rise undoubtedly would have been less smooth. But now he’s shocking a lot of Bush family admirers in his quest to receive a pat on the head from Trump — or at least not a swat. Sure, a lot of Texas Republican primary voters worship Trump, but is winning a nomination for state office worth losing one’s honor? It’s a guarantee that Fauci would not kiss the rear end of anyone who insulted his family. What we have here is a short guy from Brooklyn basically brushing off Trump’s menacing antics while swaggering Texas Republicans collapse at the sign of a New Yorker’s displeasure. And there’s one other reason for Trump’s continued obsession with Fauci: envy. Trump is fading from national prominence. Even Fox News no longer carries all his speeches live. But Fauci goes on. He’s still respected by the sort of people whose respect serious leaders want. His polls numbers remain high. As the virus threat recedes, not every pronouncement Fauci makes will grab headlines, but he’s not there for that. He’s there to do the science. The rightwing attacks on him can’t be pleasant, but Fauci will end his long career with a legacy of public service and, importantly, his dignity intact. June 18, 2021 – Global – 177,000,000/3,800,000; USA – 33,300,000/600,000 Received important e-mail with attachment from Jesse Bloom: Hi Francis, Stephen, and Toni, I’m just writing to give you a heads up that I identified a data set of early Wuhan SARS-CoV-2 sequences that has been deleted from the NIH’s Sequence Read Archive (SRA). I was able to recover the deleted files from the Google Cloud and analyze the sequences, and have attached a pre-print on the analysis that I just submitted for posting by bioRxiv. Since SARS-CoV-2 origins and early spread has become a hot-button topic, I wanted to give you a heads up. I made sure to emphasize in the discussion that the SRA has many sequences and so isn’t in a position to vet all deletions. Nonetheless, I think it would be highly worthwhile to do a comprehensive analysis of SRA (and other NIH) data that might be relevant to this topic that could have been deleted or otherwise overlooked. If I can be of any assistance, let me know. I have been running a pipeline to identify additional deleted SRA data using various heuristics including those in described in the attached pre-print, but have not yet completed the analysis enough to know the extent that the data I have recovered is relevant to SARS-CoV-2’s origins or early spread. But as I mention in the pre-print, there are two known SRR deletions that are worth looking at. I definitely think it would be good to perform a SRA side search as well, since that will obviously be easier and more efficient, and could identify deleted data not on the cloud. Anyway, I hope overall this can be a good opportunity for the NIH to take the lead by using its remarkable data archives to make progress in resolving some of the important questions about the virus’s origins. Thanks, Jesse ---- Jesse Bloom Associate Professor, Fred Hutch Cancer Research Center Affiliate Associate Professor, Genome Sciences & Microbiology, University of Washington Investigator, Howard Hughes Medical Institute paper.pdf I believe that it was somewhat imprudent on the part of Jesse bloom to make statements such as he has that indicate nefarious motives on the part of the Chinese when we have no idea why they deleted the sequences. He used words such as “obscure” and “surreptitious” which will certainly create a firestorm when conspiracy theorists read it. The best thing to do is to have Frances and I again convene a group of evolutionary virologists to discuss the potential meaning of this . We will do this two days from now on Sunday June 20. See below. Cases at around 12,000 per day NIH helped fund research involving donated fetal tissue, but Fauci was not directly involved
PRESS: Excellent refutation of the lab leak hypothesis in The Guardian: Though it is newly respectable, the Wuhan lab theory remains fanciful David Robert Grimes June 19, 2021 - Global USA Horrible roller coaster day – Due to some acute transient right posterior chest pain 2 days ago, Ted Li order a CT scan. - I got a call from the radiologist at Sibley hospital where I had gotten a chest CT in the morning telling me that I had a lesion in my right lower lobe that he felt was a cancer (non-small cell carcinoma). I felt like I got hit like by a Mack truck. Doctor Li quickly followed up on this and show the film to Andrew Lerner at Sibley who is a pulmonologist specializing in pulmonary nodules. Doctor Lerner felt that it was more likely an inflammatory lesion and there were multiple other lesions that were very small throughout the right lower lobe. In addition, I had a pulmonary infarct in the right lowest segment that was definite. Again, Dr. Li called David Hellmann Who was with his son who is an oncologist who looked at it and said that it looks more benign then neoplastic and felt that it did not look like a non-small cell carcinoma. Finally, they showed the films via computer to Dr. Elliot Fishman who is the top radiologist at Hopkins. He agreed that it was more likely inflammatory and that the only definite thing on the film was the pulmonary infarct. He recommended a follow-up CT in three months and begin anticoagulation immediately with Eliquis. Chris and I viewed the “FAUCI” documentary doe by Nat/Geo together with the leadership of Nat/Geo films at the national geographic headquarters on 17th Street, NW. Very impressive film. At the request of the White House I did a walking tour of the Anacostia neighborhood Of Washington DC together with Mayor Muriel Bowser. we started off at anacostia high school where we thanked the volunteers in the basketball gym who were administering vaccines to people in the neighborhood . We then went on and addressed the volunteers in the schoolyard of Kramer Middle School. After that, the mayor and I went door to door knocking on the doors and encouraging people in the neighborhood to get vaccinated. We did that for about an hour and 15 minutes. it got written up the next day in the Washington Post (see below).
PRESS: Washington Post: “For Ward 8 residents, coronavirus vaccine appeal comes with a touch of celebrity: ‘It’s Fauci!” https://wapo.st/3vFzhLZ June 20, 2021 – Global USA Uneventful and somewhat relaxing day . Still trying to process the news from yesterday. Will have to live with uncertainty for the next three months. As indicated above, Francis Collins organized a zoom call for today with a group of evolutionary biologists as well as Steve Sherry from the NIH databank in order to discuss this issue. Jesse bloom was also on the call. See email below from Francis having organized the meeting: From: Collins, Francis (NIH/OD) [E] <collinsf@od.nih.gov> Sent: Sunday, June 20, 2021 2:33 PM To: Tabak, Lawrence (NIH/OD) [E] <lawrence.tabak@nih.gov>; Fauci, Anthony (NIH/NIAID) [E] <afauci@niaid.nih.gov>; Embry, Alan (NIH/NIAID) [E] <embrya@niaid.nih.gov>; Sherry, Steve (NIH/NLM/NCBI) [E] <sherry@ncbi.nlm.nih.gov> Cc: Kristian G. Andersen <kga1978@gmail.com>; Bedford, Trevor <tbedford@fredhutch.org>; Bloom PhD, Jesse D <jbloom@fredhutch.org>; Garry, Robert F <rfgarry@TULANE.EDU>; rasmus_nielsen@berkeley.edu; spond@temple.edu Subject: RE: URGENT: Seeking your expert advice Allow me to suggest this agenda: 1) Introductions 2) Retrieval of SARS-CoV-2 reads deleted from SRA by submitter – Jesse Bloom 3) NCBI SOPs for handling submitter requests to delete reads in SRA – Steve Sherry 4) Likelihood of other sequence deletions from SRA? – Steve Sherry 5) Significance of this new sequence information for origin of SARS-CoV-2 – Jesse, Kristian, Trevor, Bob, Rasmus, Sergei 6) Discussion and next steps – All Looking forward to the discussion. Francis Please see the people copied on the above email for a list of those who were present at the zoom call. The only person on the list who was not there was Trevor Bedford who could not make the zoom connection. After considerable discussion among the group, it became clear that Jesse Bloom had really jumped the gun and made assumptions that the Chinese were surreptitiously hiding sequences by deleting them. Several of the scientists including Sergei Pond and Rasmus Nielsen felt that the sequences that were deleted and ultimately recovered partially were not of any particular consequence in shedding any light on the origin of SARS Co V2. The entire group felt that this was an inappropriate move on the part of Jesse to publish a single author paper making serious innuendos without running it by anyone else. As it turns out after discussion with Steve Sherry who is in charge of the NIH Sequence Read Archive (SRA) from which the sequences were deleted, it became clear that this is not an unusual occurrence for scientists to delete sequences if they are found to be either inaccurate , not up to date, or listed on another databank. He went back and looked at the required email to have the Wuhan sequences deleted, and the Chinese had indicated that they were removing it because they were putting it on their own separate database. According to Steve this would be a perfectly valid reason to remove a sequence. This obviously is going to cause us a lot of difficulty since those who feel that the Chinese are trying to cover up a lab leak will certainly say that this deletion of sequences proves that that is the case. It is really a shame that Jesse acted really in my opinion somewhat immaturely in making inflammatory statements in a preprint without further investigating the reasons behind the deletions. The NIH came out with the following statement in response to press inquiries regarding the Bloom preprint: NIH is aware of Dr. Bloom’s preprint submission. Staff at the National Library of Medicine, which hosts the Sequence Read Archive (SRA), have reviewed the submitting investigator’s request to withdraw the data. These SARS-CoV-2 sequences were submitted for posting in SRA in March 2020 and subsequently requested to be withdrawn by the submitting investigator in June 2020. The requestor indicated the sequence information had been updated, was being submitted to another database, and wanted the data removed from SRA to avoid version control issues. The submitting investigator published relevant information about these sequences by preprint in March, 2020 and in a journal in June, 2020. Submitting investigators hold the rights to their data and can request withdrawal of the data. Currently, the National Library of Medicine (NLM) has no plans to change the policy that recognizes submitters rights to their own data and the right to petition that their data be withdrawn from the Sequence Read Archive (SRA). The National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI), part of the NLM that manages the database, is the U.S. participating member of the International Nucleotide Sequence Database Collaboration, which provides guidelines for withdrawing data: http://www.insdc.org/documents/insdc-status-document. NLM/NCBI can’t speculate on motive beyond a submitter’s stated intentions. June 21, 2021 – Global -178,000,000/3,900,000; USA – 33,400,000/600,000 Did an Instagam live with FGOTUS Doug Emhoff and Dikembe Mutombo to encourage people to get vaccinated. We are putting a full-court press in encouraging people to get vaccinated. Did TIKTOK interviews (rapid fire questions) from 8 young TIKTOK “influencers who amazingly have millions of followers FOX News is blasting me for saying that an attack on md is an attack on science. I am going to go on the offensive against them. To me, it is a badge of honor to be criticized by FOX. Important article in the Post today by Joel Achenbach (see below)
PRESS: NY Times by Carl Zimmer and James Gorman: Fight Over Covid’s Origins Renews Debate on Risks of Lab Work Excerpt from above NY Times article: NEWS CLIPPING — WASHINGTON POST — CONDENSED (2 SOURCE PAGES) ““When questioning Dr. Fauci last month, Senator Paul brought up one of the most cited examples of gain-of-function research, a study of coronaviruses done by Ralph Baric at the University of North Carolina published in…” Health Scientists battle over the ultimate origin story: Where did the coronavirus come from? By Joel Achenbach June 20, 2021 at 5:58 p.m. EDT June 22, 2021 – Global USA Had podcast with the Conference of Mayors Vaccinations coming along very well:
PRESS: BBCTV with Katty Kay; CNN “The Lead” with Jake Tapper; MSNBC “All In” with Chris Hayes Very good interview on New York Times “Sway” with Cara Swisher: NYT/Sway: Anthony Fauci on the Lab Leak Theory and Emailing Mark Zuckerberg https://nyti.ms/2UfIr4K The Hill: Poll: 61 percent say Fauci has been truthful to the best of his knowledge on COVID19 origins; NPR Radio – 1A; The New Yorker: Anthony Fauci, Lifeguard The doctor is in, no matter what time of year. By Barry Blitt June 24, 2021 – Global – 179,000,000/3,900,000; USA – 33,400,000/600,000 I had another terrific day with First Lady Dr. Jill Biden. We flew to Florida from Andrews with all the bells and whistles of motorcades to visit two cities: Osceola County near Orlando and Tampa Bay. We have become somewhat of a good team together in visiting with the sites that were administering the vaccine, mingling with both the people who are being vaccinated as well as the staff who were doing the vaccinating. At each stop both doctor Biden and I made remarks and spoke with the press. Of particular note was the visit to Tampa Bay where we met with Mr. Jeff Vinik, the owner of the Tampa Bay Lightning , the hockey team that would be playing the 7th game of the semifinals for the Stanley Cup finals the following day. They gave both Jill and I our own jerseys with our names on them. We gave our speech on the ice of the arena where the Tampa Bay Lightning plays. I am getting to be quite good friends with Jill and I think that our relationship will strengthen as we continue working together. June 23, 2021 – Global – 179,000,000/3,900,000; USA – 33,400,000/600,000 Did an Instagram with Jennifer Garner on vaccines. She was wonderful as she was last time. We spoke of the vaccination of her 3 children. Cong. Stephen Scalise wants to hold a panel on the originals that would be a “set-up” to attack Francis Collins and me: 2021.06.22 Fauci Invite.pdf Here is the announcement of the “set-up” hearing. We would be crazy to honor it. The Panel 1 are a bunch of wackos: Select Subcommittee Republicans Announce Expert Witness Forum on COVID-19 Origins Forum to be held with expert witnesses on Tuesday, June 29 WASHINGTON—On Tuesday, June 29 at 12:00 p.m. ET, Republican Whip and Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Crisis Ranking Member Steve Scalise (R-La.), House Committee on Oversight and Reform Ranking Member James Comer (R-Ky.), and Select Subcommittee Republican lawmakers will hold a forum with expert witnesses to examine the origins of the coronavirus. For more than a year now, Republicans have repeatedly called on Democrats to investigate the mounting evidence showing the virus originated from the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) lab, but Democrats continue refusing to launch an investigation. “The left-wing media called it a ‘fringe conspiracy theory,’ Big Tech censored it, activists in white lab coats dismissed it and Democrats ignored it, but there is growing evidence Communist China started the pandemic, covered it up, and is responsible for the deaths of more than 600,000 Americans and millions more worldwide,” said Scalise and Comer. “Despite Speaker Pelosi’s efforts to create diversions and cover this up, the American people deserve the truth and are demanding accountability, and House Republicans will insist on getting these answers. “The House Democrat majority’s refusal to follow the science, listen to the experts, and investigate the origins of COVID-19 is a dereliction of their duty. Next week, Select Subcommittee Republicans will hold a forum with expert witnesses to advance our investigation into the origins of COVID-19,” added Scalise and Comer. “The American people deserve to know the truth, even if Washington Democrats refuse to seek it.” It was recently reported that three researchers from the Wuhan lab became ill with symptoms consistent with COVID-19 and sought hospital care in November 2019. Additionally, Dr. Fauci’s recently released emails from February 2020 reveal that scientists raised the possibility of a lab leak and also expressed concern the virus appeared to be engineered. WHAT: Select Subcommittee expert forum entitled “Led By Science: The COVID-19 Origin Story” WHEN: Tuesday, June 29 at 12:00 p.m. ET WHERE: HVC-215, Capitol Visitors Center WHO: Witness Panel I The Honorable Brett P. Giroir, former Assistant Secretary for Health, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services: Admiral Giroir brings firsthand knowledge about the public health response to the COVID-19 pandemic. As COVID-19 testing czar, he oversaw creating a nationwide testing apparatus from scratch which was made particularly difficult by China’s lack of transparency. Admiral Giroir will also discuss the investigatory failures of the World Health Organization and why a U.S.-led origins investigation is vital. Dr. David Asher, Senior Fellow, Hudson Institute: Dr. Asher has decades of national security experience and most recently led the U.S. Department of State’s COVID-19 origins investigation. His testimony will provide inside information into the origins investigation and the role of the Chinese government’s efforts to block a thorough and impartial investigation. Dr. Richard Muller, Emeritus Professor of Physics, University of California Berkeley: Dr. Muller is an acclaimed scientist that used his own research to study available data in attempting to determine the origins of COVID-19. He recently penned an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal pointing out there is strong evidence COVID-19 was developed in a laboratory using gain-offunction acceleration. Dr. Steven Quay, Founder, Atossa Therapeutics: Dr. Quay is one of a growing number of scientists dedicated to finding the origins of COVID-19. He has conducted his own research using the publicly available viral data and reached conclusions apart from outside influence. He brings significant scientific expertise to this endeavor including over 87 patents and hundreds of published scientific articles. Member Panel The Honorable Cathy McMorris Rodgers, Member of Congress The Honorable Michael McCaul, Member of Congress The Honorable Devin Nunes, Member of Congress The Honorable Mike Gallagher, Member of Congress Witness Panel II (invited but hasn’t yet accepted) The Honorable Francis Collins, Director, National Institutes of Health Dr. Anthony Fauci, Director, National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Dr. David Hassell, Chairman, P3CO WATCH: A livestream will be available HERE.
PRESS: WSJ: Dr. Fauci and the Mask Disaster; CBS “This Morning” with Anthony Mason; NBC “Today” with Savannah Guthrie; Month of Action interviews with influencers on TikTok and Instagram (one with Jennifer Garner) June 24, 2021 – Had a great day with FLOTUS Dr. Jill Biden - I flew on one of the presidential planes with Dr. Jill Biden, assembling at the White House for the motorcade to Andrews Air Force Base. Brett Rowland came with me. We went to Florida for a two city stop to promote vaccines. The first stop was at Osceola County near Orlando. The next stop was at Tampa Bay where we did a vaccine promotion event right on the ice in the arena that is used by the Tampa Bay Lightning team. Of note, tomorrow the team plays the 7th game of a seven game semifinal before the Stanley Cup finals . They will be playing the New York Islanders. We had a nice conversation with Jeff Vinik and his family. Jeff is the owner of the hockey team and he gave me a team jersey with my name on it as well as a team jersey to Jill with her name on it. It was a very productive day as both Jill and I gave speeches at each of the locations and encourage the workers there and the people lined up to get vaccinated. No doubt Jill and I are now developing a very strong relationship, as we really have developed a comfortable and warm rapport with each other. June 25, 2021 - Global – 180,000,000/3,900,000; USA – 33,400,000/601,000 I did something this morning that I feel very good about. I went over to the clinical center and participated in the “graduation ceremony” of the people in project search who are a group of handicapped individuals who underwent a training program here at NIH and were then given jobs here. I did selfies with each and every one of them, took a group photo, and gave them a pep talk about why their work is so important. I have such empathy for people who through no fault of their own were dealt a difficult hand in life. As a bit of background, Mayor Bill Di Blasio of New York City had invited me to be the Grand Marshal of the parade of heroes for the 4th of July weekend in New York City . It would be similar to the ticket tape parades that honored returning war generals. The purpose of the parade was to honor health care workers and first responders to the outbreak in New York City period, and since I am a well-known New Yorker, he wanted to make me the Grand Marshall of the parade. I did not think that this would be appropriate since we have not yet controlled the outbreak and since those people (far right radical GOP) who have been attacking me viciously over the last several weeks would probably have a field day if I did that , I decided that I would express my gratitude for the invitation but would decline. On my way in the motorcade between airports in Florida yesterday (Friday) Bill called me up on my cell phone to see what my decision was about the invitation. I explained to him my reason for declining, and thankfully he was extremely gracious and understood . He promised me that he would get another chance to honor me for what I have done for New York City and for the country. Had meeting in my office with Dr. Jeff Lehman, former president of Cornell University and now current American President and Vice Chancellor of NYU in Shanghai. Jeff has been in Shanghai for the last nine years and has considerable insight into the Chinese culture. He asked to visit me to explain to me what his take is on the tension between the United States and China around the Wuhan laboratory and COVID-19. I believe that he got everything about right in that it is extremely unlikely at the Chinese are truly hiding anything substantive. Because of their suspicious and somewhat paranoid nature it is likely that they were in denial about the outbreak in the early months and we're not really trying to hide anything but we're trying with almost wishful thinking that it would go away without anybody knowing about it. However, they did quickly come around identify the virus and make the sequence publicly known. This argues against any attempt to truly hide anything. All of the other stuff is a reflection of their suspicious nature. He also feels that there was no way that they would allow an outside investigative group into their labs anymore then we would allow a Chinese-led international group to come to the Fredrick lab. Jeff believes as I do that the only way to make any headway in all of this is to have a good faith collaboration between Chinese and other international scientists including United States scientists in order to cooperatively try to find the source of the origin of SARS Cov-2. Also, as a result of his in depth understanding of Chinese culture , he feels strongly that the Wuhan lab would not have been used for any deleterious research such as bio warfare. He confirmed the doctor Shi is a highly respected scientist and her reputation would argue against her being involved in anything outside of the realm of science. I expressed to Jeff that I agree with much of what he says , but the environment in the United states is so toxic with regard to China and the delusions of the far right radicals, that it is unlikely that we could come to a collaborative approach with the Chinese to come to a better understanding of the origin of COVID-19. Just got an email now from Ian Lipkin asking if he could arrange a phone call between him, me ,and Nancy Messonnier. I wonder what this is going to be all about ?
PRESS: WINS Radio NYC 1010; Podcast on Progressive Voices Network – “Before you know it….” with David Bender; important defense of me by “The Times Leader” - https://www.timesleaderonline.com/uncategorized/2021/06/envy-is-the-rights-real-problemwith-dr-fauci/ June 26, 2021 – Global - USA – 33,400,000/601,000 I had a very interesting evening last night. Christine and I had dinner over the home of Sally Quinn. Other guests were Bob Woodward and Elsa Walsh as well as Rick and Jane Atkinson. We had a lot of inside the Beltway discussions about Bob's books and Rick’s books and the experience that I had with Trump during the last year of his presidency. In addition, I had the opportunity to see Quinn Bradlee and who I believe is his wife or girlfriend. Sally was very pleased that I had done a podcast with her son Quinn. Fox News continues to come after me by making false accusations that I have misled congressional committees during questioning under oath. they just do not want to stop harassing me, but that is going to go nowhere. June 27, 2021 - Cases continue to slowly come down:
PRESS: Latest thing on Fox News over the last couple of days is that they are accusing me a lying under oath at a house and energy subcommittee hearing when I said That I did not know the precise reason why the president told us to cancel the WuHan grant. The fact is that we were told via mark meadows that we need to cancel the grant and when we told them that there has to be a specific reason the White House said we don't need a reason , just cancel the grant. When doctor Collins and doctor Tabak and indirectly when I said that it was illegal if we didn't have a specific reason , the White House came back and said make up a reason. Therefore, what I said under oath at the hearing is absolutely true. From a review of Jasmeen Abutaleb’s and Damian Paletta’s book by William Hanage of the Washington Post: Over and over again, whenever public health and public relations came into conflict, public health lost out. Trump’s complaints directed at “the Doctors” kept coming back to the same charge — negativity — including a remarkable, petulant presidential Oval Office outburst roughly halfway through the book. “I am sick and tired of how negative you all are. . . . I spend half of my day responding to what Tony Fauci has to say, and I’m the president of the United States!” Later in the same exchange, Trump told coronavirus response coordinator Deborah Birx: “Every time you talk, I get depressed. You have to stop that.” As if the pandemic could be defeated by the power of positive thinking, and Birx should just cheer up and promote policies that she knew would lead to more illness and death than the alternatives. I received a call today from David Wilman, who I thought was a friend and who has been having a conversation with me regularly every Sunday for the last several months in order for me to keep him up to date on what is going on with COVID. He was hinting early on that he was working on a story on gain of function research. He never interviewed me at all on the details of this but today he calls me up telling me how much he respects me, but he has a heads up for me that he is doing a story on gain of function and that I am in the story. He then went on to describe how much he respects me and that my favorite saying “precision of thought, economy of expression “ is one that he lives by and has it pasted on his computer. This looks to me like a hatchet job on me is coming and he is telling me what a great person I am before he drops the bomb. We shall see. June 28, 2021 – Global – 181, 000,000/3,900,000; USA – 33,500,000/602,000
PRESS: BET Instagram with Mark Tallman and Ronreaco Lee; Month of Action Zoom with Partner organizations; June 29, 2021 Delta variant swarming globally. It definitely is a more efficient transmitter. WHO is now recommending that even vaccinated people wear masks. Vaccinated people are getting infected, but without serious disease. FLOTUS sent Chris and me and the family a beautiful basket of vegetables grown in the White House Garden: Scanned from a Xerox Multifunction Dear Sir, Many in Australia, self included, have admired your steady hand in heavy and often dangerous seas. I saw this cartoon recently ... and I hope you like it … in the nicest possible way! Regards, Brian Dawes, Perth, Western Australia.
PRESS: Constituency Hispanic TV (x3); NBC Nightly News with Lester Holt; ABC World News Tonight; PBS NewsHour with Judy Woodruff; PSAs; CNN with Don Lemon; See below: This is the Hearing that the GOP called with crazy witnesses and they wanted Francis Collins and I to testify. Pelosi and WH said no way House Republicans hold own hearing on FOX: COVID-19 origins GOP lawmakers claim Pelosi is holding up full committee hearings: Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, said that Fauci "didn’t have the courage" to "come defend himself" at the hearing. "I’m convinced these guys knew right from the get-go what the truth was and they misled the American people," Jordan claimed, citing a slew of Fauci emails made public in early June. "He showed up everywhere for a year and a half. You couldn't go a day and not see Dr. Fauci somewhere, he was everywhere and now when we have emails… all this evidence suddenly you can't find him." Kate Messner’s Children’s Book – “Dr. Fauci” has come out. It is beautifully done and obviously well-researched. June 30, 2021 – Global 182,000,000/3,900,000; USA – 33,500,000;602,000 I just received an assembly concurrent resolution number 195 of the 219th legislature of the State of New Jersey it is a concurrent resolution honoring the life and the work of Dr. Anthony Fauci. (see below) Scanned from a Xerox Multifunction Parting note to me from General Gus Perna upon his retirement: Tony, thank you for your note and very kind words! It truly been my honor and pleasure to work with you! I brag to my circle of friends about you - ‘always had time to say hello or explain anything to me, as well as, impeccable moral courage to do the right thing’. Thank you for all that you have done for our Nation - you are one of my personal heros!!! Best of luck with all your future endeavors!!! Vr Gus
PRESS: MSNBC “Morning Joe” with Joe Scarborough; WTOP Radio; July 1, 2021 It is becoming very clear that the extreme far right in the press with Fox News, in social media but the far right crazies, and especially in the Congress with the senators and congressmen who are frightened of former president Trump and who are using attacks on me to show their loyalty to Trump. The issue that they are focusing on mostly in recent days is saying that I perjured myself in front of the House and Energy Subcommittee Hearing by saying I did not know why we were asked to cancel the Wuhan subgrant. In fact, I had checked with Francis Collins and Larry Tabak just to be sure , and there is no doubt that we were told by the White House to cancel the grant and not ask any questions about it. When we said that we had to have a specific reason for canceling the grant since it would be illegal for us to cancel it without a specific reason , the word came down from the White House predominantly via Mark Meadows that we should just go ahead and make up a reason but we definitely had to cancel the grant or else. The general counsel of HHS under Bob Charrow agreed that we had no specific reason to cancel the grant and so we had to reinstitute the grant but withhold funding until they met certain conditions which would be very difficult for them to meet anyway. It really was a work around to prevent us from funding the grant. Therefore, I was completely honest in saying that I did not know why the grant was asked to be cancelled since they never gave us a specific reason to do so. The pressure on me is extreme!!! They “bad guys” are taking everything I say and quoting it out of context. Really trying to destroy my credibility. Cases starting to go up a bit in the unvaccinated areas. Must watch closely Fauci: Divergent vaccination rates
PRESS: Axios - could create "two Americas" I taped the Sunday “Meet the Press”. It will be a 4th of July Special. July 2, 2021 – Global USA COVID-19 cases in UK increase 67%, but hospitalizations are not going up indicating that vaccines are preventing severe disease.
PRESS: Regional media TV with: WRAL NBC Raleigh-Durham; WSB-TV – ABC Atlanta; WREG-TV – CBS Memphis; July 4, 2021 Today is the celebration of the independence from the virus. There was the most beautiful display of fireworks on the mall that I have ever seen. Let us hope that the congregation of people at the celebration does not lead to a discernible surge in cases . As I have said on various TV shows including on Meet the Press this morning, there is a possibility of being two Americas, one that is vaccinated without any surge of infections and one that is unvaccinated leading to regional surges such as in those southern states with 35% or less of their population vaccinated. This includes places like Missouri , Alabama , Mississippi , Louisiana, Wyoming , among others.
PRESS: appeared on NBC “Meet the Press” 4th of July Special with Chuck Todd July 5, 2021 - Global USA Cases increasing in certain regions. Will watch carefully to determine whether this has impact on hospitalizations. We will brief the president tomorrow about the role of Delta variants with regard to vaccine protection. Virus lab leak theory dogs Democrats eager to keep focus on Trump's Covid failings Democrats worry that murky conclusions that don’t identify the origin of the virus could play into the Republicans’ hands. July 6, 2021 - Global USA A considerable amount of concern about the fact that reports from Israel indicate that the Pfizer vaccine is less protective against infection since the protection a few weeks ago prior to the emergence of the Delta variant was about 94%, whereas now that the Delta variant has emerged, protection against any infection is down to 64%. However, the good news is that the Pfizer vaccine is still more than 90% effective against serious diseases including hospitalization. It is conceivable that this discrepancy about the efficacy against the initial infection is due to the fact that the Israelis are doing a lot more testing of asymptomatic people than other countries including the United States. This needs to be followed closely. • I participated as I do most of the time in the weekly Governors’ briefing. I explained to them the situation of the threat of the Delta variant. I had my weekly briefing of the President today. This time I did it in person in the Roosevelt Room of the White House. We discussed the situation of the degree of protection afforded by our vaccines against the Delta variant. I also explained to him the situation regarding the Israeli data ( see above). The president remarked how much Jill enjoyed traveling with me and he thanked me for that saying that it means a lot to them.
PRESS: I did YouTube interview with two African American physicians from California: Doctor Jamie Rutland and doctor Italo brown. We discussed how we handle vaccine hesitancy among African Americans and how we can use the barbershop environment to convince them to get vaccinated. July 7, 2021 – Global – 184,000,000/4,000,000; USA – 33,600,000/604,000 We are stuck at ~12,000 to 14,000 cases per day: See below. It is very clear that the Israelis are increasing greatly their testing that could explain their results on asymptomatic infections in vaccinated people (see above and figure below): I had a very important meeting today with the NSC led by Beth Cameron and Maher Bitar who is the senior director for intelligence programs at NSC. We met in the EEOB SCIF and discussed the briefing document that the NSC had presented to the President a week or so ago. Beth wanted me to have an official briefing because of the catastrophic briefing that the amateurs from the CIA gave me several weeks ago. There were no new surprises for me in the briefing except that it became clear that the FBI has no idea what they're talking about since they are convinced that the origin of COVID-19 is from a laboratory leak. The reasons that they give do not make any sense. In contrast the NSA gave some reasonable hypotheses leaning heavily towards a natural jump of species in the environment. I spent some time explaining to Maher and Beth my own theories that the Chinese act like they're covering up something even when they have nothing to cover up. They manifested this in their response to the original SARS-CoV-1 when they insisted this was just an atypical influenza when in fact it was the beginning of a coronavirus pandemic. In addition, they likely shot themselves in the foot when they denied the presence of wild animals in the market when we know they were present and the Chinese cleaned out the market before adequate testing of animals could occur. In essence, they clouded the possibility of proving a natural emergence. I urged the NSC folks to work closely with qualified card-carrying evolutionary virologists such as Kristian Andersen, Eddie Holmes, Bob Garry, Andy Rambaut, among others. I also explained to them the multiple reasons epidemiologically and molecularly why it is almost certain that the virus evolved naturally from a species jump, even though I emphasized that I keep an open mind about the possibility of a lab leak . However, in this regard , I emphasized that just because two alternatives are possible that does not mean that they are equally probable. I believe that they understood where I was coming from and that it turned out to be a very good meeting.
PRESS: Interview with Frank Bruni for his book on aging; interview with Betsy McKay of WSJ on GoF; Sirius XM Radio with Marc Siegel; MSNBC with Chris Hayes; July 8, 2021 - Kristian Andersen, Bob Garry and many others came out yesterday with on a preprint server a paper strongly arguing with good evidence for a natural emergence of SARS-CoV-2 rather thsan a lab leak: The Origins of SARS-CoV-2: A Critical Review https://bit.ly/3jSK1Ep CNN: “Coronavirus almost certainly came from an animal, not a lab leak, top scientists argue” I had a very useful and enjoyable conversation with the President of Chile – President Sebastian Pinera. He was very gracious and wanted advice from me about how to handle the outbreak in Chile looking forward. He was very complimentary to me in many waves and asked a number of very intelligent and important questions relevant to his country. He seems like an extremely engaging person and it was an enjoyable half an hour that I spent speaking with him via zoom.
PRESS: NPR – “All Things Considered” with May Louise Kelly; July 9, 2021 – Global – 185,000,000/4,000,000; USA – 33,600,000/604,000 is waning after a period of several months. This created a lot of confusion and we all gathered on multiple phone calls yesterday evening in order to come out with a statement jointly from the CDC and FDA indicating that at this time if you are fully vaccinated you do not need a booster shot. In the middle of all of this I called up Mikael Dolstein and try to find out what was going on. He said that their statement was based on the Israeli data as well as data from their original phase three study which showed a modest degree of waning immunity after several months. Later in the evening I received a phone call from Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla who was very sorry and apologetic that he did not Alert me about the Pfizer announcement ahead of time. We will be arranging a meeting next week likely on Monday July 12 to discuss all of this with the visor people.
PRESS: Instagram with Ana Navarro; NBC Evening News; CNN “Situation Room” with Wolf Blitzer July 10, 2021 Wasting a lot of time responding to letters from Congress and Senate about Wuhan. Egregious waste of time!! Much concern about the Delta variant. Cases coming up in USA: July 11, 2021 – 33,000 cases yesterday. Clearly the unvaccinated are getting infected
PRESS: ABC “This Week with George Stephanopoulos”; CBS “Face the Nation” with John Dickerson; CNN State of the Union” with Jake Tapper; July 12, 2021 - Global USA It is important to point out how many hours we are all wasting in responding to the multiple letters from senators and congressmen fundamentally driven by conspiracy theories that the NIH has funded work at Wuhan institute of virology that lead to SARS-CoV-2. For example, over the weekend I was on multiple zoom calls with my staff fine tuning the letters in response to the multiple questions from people like senators Rand Paul, Marshall, Burr. I am somewhat surprised that's senator Burr was part of this since he generally is a friendly person to me. We had a very important meeting today by zoom with Mikael Dolsten and others from Pfizer with members of HHS including myself, Rochelle Walensky, David Kessler, Francis Collins, Janet Woodcock, all of the people from ASPR such as Dawn O'Connor. The Pfizer people present the data from the Israeli study which we already knew showed a decrease of efficacy against all infection down to 64%. In addition they showed some of the follow-up data from their phase 3 trial which showed a decrease in efficacy down to 83%. Clearly, Pfizer is intending to suggest boosts particularly for those who are elderly and with underlying conditions . In Israel they are already boosting some of the elderly and those with underlying conditions. There was a big debate in our own country and worldwide about giving a third shot to fully vaccinated people when most of the world is completely unvaccinated. This is a debate that will intensify. I believe we need to go ahead and explore the possibility of needing a boost at the same time as we provide vaccines for people in low and middle income countries. I have been emphasizing in my public appearances that the requirement for a boost does not mean that the vaccines are not highly effective. A boost relates to the durability of the protection not to the effectiveness of the protection. This is a concept that is often missed by the public.
PRESS: CBS “This Morning” with Gayle King; NPR Baltimore – WYPR with Tom Hall; CNN with Chris Cuomo July 13, 2021 - Global – 187,000,000/4,000,000; USA – 33,700,000/605,000 New cases are increasing in at least 41 states. This is particularly true among seven states in the South where the percentage of people who are vaccinated is very low. It is clear that we are entering into a period where the steady decline in cases has now stopped and we are seeing an increase in cases with daily cases hovering around 33,000. There is a war of words going on between the Fox News TV hosts and democratic senators such as Richard Durbin. The attacks on me by the far right and Fox News (Tucker Calrson and Laura Ingraham) are relentless and occur on a daily basis. Marsha Blackburn, Marjorie Taylor Green, and all of the other nut cakes attack me on a daily basis .
PRESS: CNBC “Squawk Box”; NPR “Here and Now”; MSNBC “Andrea Mitchell Report” July 14, 2021 I had a very pleasant experience today down at the White House where I engaged in a number of Instagrams, PSAs, and YouTube videos with the new sensational young entertainer Olivia Rodrigo. The purpose of the interaction was to encourage young people who are followers of Olivia to go out and get vaccinated. I was amazed to learn that with all her social media Olivia has 25 million followers. She is a very down to earth sweet 18 year old woman. The White House comms team for digital we're delighted with the interaction. • I'm spending a lot of time with the team in preparing for the July 20 HELP Senate hearing. This is all a colossal waste of time in which the far right is trying to link the COVID pandemic with work supported by NIAID In a sub award to the Wuhan institute of virology. I would likely get attacked by Senators Rand Paul , Marshall, Kennedy come on and Rubio among others. We shall see. July 15, 2021 – Global USA The republican Party has gone completely crazy. See letter below where Congressmen are accusing me of collaborating with the Chinese Communist Party: Follow Up NIH Re. Emails 71521 (2).pdf There are a few things to point out. For example, tonight we had a meeting that we generally have prior to briefing the president . Tomorrow we will be briefing the president and tonight at 9:00 PM we had a zoom meeting with me, Rochelle, Jeff , and Natalie to go over the plans for how we were going to breathe the president tomorrow (Friday). We divided the responsibility between Rochelle and me. Also, we had another one of the unusual experiences with the United states Congress. A group of 20 Right Wing Republican Congressman wrote a letter to Francis Collins and me asking a number of ridiculous questions in an accusatory manner as they have been for the last several weeks. In fact, the letter was first sent to the right wing publication the Daily Caller who then called us up and asked us what our response to the letter was when we had not yet even received the letter. And so, it was quite obvious that they were doing it mostly as a publicity stunt. In any event, one of the most amazing parts of the letter was the part where they made the statement: “Doctor Fauci was working closely with the CCP (Chinese Communist Party)”. They gave a reference for that statement that was an email sent to me from George Gao on March 28th 2020. In fact, that email was George apologizing to me for seemingly contradicting me in an article in Science in which he said that the United States was making a mistake by not recommending that people universally wear a mask. He did not want that to be interpreted that he was criticizing me and he apologized. In addition, George was saying how concerned he was about the outbreak and that he was worried about me and hoped that I was doing well. I wrote back to him and said “Thank you for your kind note I hope that all is well with you.” If anyone can construe that exchange as my working closely with the Chinese Communist Party, they have to be out of their mind. For that reason, it is clear that these types of letters are nothing but a bunch of unmitigated bullshit.
PRESS: Local print media – Las Vegas Review Journal, Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, Gannett Missouri; July 16, 2021 I briefed the President in the Oval Office today about the Delta variant and its impact on our country. Present at the briefing were: Ron Klain, Susan Rice, Natalie Quillian, Jeff Zients, Anita Dunn, Brian Reese, Mike Donilon and Rochelle Walensky virtually. Given the increasing number of cases in the United States, even though the hospitalizations have not increased, the President was concerned that his message that by July 4th we would be seeing an independence from the virus here in the United states might actually be now subject to question. We spoke to him about the importance of emphasizing that vaccinated people do not get severe disease even from the Delta variant . In addition, we pointed out the possibility that we may need to give booster shots , namely a third dose following the two doses of the mRNA vaccine. The President was concerned that people would say that he was giving a mixed message when he asked everyone to get the standard regimen of vaccination and now we are telling them that they may need to get an additional dose. I pointed out to him that most people who are vaccinated would be quite amenable to getting a third dose so long as they thought it would increase the duration of their protection and or make them more highly protected. It is the people who do not want to get vaccinated to begin with who are going to be in trouble because they will get infected and they will need hospitalization. The POTUS and Jeff kept asking whether I thought that it would get as bad as the winter of 2020/2021. I said no since we did not have vaccinated people back then. Fox News hosts Tucker Carlson and Laura Ingraham and mocking our attempts to get people vaccinated likely leading to loss of lives. Rand Paul and Jim Jordan tweeting about me all the time and actually raising money by trying to discredit me Cases continue to climb:
PRESS: MSNBC – “The Reid Out”; Peacock MSNBC – Joshua Johnson; CBS Evening news; NBC Nightly News with Lester Holt; July 17, 2021 No change. Cases continue to rise. Gov. DeSantis has made anti-Fauci T-shirts. Amazing!!
PRESS: CNN with Jim Acosta; July 18, 2021 Cases continue to increase. The question that is being asked is whether fully vaccinated people who have breakthrough infections can transmit the infection to others. Still no direct data either way: July 19, 2021 Jeff Z. called me early this AM (6:45 AM) concerned about the breakthrough infections of vaccinated people and waned my opinion about moving towards masking of vaccinated people who are in hot zones. I think that we should. Jeff called again at 10:00 AM concerned about the time FDA is taking to grant a full BLA for the vaccines. He is acutely aware of the sensitivity of not interfering with or pressuring the FDA, but we need the BLA since many people are not getting vaccinated until the vaccines are “fully approved”. Also, Jeff want me to get firm information on how long it will take for the peds (11 years old and younger) approval to come. Stock Market plunging >700 down due to concerns about the spread of the Delta variant. Mayor Bill Di Blasio called and ask my opinion about a strategy that he would like to do to try and get more people vaccinated and safe from the delta variant. He is proposing to give the people of New York City two alternatives if they are not vaccinated: 1) get vaccinated or 2) be required to get tested with a nasal swab at least once a week. The mayor feels that people will likely get tired of getting tested every week and my opt to get vaccinated purely for the convenience of it. Even though the requirement for a nasal swab is indeed a mandate, the mayor feels that this is much less intrusive they mandate for a vaccine.
PRESS: CNN with Kate Boldun; Bloomberg TV “Balance of Power” with David Westin; PBS NewsHour with Judy Woodruff July 20, 2021 – Global – 191,000,000/4,100,000; USA – 34,000,000/607,000 Testified today before the Senate HELP Subcommittee - There was the expected big splash at the hearing today As Senator Rand Paul accused me of lying under oath at a prior hearing and asked me if I wanted to retract my statement when I said that the NIAID has never funded nor does it funds now gain of function research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. He referred to the Plos Pathogens paper of 2017 and insisted that there was gain of function in those experiments and said I therefore lied. He quoted Dr. Richard Ebright as saying that those experiments were definitely gain a function. I exploded right back at Senator Paul and told him that he had no idea what he was talking about. I told him that I did not lie and have never lied certainly not before the Congress and then I would not at all retract anything I previously said before a congressional committee. He then implied that the work that we were doing may have been the cause of thousands of deaths. At this point I blasted back at him that if that is what he is implying he has no idea what he is talking about because the viruses that we were dealing with and that were in the progress reports and that are in the literature in no way could become SARS-CoV-2. I went on to say that it was molecularly impossible for the viruses that we were dealing with to become SARS-CoV-2. I finished by looking him in the eye and telling him that if anybody is lying here it is he. Several of the other senators on the democratic side after the discussion between Paul and me was finished made statements saying how confident they are in my integrity and in my service. Senator Marshall later asked questions about the furin cleavage site and the CGG codon. Then he started talking about the S1 segment of the spike protein and had absolutely no idea what he was talking about. He rambled on until I told him that I had no idea what he was saying; it make no sense. He made a fool of himself. Cases continue to climb:
PRESS: CBS “This Morning”; Multiple stories on TV about my encounter with Senator Paul July 21, 2021 – Global – 191,000,000/4,100,000; USA – 34,000,000/607,000 Cases continue to climb: Typical e-mail from a supporter of me after the Rand Paul clash. One of dozens and dozens: Dear Dr. Fauci, I've wanted to write you at various points over the last year, but seeing the hideous treatment you received from Rand Paul played on the PBS "Newshour" last night has prompted me to wait no longer. My husband, Breck Montague, and I want to thank you from the bottoms of our hearts for the inimitable leadership, courage and wisdom you have shown since you've had to become a frequently called-upon national spokesperson for good health sense and public health during this pandemic. I am certain you remember my father, Frank Williams, during his time as director of NIA. I actually recall when you came on board at NIAID -- I believe my father marvelled about how you were perhaps the "youngest person ever" to assume an NIH directorship. If so, thank goodness you were, because here you still are, with the benefit of decades under your belt, at such a critical time. Thank you for telling Sen. Paul it was he who was lying -- and for not accepting his dangerous rhetoric. We were so proud of you! In our rural community, we do everything we can to support fact-based conversation and exchange of information. In such a disheartening period in this country's history, we're immensely grateful to have leaders such as you who speak out and act according to your beliefs. Keep it up, and please accept our support and thanks. Mary Williams Montague Gloucester, Virginia (8576 Toddsbury Lane Gloucester, VA 23061) Francis Collins defends me against Rand Paul nonsense on CNN and MSNBC tonight I visited Eric Lander (Director of OSTP) at the White House today. He asked for the meeting and wanted to do two things. First, he wanted to express his strong support for me in light of what just went down with senator Paul. Second, he wanted my help in trying to nail down the possibility of our getting much of the $30 billion that are still available from the JOBS Act to put together a major program for pandemic preparedness for the future. He wanted to work with Francis Collins and I to make this happen and suggested that we might write an op Ed together. This evening I got a text from Beth Cameron of NSC. Beth indicated that I was her hero for what I did with Rand Paul and that she had heard from Eric Lander that I was discussing with him the issue of the $30 billion. I texted her back saying that I would push hard for this with Ron Klain and Jeff Zients. I will be seeing the President in the Oval Office today and hopefully Ron will be there so that I can discuss this with him. It should be pointed out that I have been meeting with the president personally in the Oval Office once a week for the past several weeks. It seems that Jeff prefers that I am there personally during the Presidential briefings. Also, it is rather strange that it seems that Jeff does not trust the CDC or even Rochelle and always wants me involved when it comes to the President. This may be a bit unfair to Rochelle, but his skepticism about the CDC historically is justified. In the meantime, the GOP led by despicable Kevin McCarthy continue to push back on doing an adequate investigation on what led up to the January 6 insurrection against democracy. Thank goodness that Nancy Pelosi has rejected the GOP suggestion of putting Jim Jordan on the panel that would be investigating the January 6 insurrection. Also, the GOP continues to blast me in their social media. It seems like it is an all out war between me and the radical right wing of the GOP
PRESS: Interview with Sentinel Record (Zoom) – Arkansas newspaper with Tyler Wann; NPR “All Things Considered” with Mary Louise Kelly; CNBC “Closing Bell”; MSNBC with Ari Melber July 22, 2021 – Global – 192,000,000/4,100,000; USA – 34,000,000/608,000 Daily cases continue to climb: Had my usual weekly meeting with the POTUS today at 1:00 PM in the Oval Office. Also present: Jeff Z., Natalie Quillian, Mike Donilon, Jake Sullivan (NSC). When I walked into the Oval the POTUS put his hands on my shoulder, brought me close and said: “You did a great job in stuffing that horse’s ass” referring to Rand Paul. He also said that 1st Lady Jill was “cheering for me” as she watched it on TV. As I walked through the White House, several people thanked me for “my service and for what I do” and a few remarked about Paul and said how proud they were of me. Briefed the Senate and House by Zoom together with Jeff, Natalie, and Marcella Ninez-Smith England surging with USA following: Steve Scalese is now promoting vaccines. It seems that several of the GOP who were originally against vaccines are now realizing that they are on the wrong side of history.
PRESS: CBS Evening News with Norah O’Donnell; Twitch Livestream; July 23, 2021 I had a very productive conversation in my regular every two week call with our UK colleagues – Chris Whitty and Patrick Vallance, this time accompanied by Thomas Waite. I explained to them the situation that we have here in the United states with the delta variant. The UK seems to be a couple of weeks ahead of us in every way. They have vaccinated a slightly larger proportion of their population than we have and the surge in delta that they are experiencing is much steeper then what we have at this time. The efficacy of the vaccine against hospitalization and death continues to hold. They are a skeptical about the Israeli vaccine efficacy data for asymptomatic and mildly symptomatic disease as we are here in the United States. The UK has made the decision similar to us that they will try to get all the children back to school in person by the fall. However unlike us, the unvaccinated children will not be required to wear masks when they go back to school. They have essentially decided that since you cannot vaccinate the younger children yet and since they generally have very mild disease, that you should accept the fact that sooner or later these young children are going to get infected and so be it. They do not want to close the schools or go to virtual learning. I will continue to follow the situation with them since it is very helpful to us here to learn what the UK is doing. Of note, both Chris and Patrick wanted me to know that I am held in extremely high regard in the UK by virtually everyone on the basis of my standing up to Rand Paul and his nonsense in the Senate Right-wing attacks on me intensify – North Carolina GOP Congressman Madison Cawthorn - "I thank Rand Paul for bringing it up and I will tell you right now Anthony Fauci does not have the best interests of the American people at his heart," he said. "I believe he is a pawn for the Chinese government by giving them funding to do militaristic funding to try and figure out how they can make an animal virus more transmissible to humans. It's disgusting, it's wrong, and 4 million people are dead all around the world because of it." Did my usual weekly briefing of the Cabinet (“Principals”) together with Rochelle, Natalie, Jeff, and Vivek. Brought them up to date on Delta variant becoming dominant.
PRESS: CBC (Canadian) “Power and Politics; FOX with Neil Caputo;
PRESS: Very good article in the LA Times by Melissa Healy: LA Times: Fauci: ‘There’s no way’ the coronavirus was made with U.S. research funds. Here’s why https://lat.ms/3ruPOC6 July 25, 2021 – Global USA The USA is not doing so great in vaccinations compared to other developed countries: Fully vaccinated people:
PRESS: CNN “State of the Union” with Jake Tapper; MSNBC “Sunday Show” with Jonathan Capehart; July 26, 2021 Humor: Important stuff going on!!We had at least two zoom meetings today with Jeff, Rochelle, Vivek, and Bechara to discuss the upcoming change in masking guidelines that the CDC will be proposing. It relates to the fact that data or showing that the level of virus in the nasopharynx of vaccinated people with asymptomatic breakthrough infections is similar according to CT values to that in individuals who are infected asymptomatically and who have not been vaccinated. These data are strongly suggestive that individuals who are vaccinated and who get infected can't transmit the virus two others as easily ask an unvaccinated people. This is triggering the need to tell vaccinated people that when they go to situations that are indoors that now they have to wear a mask or should at least seriously consider wearing a mask depending on the level of infection in the community where they are living. Rochelle is really having a very tough time in negotiating this with Jeff in the context of “her team” at CDC that seems to be operating in their usual manner independently of running things by the White House. For example at the end of a long and tortuous discussion about getting the wording correct in the new guideline, Rochelle let us know that two days from now (Wednesday) the CDC will be coming out with an MMWR that will overlap with what we have been wordsmithing for the guideline. Jeff and everyone else was blown away that these two parallel things were going on and we did not even know about it. I feel badly for Rochelle since she is dealing with an ingrained CDC system that has been that way for the decades that I have been dealing with them. Jeff and the White House Comms people (Courtney Rowe) are very concerned about mixed messaging. We decided that we would sleep on this and address it again in the morning. July 27, 2021 – Global – 194,600,000/4,200,000; USA – 34,500,000/609,000 Just got a call from Jeff that he wants me to brief the President today about the issues discussed above. It is very clear and unfortunate that confidence in Rochelle is very low within the White House team of Jeff, Courtney Rowe, and others. STAY TUNED Had a good conversation with the President in the Oval Office this afternoon at 12:30. I explained to him the new CDC guidelines for wearing masks indoors even if you are vaccinated given the fact that the delta variant is causing breakthrough infections in vaccinated individuals and vaccinated individuals with breakthrough infections can transmit the virus two uninfected individuals. In addition, I explained to him the data that the level of virus in the nasopharynx of vaccinated people with breakthrough infections is similar to the level of virus in the nasopharynx of unvaccinated infected people. We had a good conversation; he asked a lot of good questions. Right before the discussion he was on the phone with former senator Barbara Boxer who had just been mugged outside of her house. She asked to talk to me when she heard that the president would be meeting with me and we had a good conversation. She relayed that she felt very badly that idiots are attacking me and that she always has had the highest degree of regard for me. She recalled back in the days when we were fighting HIV together. I asked the president if Jill had come back from the Olympics in Tokyo. The President informed me that she had and so I sent her my regards through him. As Jeff , Natalie Quillian, and I were sitting in front of the Resolute Desk, I had a very strange, almost out of body experience. I just recalled at that time so clearly the bizarre situations that I had been through in the past when I sat in front of the desk trying to brief President trump. I recalled his incredible lack of concentration ability where his attention span was measured in seconds rather than minutes. This is in stark contrast to the seriousness, dignity, and integrity that now permeates the entire White House, particularly the Oval Office. Only now in retrospect do I fully appreciate what a disaster Trump was as President. This applies not only to his policies, but to the fact that he diminished the dignity of the presidency enormously. The feeling in the Oval Office now is very similar to what I experienced when I was in the Oval Office with presidents George HW Bush, George W Bush, Bill Clinton, and Barack Obama. This is such an entirely different feeling and vibration that I have when I enter the room and sit down either on the couch or in front of the desk. There was always that feeling of anxiety with Trump where I was anticipating that he would say or do something outlandish.
PRESS: Big announcement from CDC about masking for vaccinated people indoors attracting much media – Print interviews with NY Times and Washington Post. The Intercept: Rand Paul’s Attack on Anthony Fauci Chills Scientific Debate Over Gainof-Function Research https://bit.ly/3iR7zHP NEWS CLIPPING — BUZZFEED — CONDENSED (3 SOURCE PAGES) “The Black News Channel “The World Tonight”; NBC “Nightly News” with Lester Holt; NPR “All Things Considered” with Ari Shapiro; PBS “NewsHour” with Judy Woodruff; Univision National TV; Telemundo TV; CNN with Chris Cuomo; MSNBC…” "Getting death threats for me and my family and harassing my daughters to the point where I have to get security is just, I mean, it's amazing," Fauci said during an online forum last year. At that time, he called the threats "unseemly things that crises bring out in people." Fauci told CNN this week that the US is "going in the wrong direction" in terms of COVID-19 cases. He blamed unvaccinated Americans for the surge in infections, particularly with the more contagious Delta variant. Connally is due to appear in a federal court on Wednesday. Story also covered in other media – New York Post, Axios, Forbes, Newsweek, CNN, The Hill July 28, 2021 – Global USA Cases continue to surge:
PRESS: MSNBC – “Morning Joe” with Joe Scarborough; Joe Madison Radio Show; Morning Hustle Radio Show; July 29, 2021 There are a lot of important things going on that I do not have a chance to comment on in my daily diary. Some of these are the continual conversations that I have been having with Jeff about who should be the FDA Commissioner. Jeff and Ron Klain continue to run by me names of potential candidates. Today for example, David Kessler came to me with a surprising request that I float his name to Ron as a possible candidate. David is currently the head of the countermeasure acceleration group (CAG) of HHS. He is a former FDA commissioner and would likely do a very good job. I will float his name and see what happens. In another vein, I continue to get harassed by letters from far-right congressmen and senators who are cherry picking my FOIA’d emails and trying to establish that I have lied under oath when I said that the NIH has never done gain of function research at the Wuhan institute of virology. In addition, Tucker Carlson and others at Fox News continue to attack me virtually every night. Carlson saying multiple times that I created the virus. This is an extremely stressful situation but I will have to push on with the job that I have as director of NIAID and as chief medical advisor to President Biden. Another issue that is percolating it's a growing discontent with the CDC and with Rochelle’s difficulty in clearly articulating their somewhat shifting positions such as that of masking indoors. I do not believe that it is Rochelle’s fault but it is a fundamental lesion in the CDC. One of the problems is the typical CDC mentality that antedated Rochelle. Rochelle and the CDC are hesitant to show anyone data that backs up their policy because it is supposedly “embargoed. The problem is that the embargo relates to the MMWR, which is the CDC's own publication. Therefore it seems that if they wanted to break the embargo they could easily do it. Again, this is a recurrent problem with the CDC keeping data close to their vest and making policy without allowing outside experts to weigh in. It was an evolving situation here. Got a call from Jeff just now reading a sentence from the President's speech that he will give today in which he said that children do get infected, but a serious outcome is “extremely, extremely rare”. In my meeting with my office team this morning someone pointed out that in Arkansas on Wednesday there were 24 infections in children; seven of them wound up in the ICU and two of them are on respirators. I had originally told Jeff to get rid of one of the “extremelies” and just say “extremely rare”. After hearing about the infections in Arkansas I called back Jeff and told him to get rid of both “extremelies” and just say “rare “. We actually do not know the full impact of this virus on children at this point and so we really need to be careful about what we say and what we allow the POTUS to say. We are on a similar track as UK but a few weeks behind (as is usually the case): Very important essay by Peter Hotez: PLoS Biol/Hotez: Mounting antiscience aggression in the United States https://bit.ly/3lbsKXF We had a briefing today from the house Select Committee on COVID-19 chared by representative Clyburn. It was supposed to be limited to a discussion on the delta variant. However, it was clear that when the Republicans were allowed to ask questions they went off the subject and started to ask questions about infections coming over the border from Mexico. In typical fashion Jim Jordan asked me if I was a member of the P3CO oversight committee when in fact there is no such a thing as a P3 CO oversight committee. We have an executive committee of which I am not a member. Fortunately, even though I did not know what he was talking about, I said that I was not a member. He then asked for a list of the members. Since I really didn't know what he was talking about I said that I would get him that list. As it turns out, this is a list that HHS does not want to make public. HHS will get back to him and explain that to him. Obviously, he will make a big deal about this publicly. The Republicans in the Congress as well as Fox News continue to attack me viciously. I was particularly disappointed today to read Newt Gingrich whom I have always liked and respected came out and said that it was time for me to retire. He said that although I have had an illustrious career, I am trying to defend the indefensible. I am really not sure what he meant by that. Did he mean that I was defending gain of function research or did he mean that I was defending the CDC's masking guideline? As Peter Hotez said in the article above, no one is stepping up in the scientific community to defend me since they are afraid of being threatened by this extreme group that seems to be very well organized. Went to a book signing party add the home of Adrienne Arsh. The book is “I alone can fix it “ bye Phil Rucker and Carol Leonnig. The Super a list from Washington DC was there. It was a little bit uncomfortable since I was wearing a mask with the new guidance from the CDC and almost everyone else was without a mask. When they saw me with a mask , several of them put a mask on. One of the things for discussion in the book for this time frame is the extraordinary confidence that the president, Ron Klain, and especially Jeff is placing in me. When I briefed the president before his speech a couple of days ago , Jeff did not want Rochelle to brief the president even though the discussion was strictly about CDC guidelines.
PRESS: South African TV – Bhekisisa Center for Health Journalism with Mia Malan; Ken Jeong Instagram; WTOP Radio; NBC LX TV; July 30, 2021 – Global USA There is growing frustration fall apart of Jeff with the CDC and particularly with Rochelle. I love her but she does not seem to have control over organization. We were being briefed the other night about what we were going to be saying about boosters and about the effect of the delta variant. In the middle of the conversation we found out that an MMWR was already written that could possibly be in conflict with what we were discussing. (see above). Now we have a situation where a slide set that was for internal discussion within the CDC was leaked by the CDC to the Washington Post including a discussion of things that we had not vetted out with the Medical Group. Jeff was extremely concerned that we are now on the defense trying to explain or defend things in an internal document that is now public. He called a special zoom meeting with himself , me , and Rochelle to try and sort this out. It became clear during the discussion that Rochelle herself was somewhat unaware of what her own CDC people were doing. I felt very bad for her because she is clearly very competent. we will have another zoom meeting later today since Jeff tasked me to review the papers upon which the CDC conclusion that the delta variant causes more severe disease was based. I will have myself, Andrea Lerner, Cliff lane, and Dean Follmann review the papers. After review by my “team” we found that the Singapore data was very weak but that the Scotland and Canada data suggest that there is an increase in severity with the delta variant. I communicated this both to Jeff and to Rochelle. I had a very interesting conversation with the Prime Minister of Israel, Naftali Bennett, who requested a zoom call with me. Based on the diminishing efficacy of the Pfizer vaccine in Israel, the Prime Minister together with his health ministers have decided that they will give a third booster shot to individuals older than 60 years old. They are already giving a booster to people who are immunosuppressed. the Prime Minister wanted to get my opinion and ultimate support of what he is doing. with my permission he taped our discussion so that he could put it on his Instagram to show to the people of Israel. I pointed out to him that there will be some concern that he is boosting people in his own population while much of the world has not yet received their first dose. He understands that but pointed out to me that is real is a country of almost 9 million people and they have just enough doses to take care of their own people , and unlike the United states, they do not have the resources to supply the rest of the world. He asked for my cell phone number so that he might intermittently call me for advice. With the approval of the State Department I gave it to him. It seems that we have developed a very good rapport on the basis of this first meeting. It turns out that the Prime Minister is an extremely interesting man who was a combat commander (Major) in the Israeli Defense Forces in a Special Forces unit. He led many Special Forces operations. In addition, he has spent many years in the United States and has made millions of dollars as a software entrepreneur.
PRESS: Global National TV – Canada; Spectrum News TV – California; NPR – “All Things Considered” with Ailsa Chang July 31, 2021 – Global – 196,6000,000/4,200,000; USA – 34,800,000/610,000 Instagram from Israeli PM Bennett: August 1. 2021 – Global USA – 34,900,000/611,000 I got involved in an interesting situation regarding the expiration of the moratorium on evictions with the CDC in the middle of it. Apparently, the CDC has the authority to block evictions during a public health emergency. The moratorium expired and the Supreme Court ruled that they could not reinstitute it. Now Nancy Pelosi is furious because the public is blaming the Congress for not solving the problem. Pelosi is asking the White House to do it and the White House is turfing it to the CDC. The CDC does not have the authority to overrule the courts and so there's a lot of tension going on. Larry Horowitz who works with Pelosi called me to ask me to try and convince Rochelle to reinstitute the moratorium, get sued (which she will lose ), and thus give enough time to get money to the people who are being evicted to prevent their eviction. I got on the phone with Rochelle and offered to help her by giving her encouragement and support. It all worked out when Jeff Zientz worked with Ron Klain to have Rochelle write a letter to the president saying that she would love to keep the moratorium but it is legally out of her hands. In this way the good intention of the administration would be displayed , but they would not get into legal difficulty.
PRESS: ABC “This Week” with Jonathan Karl; CBS “Face the Nation” with John Dickerson August 2, 2021 – Global USA I briefed the President today in the Oval Office. It was part of the weekly briefing that we do where Rochelle and Vivek and Marcella were on the zoom screen and I was in the office with the President and the Vice President. I briefed him on the efficacy of the vaccine against the delta variant as well as on the issue of breakthrough infections and the possibility of our need for boosters. The President was his usual pleasant and calm self; however, he seemed a bit troubled about two issues: first, he is aware that everyone is waiting for the FDA to give final approval to the vaccines and that this would go a long way to getting more people vaccinated. He clearly does not want to interfere with the FDA; however, he is growing impatient with the length of time that is taking for them to come across with a full approval. Second, he is concerned about the fact that the moratorium on evictions of people from their homes has expired and the Supreme Court has voted five to four that the moratorium cannot be extended. He has the power to call together constitutional scholars and claim that they have given him enough reason to overrule the opinion of the Supreme Court and order the CDC to continue with the moratorium on evictions. He is hesitant to do that since although he believes it is the right thing to do from a humanitarian standpoint, he does not want to set a precedent for a President to use his or her Presidential authority to overrule a Supreme Court ruling. He is afraid that if we get another President similar to Trump, that a lot of mischief and bad acting could occur if such a precedent were set. And so, he has to live with the uncomfortable situation of Nancy Pelosi essentially yelling at him on the phone to do something about the eviction situation when in some respects he is powerless to do so. I feel for him and I am more appreciative close and personal of the weight of the Presidency. As it turns out, the President did get an opinion from some constitutional scholars and made the decision to ask the CDC to extend the moratorium for 30 days. As Ron Klain said in the White House , it is likely that the courts will overturn this extended moratorium pretty quickly . We shall see. The general spin is that the president did this because of extensive pressure from Nancy Pelosi and the Democratic Congress. Governor Ned Lamont of Connecticut called me today in frustration that the FDA has not yet given full BLA approval to the COVID-19 vaccines. He asked if I could do anything about it . I explained to him that that would be difficult since it would suggest that we are putting pressure on the FDA which could backfire on us. I told him that I was very much in favor of accelerating the process and that I felt that the approval would likely come within the next couple of weeks . He also asked about booster shots and I explained to him that boosters for the immunocompromised would likely come very soon and that it would probably take a couple of months before there was enough data to recommend booster shots for the elderly. Got a call today from John Bel Edwards, Governor of Louisiana. He is having the biggest surge of cases of any state in the country right now and he is asking for my support in what he will soon do and that is to put in a mask mandate for all indoor public settings as well As for everyone in the school system which will start today. He asked if I had any further suggestions. I asked if he had ordered a restricted capacity or closing of bars and restaurants and he said that although he would like to do that, he feels that the legislature would rebel against him and take away his emergency powers for public health. And so he wants to get his mask mandate through as his first priority. I agree with him. In addition before we hung up he said that he really admired me and felt badly of what I was going through with the far right attacking me. He said a very nice thing when he said: “you have bigger clowns to deal with than I do; maybe not more clowns, but certainly bigger clowns, but at least you can sleep at night with a clear conscience “. The conspiracy of the far right and the trump loyalists continues. Recently representative Mike McCall the minority On the House Foreign Affairs Committee released a report by the panel's republican staff essentially saying that the lab leak was the cause of COVID-19 and hinting the NIH's role in creating the virus. This is based on no new information or no new data. It is very clear what is going on and it needs to be called out. It is all part of “The Big Lie”. First, trump actually won the election; next, January 6th was a friendly visit to the capital book shop; next trump was right and China caused the virus; next Fauci and the NIH helped the Chinese create the virus; next, discredit Fauci and it looks like trump is telling the truth. It is plain and simple a concerted effort aimed at getting trump re-elected and exonerating him from any blame in the complete mess up of his response to COVID-19. Lindsey Graham has contracted COVID-19 period since he is vaccinated he has a mild case. I asked his staff to have him give me a call , which he did and I expressed concern for him and offered to help if I could. He was very grateful for my concern instead we would keep in touch.
PRESS: White House pressor; August 3, 2021 – Global – 198,000,000/4,200,000; USA – 35,200,000/612,000 We continue to average about 70,000 cases per day An ironic situation is going on in Florida where Governor DeSantis has a state that has the most infections per day in the country and is still insisting that mask mandates are not allowed at the local level by the schools or by anyone else. In addition, he continues to raise money by slamming me with T shirts as well as by his slogan “don't Fauci my Florida”. Besides being a total jerk, he is causing people to die in his home state. Did Governor’s call today – Chaired by Gov. Asa Hutchinson (R-AK) White House has asked me to interview candidates for the position of FDA commissioner. And so today I am interviewing Sudip Parikh whom I knew when he was the staff director for the Senate Appropriations Committee. I was impressed with his interview since he is a very smart and energetic person. I also interviewed James Hildreth who is currently president and CEO of Meharry medical school. I have known Jim for a long time and he is highly qualified. Gov. Cuomo is in serious trouble politically. A report came out today detailing 11 instances of sexual harassment. President Biden as well as Nancy Pelosi has called for his resignation . If he does not resign, he will likely be impeached. Richard Ebright (Rutgers) has proven again that he is truly an asshole. Francis Collins was on CNN this morning and misspoke saying that adults who have children at home should wear a mask at home , which is clearly not correct. However , Frances very quickly corrected his statement by putting out a tweet , apologizing , and saying that he was incorrect. Yet immediately after that doctor Richard Ebright followed this up with a very nasty tweet . See below: This evening I was asked by Erin Burnett on CNN to clarify the situation once and for all. I stated that Francis misspoke but to his great credit he immediately apologized and corrected the mistake. I e-mailed Susan Rice tonight asking her to call me, and she returned call at around 9:00 PM. I wanted to explain more fully to her the misperception about the “likelihood” that a vaccinated person would get infected. In a discussion we had yesterday where I briefed some of the economic leaders including Janet Yellin and Susan Rice, the question came up as to what it means when there is a 79% efficacy of a vaccine against the delta variant. Many people interpret this to mean that there is then a 21% chance that a vaccinated person will get infected . This is obviously incorrect since you must compare it to the unvaccinated people. Since not all the unvaccinated people get infected by any means, then the 79% protection compared to the unvaccinated people means that a very, very small proportion of vaccinated people will get infected. Susan was very grateful for the phone call and said as he has often dos when she sees me that she “loves” me. We have become good friends over the years dating back to the Obama administration, and I really like her.
PRESS: Axios interview with Eileen O’Reilly; Podcast with Creative Artists Agency – agent for many entertainment and sports figures; Podcast with CSIS – Steve Morrison; CBS Evening News with Nikki Battiste; CNN with Erin Burnett; Did a Webinar with Virginia Governor Northam; August 4, 2021 – Global USA Had 100,000 cases yesterday!! 104,000 cases today I received the call today from former Vice President Dick Cheney - This is medically confidential and not for publication in my memoir. The VP was asked to give the eulogy for former Secretary of Defense and dear friend Donald Rumsfeld. Cheney had a heart transplant several years ago and is on immunosuppressive regimen. It is likely that his immune response two the vaccine is suboptimal. He called his cardiologist , Jonathan Reiner, at GW and asked his advice about coming to Washington to give a eulogy for Rumsfeld given the current situation with the delta variant. Reiner recommended that he called me. I made it very clear to Cheney that I strongly recommended he get the third boost of the mRNA since he is highly susceptible to getting infected if he comes into contact with an infected person. We spend some time discussing the courage of his daughter Liz Cheney and sticking up against the far right Republicans who want to whitewash the January 6th insurrection. I told him that she was a chip off the old block and I really appreciated the fact that she has been sticking up for me. Cheney said he admired very much my courage and fortitude and standing up for what was right and he is proud to tell friends that he knows me and used to work closely with me. I told him that the feeling was mutual when I talk about him to my friends. Call with Eric Goosby - Eric is concerned that we are not utilizing the infrastructure of PEPFAR to solve the distribution problem of vaccines in sub saharan Africa. Eric points out that the obstruction here interestingly is Gayle Smith who is now the special director in the Department of State for global affairs. Eric points out that it is the same competition intention between USAID and other global entities of the federal government. Gayle and USAID want to be the focal point of the failing distribution of vaccines in Africa, while PEPFAR already has an extraordinarily effective infrastructure that was built for HIV. Eric is frustrated that we are not using that infrastructure. Did Zoom with Senator Dick Durbin who wanted a briefing on breakthroughs and boosters
PRESS: Katie Couric podcast; Wall Street Journal podcast with Ryan Knudson; Australian broadcasting TV “7/30” August 5, 2021 – Global USA I had a very busy day today. Jeff arranged for me to brief both the house and the Senate via zoom on the latest in the COVID situation. In addition , I joined the first gentleman Greg Emhoff in discussing with a bunch of young communicators the importance of their work in getting their young peers vaccinated. This is the second time that I have done an event with the first gentleman. In addition, I met by zoom with Kathy Russell the head uh White House personnel to debrief her on the interviews I did with FDA candidates James Hildreth and Sudip Parikh. During the debriefing when they asked me if there were any other candidates that I would recommend, I strongly recommended Zeke Emanuel. However, as usual there was a concern about the fact that he can be a bit of a loose cannon. This is unfortunate since he is a very talented guy , intellectually brilliant, and very visionary. He is also a good friend. The nonsense of the far right in trying to discredit me continues. A day does not go by without either the far right GOP congressman or senator criticizing me and even calling for my removal together with the far right media , particularly FOX, being sharply critical of me in every respect.
PRESS: ABC “Good Morning America” with George Stephanopoulos; Rickey Smiley Radio Show; Taped CNN Fareed Zakaria for this Sunday; August 6, 2021 – Global – 200,800,000/4,300,000; USA - 35,500,000/614,000 67,000 7-day average Cases continue to climb. There has been a lot of discussion about whether or not we should move quickly in instituting a program. I have been a very strong and vocal advocate to give booster shots immediately to people who are immune compromised such as those who are transplant recipients, those war on cancer chemotherapy, and those who are immunosuppressed because the border immune diseases. I have been explicit about that and have also been pushing the CDC to give us at least some preliminary data on the cohort studies that they say will inform us about the durability of protection among various groups of people. Other countries including France, Israel, and Germany, have decided to give boosts to the elderly right now. The UK has decided that they will start doing this in September. In this context, Jeff is getting very disillusioned with Rochelle and the CDC in their traditional way of not giving anyone even a slight hint of what the data shows until they are ready to announce it officially. A typical example of this has occurred today. I will be on a lot of press calls today and over the weekend and the CDC just announced that they have an MMWR that will be coming out together with a couple of papers in JAMA. I have no idea what is in these publications. This is unacceptable . Similar to what Sylvia burwell discuss with me years ago about firing Tom Frieden, Jeff is seriously thinking about either bringing in someone else to assist Rochelle or outright getting rid of her. I have argued that we should absolutely not fire her, and I have offered to speak with her about this issue. I had a long call with Rochelle tonight and explained the entire situation to her. I confirmed that I totally support her, but she really has to address the ingrained and somewhat ossified culture of the CDC. I particularly pointed out to her that she just cannot hold back information from Jeff and the White House team because she is waiting for her team to finalize data. If she has preliminary data she needs to tell us about it since we may need to talk about policy that would depend on such data. She just cannot give us an MMWR on the same day that is coming out. The last time this happened she said she could not give it to us because it was “under embargo “. I pointed out to her that this enraged Jeff since the CDC owns MMWR and as director of CDC she needs to realize that no one is trying to influence what goes into MMWR but it is important that she does not surprise Jeff or the president with something that she knows and that we do not know. I love Rochelle and she knows that. I explained to her what she needs to do to make things right with Jeff . A human explained to her the story from years ago when I saved Tom Frieden from getting fired by Sylvia Burwell because of how he messed up the ebola situation as a result of his listening to “his guys “. I believe that Rochelle gets it and will survive this very difficult time. I support her totally.
PRESS: WJXX -Jacksonville TV; Bloomberg TV interview – Madison Mills; 1 hour with USA Today Editorial Board; Zoom Call with Michael Spector for his adio-book; MSNBC peacock TV with Joshua Johnson August 7, 2021 The surge continues: Governor DeSantis is a complete disgrace. He is blocking the local authorities from mandating masks in various locations including schools. He is doing this while at the same time Florida is virtually on fire with surging cases. Approximately 20% of all the cases in the country right now are in Florida. When you add Florida with Texas you get about 40% of all the cases in the country. At the same time he together with his Greek chorus of Rand Paul and other GOP members of Congress together with all of the stooges at Fox News (Carlson, Hannity, Ingraham), continues to actively criticize me and talk virtually every day about my being wrong on everything I say and then I should be fired. This is an obviously calculated plan of disparaging me and any other scientists (but focusing heavily on me) that speak up against their crazy strategy. I am convinced even more that this is part of the total dystopia going on in certain elements of the country and it is all linked to “The Big Lie” involving the election and the denial of January 6. I really am worried more about the country then about myself since if this goes on I fear that our democracy is in dire danger. We had an important conversation today with Glenda Gray and Linda-Gail Bekker of the Republic of South Africa. The discussion centered around the fact that Glenda and Linda GAIL want to do a randomized placebo-controlled trial using the Moderna M RNA. The purpose of the study is to determine if and how well mRNA vaccine works in persons with HIV. We have a real problem with doing a randomized placebo-controlled trial and so we got on the phone with David Kessler, the people from NIAID including Cliff, John Mascola, Mary Maravich, Carl D., and others. I came up with a solution that everyone liked. That was to do a trial where each arm gets a prime in boost dose of Moderna and then one group gets randomized to placebo and the other group gets randomized to a third dose boost. This will kill two birds with one stone. It will avoid the controversial use of a placebo and at the same time tell you whether the mRNA vaccine works in persons with HIV and whether and whether or not they need a boost for optimal response. August 8, 2021 – Global USA
PRESS: CNN “GPS” with Fareed Zakaria; NBC “Meet the Press” with Chuck Todd August 9, 2021 – Global USA Cases 140,000 yesterday. It seems that my prediction of 200,000/day will come true unfortunately. We're having continual and difficult discussions concerning boosters. With my strong persuasion we have now finally arrived to the reality that we must give an additional dose to immunocompromised people as quickly as possible. The real issue that we are struggling with is when how and to whom we should give boosters among the population in general. Clearly, we want to stagger it so that we don't have rush to the gate. We're trying to get as much data as possible to validate a decision to start giving it to the elderly at approximately 8 months following their initial vaccination. I continue to struggle with having to defend the CDC against reasonable concern about the fact that they are generally behind the curve when it comes to accumulating data that would inform proper public health action. He gets back to previous conversations that we had concerning the entrenched culture at CDC who feel that they know best and they are not accountable to anyone. Under non pandemic conditions this goes un-noticed. However, in the middle of an outbreak of this proportion it is a glaring deficit.
PRESS: Black News Channel (TV); Hugh Hewitt Radio; Navajo Times Interview; BBC World News TV August 10, 2021 - Global USA The soaring of cases continue. It is really looking rather ominous in that there have been numerous reports of gatherings of completely vaccinated people in a moderate to small sized party 20 thirty 40 people where you have outbreak of infections among these individuals. It is very clear that this virus is very different in its ability to transmit compared to the alpha variant. There have been a number of discussions regarding the use of additional booster shots. I have been a strong proponent and have led the discussion in getting additional booster doses to the people who are immunosuppressed, and to get these doses to them imminently. We have had several meetings with Jeff and the team and in some cases with the FDA to try and expedite this. It becomes an issue of the clinical data in a somewhat preliminary form balanced against the need of the FDA to have firm data before they modify the EUA. The tension between Jeff and the CDC continues in that the culture does not allow the CDC to share data in real time in a situation in which you actually need data in real time to make a decision. The lack of confidence in Rochelle and the rest of the CDC is manifested by the fact that Jeff is having me as opposed to Rochelle brief the President about things that appear to be strictly epidemiological. The same holds true for briefings of the principles and the governors. I don't know what to do to help Rochelle change the culture of the CDC because this is a decades-long problem. Vivek is in total agreement with me on this issue. I met with the President today in the state dining room of the White House to discuss together with the administrator of FEMA Deanne Criswell and Assistant to the POTUS for Homeland Security Liz Sherwood-Randall among others and together with Natalie and Jeff. The topic of the discussion was how we were going to handle the obvious heavy hurricane season that is approaching in the context of major outbreaks of COVID in the gulf states that have the lowest levels of vaccination and the highest levels of infection. I presented the epidemiology data and Liz and Deanne presented the hurricane data. My impression was that the president was not particularly happy with Deanne’s presentations since she was not able to give him the answer to a lot of his questions. Nonetheless being the gentleman that he is he did not really act annoyed with her although as I get to know his body language better I could sense that he was disappointed. As indicated above David Kessler and I and most recently with the support of Jeff have been trying to push the concept of getting the US government to make a major investment in Lonza company that makes the mRNA four Moderna. We're making some progress in the implementation of the concept of the US government bankrolling Lonza to expand this capability to supply billions of doses of vaccine to the developing world. We had been working on this in collaboration with Peter Staley, James Krellenstein, and David Barr. Unfortunately, Peter in his enthusiasm to get things done quickly, orchestrated a letter signed by 175 public health advocates essentially criticizing the Biden administration for acting too slowly in getting vaccine to the developing world. They sent the letter to the president simultaneously with sending it to the Washington Post and my media friends Yasmeen Abutaleb and Dan Diamond wrote an article in the Post indicating that David Kessler and I were working with them to get the higher ups in the administration to agree with the plan but that we had not been successful. Unfortunately, this may have blown our entire plan of getting this done under the radar screen. It is likely that this could now interfere with what David and I were trying to do. Yasmeen called several times for an interview; however, I did not see any purpose in getting involved in this controversial issue and also she had already written the story. See below: Wpost: ‘Act now’ on global vaccines to stop more-dangerous variants, experts warn Biden Vivek called me tonight after resume call with Dawn O'Connell and told me that a number of scientists and public health people that were originally on the advisory committee to Biden's election group we're writing to Ron Klain urging the administration to fire Rochelle Walensky as the CDC director. I believe this is very unfair since after I have spoken to her she is really trying very hard to gain control of the agency and to change there are somewhat ossified culture.
PRESS: MSNBC “Morning Joe” with Mika Brzezinski; Did Instagram and TikTok interviews with “influencers” including Actor Edgar Ramirez, Kathleen Barnes, Jax James, Merrick Hanna Chris Olsen/Ian Paget, Wisdom Kaye August 11, 2021 David Kessler is pissed at Peter Staley. David feels betrayed that Peter mentioned his name and my name in his interview with Yasmeen. Last night I called up Courtney Rowe and had a long about the pros and cons of responding to Yasmeen who has been trying to get a comment from me regarding the article. We came to the conclusion that it would not do any good since the quote could be misinterpreted. I agree with Courtney. However we may have a problem that the article may set us back in getting jeff's support to push for billions of dollars to expand capacity to be directed 2 low and middle income countries. I will try to repair any damage that has been done to this effort. I had a good conversation with Peter this morning and I believe Peter realizes that he may had done some damage by mentioning my name and David's name in his interview with Yasmeen. It is again a delicate balance of trying to get an activist-driven push to get the right thing done and still operate within the system that alone has the capability of getting the right thing done with all of the political sensitivities involved. Email from David Barr to David Kessler: From: David Barr <davidbarr376@gmail.com> Sent: Wednesday, August 11, 2021 8:47 AM To: Kessler, David (HHS/IOS) <David.Kessler@hhs.gov>; Fauci, Anthony (NIH/NIAID) [E] <afauci@niaid.nih.gov> Subject: Follow up from the Washington Post story David - I saw your message to Peter. I think you have every reason to be annoyed at Peter's quote in the story. The story is about the sign-on letter that was developed as an outcome of a meeting sponsored by Yale School of Public Health, PrEP4All, ICAP at Columbia and AVAC, in which Peter was not involved. The letter is focused on the proposed plan to scale up mRNA vaccine manufacturing, a plan that has been public for many months now. The letter has nothing to do with the discussions we've been having with you and Tony and there was no reason whatsoever for Peter to have mentioned those discussions to the reporter. I don't see the quote as revealing any detailed information, but I do see how just saying publicly that we've been talking could undermine your negotiations. I've let Peter know that I'm not happy about this. I feel that you've worked with us in good faith and are making progress as evidenced by our last call. I hope we can keep these discussions going forward. Our goal is to ensure that vaccines are available to the world as quickly as possible. I know you share our concerns and understand the urgent need for this. I do not envy your current role in all this, as it must be both exhausting and frustrating. I remain confused as to why the President and the global public health establishment do not seem to truly share our concerns. Rather than lengthy negotiations with Moderna, why hasn't Biden hauled them into the Oval Office and said 'this is what is going to happen'? Instead of a piecemeal structure based on donations, why hasn't the WHO called for wartime footing to solve this problem? Meanwhile, the caseload grows and the potential for a new variant grows with it. Again, thanks for your efforts to date and I very much hope we can continue our discussions. David POTUS called me up today. Jeff is giving the president a briefing about a number of things and he wanted me to specifically brief him about the importance of giving a third dose of vaccine to immune compromised people. Jeff felt that it was not worth my going all the way down to the White House again since I was there yesterday and so he arranged in the middle of the meeting that he was having with the president to have the president call me on my cell phone and have me explained to him the rationale of the third dose , namely a booster, to immune compromised people since they never had an adequate immune response to begin with. The confusion that the president might have is to distinguish the boost for the immune compromised versus a boost for those who overtime have an attenuation of their response even though they are immunologically normal. It was for this reason that Jeff wanted me to do the explaining. I believe that the president understood what I was saying. Just to note that almost without exception every week I brief the Principals together with Jeff, Natalie, and Rochelle. the principles consist of cabinet secretaries as well as other high ranking White House officials. I don't report on it every week but it essentially occurs every week. Today I briefed them on various aspects of the delta variant. I did a favor for the State Department today by answering a series of Qs and As about the mRNA vaccines
PRESS: CNN International with Christiane Amanpour; ABC World News Tonight and ABC Evening News; podcast – “America Dissected” with Dr. Abdul El-Sayed Borowitz satire report in the New Yorker: New Yorker: Fauci Says It Is Safe to Watch YouTube Now That Rand Paul Has Been Suspended August 12, 2021 – Global USA Now averaging (7 day) >100,000 cases per day Hospitaliations in children increasing per 100,000 population Had a good call with Hans Kluge, WHO Regional Director of Europe. Good discussion about mutual interests concerning COVID-19 and issues such as vaccine hesitancy. Had a very important Zoom with Chris Whitty and Patrick Valance see above) from the UK. Jeff has suggested that I call up Chris and Patrick and ask them what the strategy is in the UK regarding booster shots. To my surprise, I found out that they have not yet implemented booster shots for the immune compromised. They plan to do that in September. However, the bigger surprise was that although they are planning to give booster shots to the elderly starting with those who are 70 years old and older and then moving to the 60 years old and older, they will not boost anyone less than 50 years old . This means that they have no intention of boosting the general population who are not immune suppressed. Of note, this is consistent with their strategy that they care less about transmission of virus among individuals than they do about keeping people out of the hospital . That's why they feel that although the general population might have a decrease in effectiveness of the vaccines leading to infection and transmission, they are not concerned since the protection against severe disease is holding strong. This is consistent with their strategy of not wearing a mask and sending the children back to school without masks. In other words, they feel that we will have to live with transmission of the virus so long as we protect people from getting severe enough disease to be hospitalized. Jeff and president Biden were concerned that we would be behind other countries in protecting our citizens when in fact we are ahead of them, certainly ahead of the UK.
PRESS: White House Press Conference; ABC “Good Morning America” with Amy Robach; NBC “Today” with Craig Melvin; CBS “This Morning” with Vladmir Duthiers; ABC “World News Tonight” with David Muir; NBC “Nightly News” with Lester Holt; PBS “NewsHour” with William Brangham; KMBC (ABC) TV – Kansas City, MO with Mike Mahoney; KDFW TV (FOX) Dallas-Fort Worth with Steven Dial; WPLG TV (ABC) Miami with Ben Kennedy; Univision TV with Lourdes del Rio; Telemundo National TV with Jose Diaz-Balart; Univision Atlanta TV with Rafael Olavarria; MSNBC “The Reid Out” with Joy Reid; CNN AC/360 with Anderson Cooper; August 13, 2021 Cases continue to surge We had multiple zoom calls and conversations today concerning the proper approach to his booster vaccinations. In addition, based on this submission to the FDA on data in diminished response in the immune compromised, the ACIP recommended that people who are immune compromised including transplant patients, cancer patients on chemotherapy, any patients on severe immunosuppressive therapy, people with advanced HIV disease, and people with primary immune deficiencies receive a booster dose. We also had considerable conversations about the best way to roll out the recommendations to boost the entire population in an orderly fashion starting likely sometime in mid to late September. The COVID team agrees that this is the way to go; however, it must be done within the context of the FDA regulatory framework. I am pushing my people who are doing clinical trials on booster doses to get data as quickly as possible to the FDA and the CDC so that they can analyze it for the purpose of making policy. Jeff is very sensitive to the fact that he does not want us to look like we have come in too late to the boosting game. This is actually not the case since as mentioned above , if anything, the UK is actually behind us. There will certainly be international concern by the fact that we in the USA are giving boosts to otherwise healthy people while the rest of the world is lacking even their first boost . However, the argument that I am giving is that the USA is donating more doses and money two international vaccines for low and middle income countries then the entire rest of the world combined . At this point we have contracted for 500 million doses to be distributed in the following cadence: 200 million doses by the end of 2021 and 300 million doses before the first half of 2022 ends . In addition, we have already given away 110 million doses to 60 countries. This includes 80 million of our own doses. In addition, the USA has either given or pledged $4 billion to COVax. There is an interesting concept that is heavily debated among us. Although we all agree that we need to do as described above, we are not fully appreciative of what the decrease in incidents of infection actually means if the current rate of hospitalization and death appears to remain stable. Are we vaccinating people with a boost because we feel that ultimately those increases in infection will lead to increases in hospitalization and deaths, or are we concerned that even if vaccinated people get infected and spread the infection that we are trying to suppress transmission in addition to serious disease. Stay tuned for how this all rolls out.
PRESS: WTOP with JJ Green; Twitter responses with WH Digital team; CBS Radio Los Angeles; CBS Radio NYC; White House twitter with digital team; August 14, 2021 – Global - USA – 36,300,000/618,600 140,000 cases in the USA today. We had continued discussions today with Jeff and David Kessler as to how we are going to deal with the activists (Peter Staley et al) in our attempts to cooperate with them in getting doses to the developing world. We need to get them to understand that we are with them and trying to expand the number of doses we give ; However, they need to understand that we have already given more than the entire world combined. So they really need to recognize that we've done a lot at the same time that they work with us to do even more rather than attacking us for not doing enough. Moderna has not acted in good faith. They have actually put in their patent application and have explicitly said that Barney Graham, John Mascola, and Kizzy Corbett are not inventors of the M RNA 1273 patent. This is absolutely outrageous and I have had conversations with Francis Collins, Larry Tabak, and earlier this evening with Jeff indicating that we have to get a heavy hitting law firm to argue our case. I suggested as did Jeff that we employ the firm of Williams/Connelly to represent us. We are planning to roll out next week the program of giving a booster shot to everyone starting with those in long term care facilities and the elderly, but ultimately including everyone related to their anniversary date of their last shot. Clearly, we will get both praise and criticism for this. August 15, 2021 (Sunday) Heat wave throughout the country. I had a very intensive day with the medical team trying to fashion to coherent message to justify the announcement that we plan to make this week that we will be giving a booster shot to everyone who wants one regardless of age or underlying condition. This has been a very difficult situation since the data for diminution of efficacy regarding hospitalization and death are unclear because of the confounding variables of some studies dominated by delta , some studies dominated by alpha , and some studies with a combination of both. In addition, when we talk about hospitalizations , it is unclear from several of the studies whether those who were hospitalized were almost exclusively the elderly and /or people with underlying conditions. Jeff is bent on having a coherent sharp message about this when in fact that is very difficult to do given the paucity of data. If we are too precise we will be called out because we cannot back it with data. If we are general, Jeff feels that the public will be confused. I am trying to convince him that it is OK to say that we do not know nor do we have all of the data to make a decision and sometimes you have to make a clinical or public health decision just based on clinical judgment. In this case the judgment is that delta is a very bad virus and even though we don't have firm data yet that younger people are getting seriously ill, we don't want to be late to the game. I used the metaphor of Wayne Gretzky who always said it is important to skate where the puck will be rather than where the puck is. We do not wait until younger people start requiring hospitalizations before we decide that we want to give them a boost. My job in all of this is to give the immunological basis for providing a boost. Bottom line is that the controversy will be not that we need to give a boost, but do we really need to give it to everyone instead of just to the elderly and those who have underlying conditions. One of the most important aspects about all of this is that when you boost someone with a third dose at about six months or so after the original prime boost the level of antibody goes dramatically high and I believe that this would provide durable protection against delta and any other variants that come along. My concern is that the Medical Group will not articulate this concept well enough and I will have to be out there trying to pick up the pieces as is usually the case. Summary of what has been going on hat I might not have had he time to document. I am more and more astounded by the fact that our society is so dystopic in that untruth and out and out lies seemed to win the day . In addition, I am concerned that even good scientists playing a game of using their longstanding concern with gain of function to call attention to this by what is going on regarding the argument about the origin of the virus. There is no question in my mind based on so many factors including history, molecular makeup with the virus, among others that this virus naturally emerged from an animal reservoir. Yet , people like David Relman and others are not realizing that by their focusing on the gain of function which they believe is what we funded at Wuhan could possibly be the cause of SARS Co V2 when in fact they know that this is molecularly impossible. I have evolved into something that would have been unimaginable to me just a few years ago. There are some positive aspects to it ; However, for the most part I feel like it is no longer me. I am now probably one of the most recognizable faces in the world. Millions of people idolize me and the far right radical group absolutely hate me. I cannot go out in public to a restaurant or even walk through a crowd since someone immediately recognizes me and wants to take a picture or congratulate me or just say that they said hi to me. This is driving my security group crazy as they are afraid fair among these legions of admirers will be someone who wants to kill me. All of this together with the stress associated with the fact that the president and others in the administration rely heavily on me four major decisions and I have very little staff relatively speaking who could help me.
PRESS: CBS “Face the Nation” with Nancy Cordes AUGUST 16, 2021 Pediatric hospitalizations surging: Someone leaked our plan for boosters. The press are texting me all evening. I am not answering.
PRESS: August 17, 2021 There is a lot going on and a lot of moving parts. We have been working very hard on trying to get a plan and a program out to deliver third boost shots to people who have received the original two dose vaccine regimen for M RNA. This is a complicated issue because it appears that the vaccines in the United states as well as globally particularly in places like Israel and England among others are still holding strong and preventing hospitalization and deaths but there is a dramatic diminution with the delta variant in protection against infection and symptomatic disease. There is an inkling that we are starting to see increase in hospitalizations particularly in Israel in vaccinated people. Jeff together with the White House team has been working on a plan to be implemented starting September the 20th to get a third shot to everyone in a cadence beginning with those who originally had received the vaccine first. These people are fundamentally health care workers, the elderly, and people in long term care facilities and nursing homes. The problem is the data that definitively show that we are seeing an increase in hospitalizations with delta are not there yet. However , as I and others know from experience , when you are dealing with COVID-19 , particularly the delta variant, you may be behind the curve by a few weeks at the time you realize you were behind the curve. I use the analogy of skating to where the puck will be not where it is now . In this regard, there will be criticisms that we acted too soon particularly since so many people around the world have not yet received any vaccine. This is countered by the fact that the United states is doing more than the rest of the world combined to get vaccine to lower middle income countries. There is an additional complicating issue here in that Jeff is insisting that when we announced this, it looks like it is a done deal and we are definitely going to do this . However, it really does depend on or authorization from the FDA together with recommendation from the CDC via advice from the ACIP. If we come out and definitively say we're going to do it prior to the FDA approval , it looks like we have politically influencing the FDA. I am warning Jeff about this because even though he is trying to do the right thing , we have to be careful that we don't look like we are tipping the scales and overriding the FDA. Janet Woodcock is very concerned about this and I do not blame her. Another complicating issue is that last night someone leaked our plan to the press and although we are going to make the announcement tomorrow the press is running wild with speculations and partial data right now. I have not answered any press calls because I do not want to get involved invalidating the breaking of a very strict code of silence. Shame on the person or persons who leaked this period now we have to explain things without necessarily giving everybody all the necessary information. In addition , we have faced with the usual problem of the CDC not giving us all the information that we need and even continuing to refer two embargoed MMWR papers to come out. We absolutely need to see those data if we are going to defend our policy. Email that I sent to Ian Sams: From: Fauci, Anthony (NIH/NIAID) [E] <afauci@niaid.nih.gov> Sent: Tuesday, August 17, 2021 2:02 PM To: Sams, Ian (HHS/ASPA) <Ian.Sams@hhs.gov>; Kessler, David (HHS/IOS) <David.Kessler@hhs.gov>; Murthy, Vivek (HHS/OASH) <Vivek.Murthy@hhs.gov>; Collins, Francis (NIH/OD) [E] <collinsf@od.nih.gov>; Walensky, Rochelle (CDC/OD) <aux7@cdc.gov>; Levine, Rachel (HHS/OASH) <Rachel.Levine@hhs.gov>; Nunez-Smith, Marcella (OS/ASPR/IO) (CTR) <Marcella.NunezSmith@hhs.gov> Cc: Phillips, Alexandria (HHS/OASH) <Alexandria.Phillips@hhs.gov>; Perry, Sherice (OS/IEA) <Sherice.Perry@hhs.gov> Subject: RE: Latest statement + Tough QA Thanks, Ian. The following that is in the statement is a very important part of the statement. Please make sure that it does not disappear. “…once FDA conducts an independent evaluation and determination of the safety and effectiveness of a third dose of the Pfizer and Moderna mRNA vaccines and CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) issues formal recommendations.” Best, Tony Anthony S. Fauci, MD Director National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Building 31, Room 7A-03 31 Center Drive, MSC 2520 National Institutes of Health Bethesda, MD 20892-2520 Phone: (301) 496-2263 FAX: (301) 496-4409 E-mail: afauci@niaid.nih.gov I called Janet Woodcock to encourage her to stick by her guns and do the FDA work quickly but by the books. She is even concerned that some FDA whistleblower will tell the press that FDA is being “pressured”. Despite the fact that the leak has made things very complicated , we are putting the finishing touches on our plan for the rollout of the booster statement tomorrow. After that I will brief the president. This should be interesting since he cannot be in a good mood given the total disaster that has gone on with the withdrawal from Afghanistan and the complete takeover by the Taliban. I had an incredible and stressful evening tonight on the phone multiple times with Jeff and Rochelle and then later with John Mascola. Poor Rochelle! She had been telling all along to Jeff that the acip would go along with what we are doing. Jeff wrote a speech for the president that definitively said what we are doing. Now that the leak has occurred the acip is furious that we have already decided what we want to do without even consulting them. Jeff is being very rigid in getting a very clear crisp message of what the plan is and when Rochelle heard that Natalie had asked her to put together a schedule of how to roll out the plan, she panicked since this would actually pushed the acip over the line that they are being treated as a rubber stamp. I called up Jeff and explained to him that we really need to pull back on the schedule issue . After much discussion in which he got very agitated , but maintained his friendship and respect for me we decided to call up Rochelle and Vivek and have a zoom conversation. He was furious with her because he said that she kept on telling him that she had the acip in total alignment with what we're doing and now all of a sudden the acip is a problem. I believe that her job is in danger. I spent a lot of time on the phone trying to get Jeff to appreciate that we have got to stay within the process of how recommendations are made and that we can do that at the same time ultimately doing what we feel is right. I finally got him to listen to me and I had him change some wording in the president's speech for tomorrow that would add a degree of flexibility to the fact that we will ultimately get done what we want to do but that we would tip our hat to the recommendations of the acip. After it was all over and at 10:15 PM Jeff called me up again to see what my thoughts were. He had changed the POTUS comments to include the caveat that the details are dependent on FDA approval and recommendations from the CDC’s advisors. He was considerably calmed down and I went step by step with him and told him that we likely will be able to pull this off and get it right without having the rest of the world think we were railroading the acip which really was not what we wanted to do. He seemed OK with that. At the end of the day, after the BLA, people and physicians will boost whoever they want to boos whenever they want to.
PRESS: PBS South Florida TV; National Association of Black Journalists – Interview of me and Cameron Webb by Dr. Ian Smith (Physician/journalist/author) August 18, 2021 – Global - 208,500,000/4,400,000; USA – 37,100,000/621,300 Yesterday 180,000 cases. 7 day daily average >100,000 Had a very eventful and stressful day today; however things worked out well with the rollout of the booster plan at the White House press conference. Following that I briefed the president and VP in the Oval Office together with Vivek, Jeff, Rochelle, Berchara, and Marcella, and Natalie. Only Vivek and I in person. The president and vice president asked good questions , particularly with regard to the president's concern that this is contingent upon FDA and acip recommendations . He picked up right away on the concern that Jeff had that we needed to do this and make sure that we don't have a stumbling block with the FDA and acip. The one issue that could arise is that the FDA may feel that the risk benefit ratio of boosting young kids 18 years old and there abouts may not be favorable in the context of the risk of myocarditis balanced against the risk of their winding up in the hospital as a result of COVID. The president is having a bad few days given what is going on in Afghanistan with the Taliban having taken over the country in just a couple of days following withdrawal of USA troops. As expected the response to the rollout of the booster plan was very mixed, and quite understandably. The CDC messaging all along has been dysfunctional . I do not think that this is the fault of Rochelle, but just the function of the culture at CDC where they hang on to data without letting anybody know about it until it's ready to be published. We had another instance where Rochelle was very reticent to show any of the medical team what was in the upcoming MMWRs that actually impact greatly the booster roll out because in typical fashion it was “embargoed “. One cannot imagine how ridiculous this is that a public health agency is acting like an academic department in a Medical Center where the most important thing is publishing data as opposed to guiding public health decisions. I take this opportunity now to talk about it , but this has been a chronic problem literally for the decades that I have been the NEWS CLIPPING — WASHINGTON POST — CONDENSED (1 SOURCE PAGE) “director of NIAID. Of note, Yasmeen Abutaleb wrote an article this morning in the Washington Post in which she described this exact problem. (see below). Getting back do the concept of boosters, it is very…” Fears over rising illness and death Washington Post: from the delta variant fuel Biden administration push for boosters Health officials expected to announce recommendation Wednesday that Americans get extra shots By Tyler Pager, Laurie McGinley, Dan Diamond and Lena H. Sun August 19, 2021 – Global USA Cases recently >200,000/day weekly average >100,000 I just had a good conversation, my first conversation with New York State Lieutenant governor Kathy Hochul. Starting on Monday August 23rd she will be the governor of New York State replacing Andrew Cuomo who resigned affective August 23rd related to the sexual harassment scandal in which he was involved. The conversation with Kathy was very positive and she is very interested in working very closely with me and getting advice from me regarding how New York State should handle the explosive outbreak of the delta variant. Much press (see below) regarding the announcement yesterday on booster shots. I received an email late in the evening from Elizabeth Alexander the communications director for the first lady Jill Biden. She wanted me to edit an opinion piece that the first lady was writing for Time magazine . I spent about an hour late at night doing it for her.sorry one second
PRESS: Another hour long TikTok/Instagram session with young “influencers” who amazingly have millions of followers; did 6 Regional TV hits at request of the White House: WSVN Miami with Lynn Martinez; WTVT Tampa with Craig Patrick; WTMJ Milwaukee with Charles benson; DBI Radio with Rene Miller; Univision (National) with Janet Rodriguez; Telemundo (National) Lourdes….; MSNBC with Andrea Mitchell; CNBC “Closing Bell” with Sara Eisen and Wilfred Frost; CNN with Jake Tapper; August 20, 2021 Cases still increasing: I had a conversation today with the Minister of Health of Gabon – Dr. Guy Patrick Obiang Ndong. The purpose of the meeting was for me to give him an idea of how we handle COVID in the United states and to answer some of his questions particularly around the area of misinformation and disinformation that has led to vaccine hesitancy which as it turns out is a major problem in southern Africa including his own country. We had a good conversation moderated by Ms. Anne Soy, a journalist from BBC. The MOH did not mention it but I'm sure there is this feeling of concern that we are planning to give out third shot boosts at the same time that Africa has very very little vaccine. I have explained on several of the TV shows and imprint that the USA has already given more doses to LMICs then the entire rest of the world combined (see above). In addition, we plan to give hundreds of millions more and they are also working with Peter Staley and the activists to provide major increases of doses to the rest of the world (see below ). There is still ongoing controversy among some people regarding whether the idea about giving a boost was justified by the data. I had a good conversation with Paul Offit who fields that we may have jumped the gun. Vincent Racaniello has written in his blog that he does not think that the boosters are justified. They are all waiting to see data regarding an increase in hospitalization as a result of delta and waning immunity. I still believe given the Israel data that boosters in their country are already showing a significant decreases in the number of breakthrough infections that we did the right thing in making our decision. In addition, those who object seemed to forget about the fact that short of hospitalizations a lot of people get seriously ill with symptoms and signs of long COVID that can be very troublesome. The boosters are safe and to put it in plain terms it can help, and it certainly cannot hurt. August 21, 2021 184,000 cases today! August 22, 2021 (Sunday) – (no shows for me today – predominantly Vivek Murthy) Had a zoom call today with Jeff and the medical team planning how we can roll out the booster situation putting all the pieces together with the FDA, the CDC, and the acip. We also heard that FISA will get it's BLA on Monday August 23rd. One of the important parts of the discussion was my relating data that we have received from the Minister of Health of Israel. The data clearly show that hospitalizations for people with two doses of vaccine are going up significantly particularly among the elderly and those with underlying conditions . In addition, they are showing that the efficacy of two doses against infection and symptomatic disease has dramatically diminished, and when you give the third dose boost, this turns it around dramatically and diminishes the breakthrough infections. These data are well ahead of the somewhat disjointed data from the CDC. However what it does do is_that we are correct in asking for boosters essentially for everyone. In addition, I am going to pursue with calls to Peter Staley and others (Krellenstein and Barr) as well as a follow up call with Jeff , David Kessler, and me to plan a more coherent strategy about getting doses led by the United states to the rest of the world. The plan to do this would be to increase dramatically the production capacity of the companies particularly moderna even if we have to deal with Lonza directly since Lonza is a major multilocation company that is producing the vaccine for Moderna. Stay tuned. In a follow up conversation with Jeff and David Kessler, Jeff was amenable to pursuing the plan of Peter and the activist group ; however, he wanted to make sure that we got the situation with the Moderna booster straight before we started to go to war with Moderna to get them to cooperate with us on the Lonza deal. I believe that Jeff is serious about this and we may in fact go that route once we get the approvals to use moderna as part of the booster plan. In this regard, Tom Frieden call me up tonight urging me to push ahead with the “nuclear option “a forcing moderna to cooperate in expanding capacity for the developing world. Tom feels that moderna or a bunch of used car salesman and he does not trust them at all. He has stated , which is partially true, that they would be nothing without the NIH and the federal government. In this regard, Beth Cameron from NSC wanted me to look over a summit plan for addressing the global issue of COVID. I wrote back to her and emphasized that I feel strongly that the United states should take a PEPFAR-type approach in assuming any leadership role in getting doses to low and middle income countries. The Israeli data are emerging as extremely important since it is clear , as they are about a month and a half ahead of us and everything, that the vaccine efficacy is diminishing significantly overtime against infection and symptomatic disease. However, unlike the situation here in the USA, the Israelis are starting to see a diminution in protection against hospitalization and death. This is exactly what we have predicted in our decision to move ahead with the booster program. Furthermore, the Israelis are starting to see a very positive effect following giving boosters to over 1,000,000 people in the sense that the number of infections have dramatically diminished in association with the administration of the boosters. August 23, 2021 – Global USA BLA granted for Pfizer by the FDA!! I just did a site visit to the Department of State facility that does the screening for diplomatic pouches and mail. This is the facility that has been screening my mail ever since I had the anthrax scare with the power in one of my letters literally one year ago four days from now. Brett Rowland arrange for me to go there to thank the people in the facility and to encourage them in their work. They were very grateful but I took the time to visit them and there was the usual selfies galore. Another important issue today was that we were told by Larry Tabak at the state department wanted us to remove any names of people in Afghanistan that we are interacting with through grants or contracts from our public facing databases and websites. The reason for this is that we are concerned that the Taliban will use the websites to identify people in Afghanistan with connections to the United states and would then assassinate them. It is very clear that things are not going well following the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Afghanistan. The Taliban has easily taken over the country and now we are having trouble getting Americans as well as Afghanistan allies such as interpreters out of Kabul safely. It's a very bad time for the Biden administration since they are being severely criticized for not having the right intelligence capability to indicate to them that the Taliban would take over so quickly without allowing time for us to withdraw our own personnel in an orderly fashion. What we did was withdraw the military first thinking that we would have ample time to withdraw diplomats and other personnel safely . Obviously this is not the case and it is still a very tenuous situation in Afghanistan.
PRESS: Podcast 70 Over 70; NPR “All Things Considered” with Mary Louise Kelly; Podcast “A Starting Point” with Mark Kassen and Chris Evans; PBS ”NewsHour” with Judy Woodruff; MSNBC “Peacock” with Mehdi Hasan; August 24, 2021 – Global USA Cases, hospitalizations and deaths (to a lesser extent) continue to soar. More conspiracy theory like letters keep coming in from congressmen and senators trying to link us to the origin of COVID-19. This is an amazing and unbelievable waste of our time and has no bearing whatsoever on what we have actually done with that minor, minor $125,000 grant to the Wuhan institute of virology. It is totally mind boggling how they are distorting the truth to try and distract from the reality of what actually had happened during the Trump administration where he lied and underplayed the outbreak. Strange but not surprising thing happened as a result of several of the shows that I was on over the last 24 hours. On several of the TV shows I was talking mostly about the favorable aspect of the final approval of the BLA for Pfizer. However, in one of the conversations someone asked when I thought we were to get back to normal. I gave the usual caveats but then went on to say if we get as many people vaccinated as we possibly can as quickly as we possibly can we could diminish the number of cases and if we get through the winter which will be complicated by influenza and other respiratory infections, then I believe we could get back to some form of real normality by the spring of 2022. Much to my surprise I got a call this morning from Jeff clearly upset because the news media had jumped on that and said that Biden has been saying we're going to get out of this soon and Fauci who knows what's going on is saying it's going to be into next year. I am getting a little bit concerned, even though I understand Jeff's concern about the distortion of a message for a political purpose, that we may be tailoring a message that is not totally aligned with the truth. In fact, I believe we would be very lucky if we're back to normal by the spring of 2022. I told Jeff that from now on when asked to predict I will just say we don't know. This might actually not go over very well with the press anyway, but that is what I will say. Of note shortly after my call with Jeff, Courtney Rowe called me up in a much more conciliatory manner saying she understands how these things get taken out of context and said that she heard it a lot more the way I meant it; however, we really need to be careful that people would be distorting our message. I agree with her.
PRESS: CBS “This Morning” with Gayle King; NBC “Today”; MSNBC “Morning Joe”; Telemundo TV Hoy Dia with Adamari Lopez; August 25, 2021 – Global USA Cases continue > 120,000/day Had an extremely interesting Zoom meeting yesterday with the Israeli Minister of Health and several Israeli scientists. The Israelis have always been about a month or so ahead of the USA temporarily with regard to the dynamics of the outbreak, the percentage of population vaccinated, and their recent decision to provide booster shots as third doses first to their elderly and then to progressively younger people. On the zoom call that Danny Douek and Bob Seder helped organize since Danny spent a year sabbatical in Israel, it became clear that's what we suspected was actually true. On the call for the Israelis were: Nachman Ash, Minister of Health of Israel; Sharon Alroy-Preis – Director of Public Health Services for Israel; Ran Achitov – Senior Advisor to the Israel Prime Minister Naftali Bennett; Ron Milo – Weizmann Institute; Boaz Lev. The Israelis were seeing a gradual waning of protection of the Pfizer vaccine over a few months to the point of protection against infection and mild disease was dramatically diminished after several months. Importantly, they found that the protection against severe disease leading to hospitalization also significantly decreased. This latter point is extremely important because the data from the USA cohorts was suggesting that But did not definitively show it. In addition, they gave booster shots to about 1.6 million people and have shown that the booster shots dramatically reconstitute the protection against infection. clinical disease and hospitalization. Furthermore, they found a decrease in the Ro strongly suggesting that the booster also diminished transmission. These findings completely validate I would decision to begin giving boosters here in the United States. I briefed Jeff on this last night and we will arrange an additional call with the Israelis including John Mascola, David Kessler, and others involved in our program.
PRESS: The Times of Israel: Health Ministry officials said to update Fauci on COVID booster shot campaign Today, 9:02 pm • US top infectious disease expert Dr. Anthony Fauci testifies before the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee, on Capitol Hill in Washington, on July 20, 2021. (J. Scott Applewhite, Pool/AP) The Kan public broadcaster reports that top Health Ministry officials, including director-general Nachman Ash, held a virtual meeting with Dr. Anthony Fauci to discuss Israel’s COVID-19 vaccine booster shot campaign. The report says that the Israeli officials updated Fauci, who is director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and US President Joe Biden’s chief medical advisor, on figures showing that the third vaccine dose provides increased protection against infection and serious morbidity. The US is planning to begin administering booster shots next month. August 26, 2021 - Global – 213,400,000/4,460,000; USA – 38,300,000/631,400 Cases still soaring The people in the White House medical team are all excited now about the Israeli data, and they want me to arrange for resume between members of our White House team and our Israeli colleagues. I would be happy to do this since I want them to appreciate the extraordinary data that the Israelis have. A science in the shadows
PRESS: Washington Post: Controls on ‘gain of function’ experiments with supercharged pathogens have been undercut despite concerns about lab leaks By David Willman and Madison Muller August 27, 2021 – Global – 214,500,000/4,470,000; USA – 38,500,000/632,800 Just as a follow up over the last days to weeks - I continue to get attacked viciously by the far right social media including FOX News. they are still dancing around the inappropriate conflating of gain of function research (See Willmann article above) and the origin of the virus. I am starting to get so annoyed by this that for the first time ever I'm seriously discussing with Christine the timeline not my stepping down from this ridiculously thankless situation that I'm in . I say that still knowing that it is very unlikely that I will do that. POTUS slight mis-speak – Interesting situation arose today. We were in our pre brief for the White House presser that would take place in 1/2 an hour. In the middle of the pre brief , president Biden called me up on my cell phone. He said he was in with the Prime Minister of Israel and the Prime Minister was telling him that Israel will be giving their booster shot at five months. The president wanted to know what we were doing about that and were we following the lead of Israel. I told him that we were sticking with eight months but since the ultimate decision will be with the acip that they would likely give us the possibility of a range from six to nine months and so depending on the data, we would have the option of giving it earlier . However, for now we were sticking with eight months beginning on September the 20th. Very shortly after I said that the president got up and said that we might start boosting earlier perhaps at five months because the Israelis are doing that and he spoke to me about it. As one might imagine this created a flurry among the press and White House comms . The good news is that everybody in White House comms knew exactly what I said to the President and so it was just one of those things that the President will say what the president will say (see below). And has been wanting to get more closely involved in the data flow and information flow . In this regard, he has asked me to see if I could get him more involved in the various meetings that we have among the White House medical team . I have arranged that and we will have him join the weekly meeting that Vivek organizers among the White House docs. In addition I have arranged for him to visit NIH and sit down for a roundtable chat mostly but the people from the VRC. We did that today and it was interesting as usual since Eric is a very smart guy.
PRESS: TV and Radio for local stations: Black Information Network (Radio); Rolling Out (TV); The Root (Radio); Instagram Live with Geoff Edgers (Washington Post); White House plans to clarify Biden boosters statement Caitlin Owens (Axios) August 28, 2021 (Saturday) – Zoom meetings with Jeff - There is concern about sticking with the eight month projection for the beginning of boosting. Jeff is adamant not to waver on the 8 month projection even though it is clear from the data in Israel as well as from the general knowledge that in Israel there is waning of protection as early as five months. I will be on all the Sunday shows tomorrow and I will have to walk a tightrope to stick with eight months on the one hand and leave the flexibility for earlier than eight months on the other. The intelligence community report on the origins came out and in some respects it was good news in that they felt fairly confident that it was not a bioweapon nor that it was bioengineered. They still left open the possibility that it could be a lab leak ; However, more elements of the intelligence community felt that it was a natural occurrence compared to the single component (FBI) who seemed to feel strongly that it was a lab leak , although this is based on no data at all. The reaction to the report was rather typical with Bob Garry saying that he was pleased that it ruled out bio engineering and David Relman making the incredible statement in a Nature news article that he would like to see all of the records of the NIH in their dealing with Chinese scientists. Truly amazing! There is no doubt that he has an agenda here and that is unfortunate. August 29, 2021 (Sunday) – Cases continue to surge with increases in hospitalizations as well as deaths. The cases have been between 100,000 and 150,000 for several days in a row now. Thus far the piece by David Willman has not received much attention. It has only appeared online and I expected it to be on the front page of the Sunday Washington Post and in fact it was not there it is possible that the situation in Afghanistan as well as the horror of the upcoming hurricane Ida has pushed this out of the news. I will have to navigate all of the difficult questions today since the White House is putting me out on all the Sunday shows. The boosts that the Israelis are giving or having a profoundly positive effect on deminishing the number of cases that are severe . See below: Israel: Two weeks after the third dose campaign, and for the past two weeks, there is a decrease in the fraction of cases who become seriously ill https://bit.ly/3gKS7fY
PRESS: CNN “State of the Union” with Jake Tapper; ABC “This Week” with Martha Raddatz; NBC “Meet the Press” with Chuck Todd; August 30, 2021 >150,000 cases today Did podcast with American Muslim Health Professionals Jeff continues to be frustrated with Rochelle. she does not seem to have the control over her agency that Jeff would like to have her execute. He is frustrated that she doesn't tell anybody what's coming out in MMWR as if it were a private journal as opposed to what it really is - the journal of the CDC. In addition, Jeff is very concerned that she is out of touch with what goes on in the acip and in other various components that interact with the CDC. The other night I had to talk him down from feeling like he had to let her go. I continue to have faith in her and that she is a very good person but she is dealing with a rigid and secretive organization that has been that way decades before she arrived.
PRESS: Sinclair TV; TikTok with influencers including Grammy Award-winner (4X) Jason Isbell; August 31, 2021 - Global -216,900,000/4,500,000; USA – 39,100,000/637,400 Trouble at the FDA. Today it was announced that Marion Gruber and Phil Krause will leave CBER at the FDA. The reason being given is that they are upset that decisions have been made by acip and by the White House that should have been made first at the level of the FDA. This has been superimposed upon the fact that the administration is having a hard time making a decision about who the next FDA commissioner will be. There is pushback from some senators particularly Joe Manchin (D-WV) against Janet Woodcock even though she should be the top candidate. The loss of Marion and Phil is a big blow to the FDA. More drama with the FDA CDC relationship. Another late night call from Larry Horowitz telling me that the CDC with Rochelle want the ACIP to discuss publicly data that might confuse the issue since the FDA has confidential data that might change the direction of the discussion. Somehow or other the CDC does not fully appreciate that traditionally their ACIP working group was allowed to discuss in private data related to a particular study, but they would not publicly discuss it until the FDA weighed in on it. As it currently is rolling out, Rochelle seems somehow influenced perhaps by Amanda Fine who is a CDC employee but who is the executive secretary of the ACIP. They want to publicly discuss data before the FDA weighs in with data that they have that is confidential. Bottom line is that if the ACIP publicly discusses incomplete data, when the FDA weighs in with the confidential data it would cause a lot of confusion. This is driving Jeff crazy and again he is on the verge of firing Rochelle. Again, Jeff is asking me to help solve the problem by speaking to Rochelle and explaining to her why it is so important to do things in the traditional format of giving the FDA the chance to make decisions about data before the ACIP ways in with recommendations concerning those data to the CDC. I called up Peter Marks last night and Peter feels that the CDC and the ACIP are breaking tradition here and Peter feels strongly that it is OK for the working groups acip to discuss data so long as they do not do so publicly before the FDA opines from a regulatory standpoint.
PRESS: September 1, 2021 Global – 217,600,000/4,500,000; USA – 39,300,000/638,700 I spoke to Rochelle this AM. I tried to explain to her the dilemma that we are in with this disagreement between CDC /ACIP and the FDA where Jeff agrees that the acip should not opine before the FDA rules. Clearly, Jeff is expecting me to be the arbitrator here and fix this. Jeff is very concerned that the acip will come out with recommendations contrary to what we had already planned and what the FDA will allow and that this will make it look like we are “the gang that could not shoot straight “. Rochelle feels that we are all going to be in the same place anyway but Jeff is concerned to the contrary. Jeff asked me to broker a meeting between senior CDC and senior FDA officials to see if we can settle this dispute regarding the role of acip.
PRESS: CNN “The Situation Room” with Wolf Blitzer September 2, 2021 – Global - USA - Weekly average 149,000 cases/day Important reflection about “controlling the message” - I thought I would make this comment now since it is something that has been ongoing for some time. It relates to the fact that this administration particularly in the form of Jeff does not at all want to interfere with the science or dictate what the science should be saying. This is completely different from the interference with science and the actual contradiction of science that was so rampant during the Trump administration. However, in the situation where we came out with the statements that we should begin boosters on the week of the 20th of September and at 8 months from the time individuals finish their original immunization regimen, it is clear that the timing was not totally science driven . It was logistically driven. In other words, we found out in late July that it was clear based on the hint of what we were seeing here in the United States and what the Israelis were seeing that we would need to boost. From a logistics standpoint we could not begin to do that until September which would put it eight months following the time that the first people got their vaccination in January. And so the eight month timeframe was not based on any biological or clinical science. It was based purely on logistics. And yet whenever we have a discussion Jeff insists that we stay with eight months because the science dictates that it is 8 months. That is just not true. It very well may be and in fact it looks like it should be earlier, such as six months. The reason Jeff did not want to change or veer away from 8 months is that he did not want it to seem that we were saying one thing on one day, and a week or so later we would change it, for example changing from eight months to six months. I consider this a fixation on messaging which is really unnecessary. I would have said we chose eight months because it was already eight months from the time that people got their first vaccination. Jeff was afraid that we would get criticized that we should have been doing it earlier if we switch from eight to six months. I would have said what the truth was that we picked eight months at first because that was the logistic reason and as soon as we found out that it was better to do it at six months we would then change to six months. It is the truth and there's nothing wrong with that. Important principals meeting today in the SCIF. the meeting was led by Jake Sullivan of NSC . The subject matter was how the United states could take a leadership role in the global response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Specifically, the question arose about how we can get foreign countries including China and India to participate in the process of getting doses to low and middle-income countries. A number of the principals weighed in including Samantha Powers, Tony Blinken, and others. Although I have a keen interest in this concept and I have been discussing it in detail with Jeff and with Peter Staley and David Kessler, I did not preemptively make any comments since they did not ask me to. However, in the future I will give my opinion as how we can best accomplish this goal.
Dear Diary — July 16, 2022
PRESS: CNN with Laura Coates July 17, 2022 (Sunday) Important conversation with Ashish Jha. But she's called me up and wanted my opinion and backing on what he wants to bring up to Ron Klain. He wants to propose putting billions of dollars into a program that would mimic operation warp speed in which he has been calling “hyperdrive”. The purpose is to put a full court press on getting you closely administered vaccines to prevent infection and transmission as well as next generation platform and imagine designs for greater breadth and durability of response. These latter concepts word described by me to him. The reason Ashish wanted my help was that he heard from Ron that unless we're proposing something that is more than just incremental and that would actually be transformative and play a major role in turning around how Americans think about COVID, then he doubts that Ron will take the step to go to the president to have the president use a chit with the Congress to get the money. The trick about all of this is that Ron will want a product to go into the arms of Americans within 18 months to coincide with approaching the end of the administration and the election for the presidency. I told Ron that I would back him on the transformative nature of the two pillars that I mentioned above, but I have considerable skepticism as to whether or not we can do this in 18 months. I suggested to Ashish that week altogether a group comprised of him, me, Peter Marks and Rob Califf from the FDA as well as some knowledgeable people from biotech and pharma. Unless we have corporate sponsors we are not going to go anywhere with this and we will never be able to do it in 18 months. Ashish will set-up the meeting and hopefully we can make a determination and get back to the president. Ashish feels that if we cannot convince Ron about this then there is no way that we can get the money. July 18, 2022 Sarah Ohermohle wrote an article in Politico where I mentioned that I would be leaving the NIH sometime before the end of President Biden's first term to which is January 2025. This is being interpreted by many in the press that I'm announcing my retirement. This is obviously not the case because I have given no date for stepping down and I am not retiring when I leave government service. However given the interest in me it is not surprising that this is now gone viral: Anthony Fauci wants to put Covid’s politicization behind him The disease fighter says he’s plotting his departure and reflecting on how he wants to be remembered. Financial Times: Kiran Stacey US chief medical adviser Anthony Fauci to step down in Joe Biden’s first term Kiran Stacey 4-5 minutes Washington Post: Fauci says he will retire from government post by the end of Biden’s term By Yasmeen Abutaleb July 18, 2022 at 11:45 a.m. EDT New York Times (Sheryl Stolberg): Fauci Says He Will ‘Almost Certainly’ Retire by January 2025 Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, 81, said he expected to see out President Biden’s current term. Wall Street Journal – Stephanie Armour and Betsy McKay Anthony Fauci Plans to Retire by End of Biden’s Term One of the leading public faces of the U.S. public-health response to Covid-19 says he hasn’t decided on exact date ---------------------------------- I had a very good talk today with Sam Bankman-Fried and his brother Gabriel Bankman who runs a foundation called “Guarding Against Pandemics”. Also on the call were their associates Jacob Swett and Annabel Snidow. (see above) . We spoke about how Sam with his billions of dollars could partner with the NIH and pushing the scientific agenda for the prototype pathogen approach of pandemic preparedness. Sam is a good friend of senator Joe Manchin and Joe is the one who originally pointed Sam in my direction to see if somehow we can all work together to having some sort of a partnership where the Congress puts in a certain amount for pandemic preparedness using the prototype pathogen model and Sam puts in an equal amount to support the effort through NI AID. We left it that they put together a proposal and that I serve as the scientific advisor for the amount of money that Sam wants to put into this even though I must be careful and will be careful about not getting involved in writing any legislation since Manchin has been talking about writing this into a reconciliation bill.
PRESS: CNN with Kate Bolduan; Reuters interview with Julie Steenhuysen; NBC Online Web; NPR with Rob Stein (talking about the Politico article (see above) July 19, 2022 I had an important conversation this morning with Peter Staley in which I asked his advice about messaging to the gay community regarding monkey pox. There seems to be a debate in New York City among public health officials versus some gay leaders. The tension is whether or not to tell gay men to hold off on multiple sexual partners until they get a PrEP version of the vaccine. Some people are saying that that would increase the stigma against gay men. However, Peter agrees with me that there is nothing wrong with and probably a good idea to tell gay men to just hold off and cool it for the next couple of weeks until we get enough vaccine to vaccinate all people who are at risk namely those who've had multiple sexual partners within the last 14 days. I will be out in the press talking about this and I just wanted to check with Peter as to whether he agreed with me and in fact he does. BA.5 dominating isolates:
PRESS: The Hill Health Summit Interview and streaming with Steve Clemons; Good Housekeeping with Zee Krstic; WHUR 96.3 FM DMV/ HBCU Network with Harold Fisher;WJLB 97.9 Detroit with Bushman; WNYM (FOX-NYC) TV with Lori Stokes; July 20, 2022 I just had an important conversation with Rochelle in which I related to her the conversation that I had last night with Carlos Del Rio in which Carlos articulated that there's a great deal of concern and agitation in the gay community, which I already am aware of, regarding the difficulty in getting TPOXX for the treatment of monkey pox. I decided to call Rachel and give her a heads up that the community is really starting to get very agitated to the point that they may be attacking the administration and her and the FDA and all of us in the press if we don't do something soon to cut down the difficulty in getting TPOXX to those in need. I suggested to her that she and the FDA think in terms of doing something akin to the parallel track approach that I initiated decades ago during the HIV pandemic. She will look into this with her people. I had a great meeting today in building 31 with Dr. Karl Lauterbach, the Minister of Health of Germany. He relied heavily very heavily on my advice about how to handle the decision about and distribution of booster shots for COVID in Germany. He is having some of the same problems as we are having here in trying to decide what the correct booster should be in the fall. He has already ordered millions of doses of Moderna bivalent which is an omicron plus ancestral as well as Pfizer which is a BA.4/5 bivalent plus ancestral. Moderna is obviously pushing their product, but Karl was very interested in what my opinion was. I told him that on the advice of me and others, the FDA has already authorized the bivalent of BA.4/5 and ancestral for the full dose. It is now up to the CDC and teir ACIp to make a recommendation f who “should” versus “may” receive the dose. We also spoke about the tension regarding vaccinating people now who are at risk of severe complications given that there is a wave of infections in Germany as well as in the United States versus waiting until a more variant-specific boost is available in the fall. Germany is facing the same dilemma as we are in that some people in Germany are arguing in a very similar way to Paul Offit who is saying that we should not be vaccinating people now. Paul is smart and a good friend but he is a victim of what I consider making the perfect the enemy of the good. From a purely immunological standpoint it is obviously not optimal to have a boost now (ancestral) and require an even better boost (bivalend BA.4/5 + ancestral) just a couple of months down the pike. However, you have to balance the public health benefit of getting some form of vaccine to people who are at risk for infection and severe disease now compared to the relatively minor negative effects of giving a vaccine shot now followed in 2 to 3 months by a vaccine shot with a better boost. I was surprised that bloggers such as Paul Offit have a major impact globally. Karl mentioned to me that he and his colleagues listen very carefully to what I say and it would be very helpful to them to hear what I am telling him today and that I agree completely with him since he is absolutely in the same lane as I as well as many of my NIH colleagues including Rick Koup and others. It was a very stimulating conversation and I was on my A game. We then went on to discuss the issue of monkeypox. According to Karl monkey pox is out of control in Germany and similar to what we are seeing in the United States the gay community is very frustrated with the lack of as many vaccines as they need as well as the lack of easy access to antivirals. They seem to be having no trouble with diagnostics which are plentiful. I explain to him that our situation is very similar here in the United States. The conversation ended with him wanting to take a picture with me since his daughter who is 15 years old apparently is a great fan of mine. We exchanged cell phone numbers and he promised me that he would be calling me frequently. John Laureman (Bloomberg) wrote a very nice laudation of me today: An Early Farewell to America’s Top Pandemic Expert July 21, 222 Harassment from the far right continues: Rand Paul Sends Message To Fauci: You’ll Have To Testify Under Oath If GOP Wins. Fox News (7/20, 23.99M) reports, “Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., issued a warning to Dr. Anthony Fauci: If the GOP takes back Congress in the midterms, be prepared to testify under oath regarding the coronavirus pandemic.” On Wednesday, he argued on “America Reports” that “the American people deserve the truth and answers on whether there was a cover-up for a lab leak in China.” President Biden tested positive today (Thursday)! Tested negative on Tuesday, went to Boston on Wednesday; had mild sxs this AM and tested positive. https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2022/07/Letter-7.21.pdf Obvious media storm. He has mild sxs. My only concern in the way that his MD (Kevin O’Connor) is treating him is that he D/C’d his Eliquis and Lipitor. I do not care about the Lipitor, but I am very concerned about the discontinuing completely of the Eliquis. The president has a atrial fibrillation and I would have merely lowered his dose to 1/2 the dose rather than completely discontinuing it because of my concern about him throwing analysis in getting a stroke. I mentioned this to a sheesh during a briefing called this evening since we are all going on television tomorrow. Couple of interesting things related to the infection of the president. 1) I called up Kevin O'Connor who is the physician to the president and got a briefing from him for the simple reason then when I go out on TV and I'm asked whether or not I have been consulted with it would be rather embarrassing to say that they did not call the so-called most famous infectious diseases expert in the world, who happens to also be the chief medical advisor to the president. I explained to Kevin my concern about the anticoagulation. He understood my concern and said that he has started the president on low dose aspirin which is a good thing. Kevin explained that the president was negative for an antigen test on Tuesday, did not sleep well on Wednesday evening, and woke up on Thursday predominantly with fatigue. Tested himself on a routine basis which for him is 2 to three times per week. The test came back positive, confirmed by a PCR. Throughout the day he then began to get sniffles, at first a dry cough and then a loose cough. His temperature rose to 99.4 F, which came back to normal with tylenol. His oxygen saturation was 97 to 98%. He was resting reasonably comfortably when Kevin left him tonight. 2) We had a meeting with the comms people and Ashish Jha this late afternoon in preparation for media requests tomorrow. I was under the impression that they were going to spread out the request for morning shows between Ashish and me. I found out later in the evening that all the morning shows will go to Ashish and they will give me regional meeting in the afternoon. As mentioned several times above it is very clear that Ashish is trying to dominate the media scene with regard to COVID-19 and is telling his staff to lead me out of the major media hits. Again, he does a good job but it is a bit of Bush league to do that. I have asked Courtney to communicate with the White House calms people and two in a very nice way ask them just what is going on here. Monkeypox continues to spread throughout the world. 15,000 cases worldwide in 70 countries; >2000 in USA: Monkeypox Virus Infection in Humans across 16 Countries — April–June 2022 J.P. Thornhill, S. Barkati, S. Walmsley, J. Rockstroh, A. Antinori, L.B. Harrison, R. Palich, A. Nori, I. Reeves, M.S. Habibi, V. Apea, C. Boesecke, L. Vandekerckhove, M. Yakubovsky, E. Sendagorta, J.L. Blanco, E. Florence, D. Moschese, F.M. Maltez, A. Goorhuis, V. Pourcher, P. Migaud, S. Noe, C. Pintado, F. Maggi, A.-B.E. Hansen, C. Hoffmann, J.I. Lezama, C. Mussini, A.M. Cattelan, K. Makofane, D. Tan, S. Nozza, J. Nemeth, M.B. Klein, and C.M. Orkin, for the SHARE-net Clinical Group* The activist community is very angry. See Washington Post article: Opinion The Biden administration’s monkeypox response has been a mess By Gregg Gonsalves July 21, 2022 at 3:56 p.m. EDT
PRESS: FOX “Good Day” NYC TV with Rosanna Scotto; WGN Chicago Radio with Peter McMurray and Rob Martier; July 22, 2022 Kevin O'Connor called me this morning at 10 48 AM to give me an update on the president's condition. He is quite stable has a slight fever up to 99F that is easily brought down by tylenol. He has a cough which started off as dry but now is a bit “loose” as described by Kevin which means it seems deeper in the chest. However, the president feels well enough to continue to work from the White House although he is a bit fatigued as you might expect. More later. Letter from Kevin O’Connor to the USA – POTUS doing well: The Guardian – Gay community in revolt about monkeypox. Article about Peter Staley: ‘Nobody’s acting like this is an emergency’: Act Up veteran Peter Staley condemns US monkeypox response Wilfred Chan Rochelle has pleaded with me to back the CDC plan of distributing vaccine more on the basis of at risk population then on the actual number of cases since it is anticipated that with a variety of gay pride galas coming up including “Southern Decadence” among others that although there are not a lot of cases in the southern states including Louisiana, there will be soon and although New York City and other large cities but particularly in New York City is hammering the White House about the lines that there are to get vaccine in people who perceive themselves and in fact are practicing risk behavior even though they have not been in direct documented contact with an infected person. The White House is responding to the complaints of the gay community that the response to the monkeypox outbreak has been a terrible disaster (see above with Peter Staley) and they are pushing Rochelle and the secretary to distribute it favoring New York since they have the most cases. Rachel wants me and I agree to back her in making it a 75% on risk and 25% on cases whereas the White House wants the distribution to be 25% on risk and 75% on cases. I believe that this is short sighted because we are quickly going to see areas that do not have a lot of cases now but will very soon not having enough vaccine to prevent the outbreak. I was very forceful in the zoom call with the secretary and the HHS team in saying that I would back Rochelle; however, we must have the flexibility of apportioning doses to the at risk locations in small allocations so that if they don't use them we will not have given them all of their doses at one time and thus cannot recall them to give them to cities and locations that actually have a large number of cases. Once you send doses to a location, by FDA regulations, you can't pull them back and send them somewhere else. And so smaller allocations are the answer. Whether or not Ron Klain will accept this is a big question. He is very interested in the political blowback from New York. This is understandable since he is a politician but he is not looking at it from a purely public health standpoint. I was very forceful with the HHS team when the comms people were suggesting that we explain this gap that we have in availability of vaccines on the lack of funding. I told the secretary on the zoom that I have to be frank with them, but I thought that this would be a total disaster since that is an excuse and not an explanation and the gay community would kill them for making excuses. I mentioned that we had to own the problem and tell them that it would have been nice to have all the doses that everybody needed, but the fact is we don't have all the doses and therefore we will do everything we can to get as many doses to people as we can in an equitable manner. Bottom line is that I told them what I told the Trump administration, and that is the only way to solve a problem is to first own the problem. Was on multiple TV shows (see below). One of the things that came up was why the president's physician, doctor Kevin O'Connor, was not out there describing the president's condition. I answered that I was not in the loop and I did not know why. However it is very clear as mentioned above and as confirmed by Dori Solcido that Ashish really wants the spotlight and wants to be the one talking about the president's condition. I consider that an unforced error because that's what the press is going to focus on that we are hiding something. I do not want to get into that seen Ashish wanting to essentially be on every single possible major TV show, but that's the way it is. Also, the White House was concerned that Kevin mentioned that the president had a temperature of 99.4F. the temp responded very well to Tylenol and I brought up too Dory as to how foolish it is to get upset because Kevin mentioned his temperature. It is the perfectly normal thing to have a low grade temperature with a upper respiratory infection. Even though this White House is a good White House they're concerned about message control is ill advised and they are only making unforced errors. I spoke again tonight (10:00 PM) with Kevin O'Connor and he brought me up to date on the President's condition. He still requires Tylenol to keep his temperature down. He is very comfortable and even played some golf on the putting range in the White House outside because he was getting a little bit cabin fever. According to Kevin he continues to improve, but Kevin is concerned about Paxlovid rebound and is considering giving him eight days of the drug. He wanted my opinion as to whether or not that was a good idea. I am ambivalent about this since there will be a lot of blowback about why he was treated differently than the recommendations. Cliff lane would not treat him for an extra few days but would take the chance that he was going to rebound. I will recheck with Kevin tomorrow. I had a long talk with Raj Panjabi (NSC) who sought my advice about how to deal with the activist group who feel that he is lying to them and that they have lost confidence in his ability to give them straight information. I mentioned to Raj that he needs to be straight with the activists and put himself in their shoes where they are looking at hundreds of millions of dollars invested in a product to be put in this row tegic national stockpile, and now that we need that product it is not available to the gay community. They are outraged and all he and his colleagues are doing is making excuses for it (see above about owning the problem). I made it clear to Raj and cannot have his comms person speak to Peter Staley, David Barr, and James Krellenstein et al. he must do it himself otherwise it would be showing disrespect to the activists. Raj was extremely grateful for my tutoring of him in this regard.
PRESS: CBS Livestream Online; NY1 Spectrum News TV with Kevin Frey; Alice Park with Time magazine; ABC World New Tonight; NBC Nightly News with Lester Holt; CNN “The Situation Room” with Wolf Blitzer; FOX News with Brett Baier; MSNBC “The Beat” with Ari Melber; KMOJ FM (Minneapolis) with Freddie Bell; Univision National with Andrea Linares; Telemundo National with unknown July 23, 2022 Yesterday I spoke with dawn O'Connell and told her that I would be very much in favor of the secretary declaring a public health emergency for monkeypox. She is now running it up the chain to see what others think about that.. I had my usual call this morning with Kevin O'Connor, the president's physician. It was a disturbing call because Kevin told me that Ashish is really trying to manipulate what Kevin says regarding the health of the president and Kevin is starting to get very aggravated by this. For example, Ashish did not want Kevin to mention that the president's temperature was 99.4F because then that would be a topic for the news discussion. That is completely ridiculous because it is totally expected that someone with a URI would have a mild temperature responsive to Tylenol. In addition, Ashish did not like the use of the word “malaise” which was the exact word the president used to describe how he felt. Ashish was afraid that that word would bring up recall of president Jimmy Carter and the negative response that the country had to his describing “malaise” in the country. And then finally in today's report Kevin wanted to put in a new symptom that the president complained of which was muscle aches, an entirely understandable symptom that has nothing to do with progression of disease. They insisted that he not add that. Kevin pushed back and said that he would not sign off on anything if they force him to hold back on what the true symptoms are. Call from Larry Horowitz regarding Ron Klain saying to him (Larry) that the President wants to make some changes since Health area (COVID/MPX) is not going well. “Someone needs to get fired.” Primary target is Becerra, but they feel that they cannot fire him since they never would get a replacement confirmed in he Senate. Next in line in Rochelle. They really are disappointed with Rochelle and want to fire her. They asked Larry for suggestions for replacements. Larry called me about this. He suggests Mark McLellan or Anne Schuchat. Wants names from me. Larry also called Jeff Z. They do not know that Jeff is working with me regarding my stepping down. Could get complicated. I called Jeff and we discussed the situation. See below my discussion the next day (Sunday) with Jeff. Had a long conversation with Jeff about the above issue concerning firing someone at HHS/CDC. Similar to the situation that I faced years ago with Secretary Burwell wanting to fire Tom Frieden because of poor performance with Ebola where I defended Tom, I found myself defending Rochelle. Rochelle is a wonderful person, but she does not have control over her agency and she has to learn to balance the politically expedient thing while still maintaining solid scientific principles. The problem is she relies too heavily on the entrenched people at CDC who are smart and will meaning but who have no oversight or quality control from the outside. This allows them to proceed with somewhat antiquated if not ossified ideas. As the discussion went the options were to fire Secretary Becerra; however, this would be very difficult since it would be tough to get a Senate confirmation for a secretary within a relatively acceptable period of time. The other option is to fire Rochelle, but now is not the time to do that and it would be against my recommendation. One of the points that Jeff made is that they are considering in a humane way to ask Rochelle to step down at the end of the year before the beginning of the second-half of the first term. Despite my trying to protect Rochelle there is a very good chance that that will happen. Kevin O’Connor continues to call me 2x/day. The president continues to improve and is completed his 4th day on Paxlovid. .He was out for four hours today by the pool doing reading work. The next big question is whether to give him eight days or 10 days instead of five days of pax livid. That would be a problem since it would be against FDA authorization and the public would cry out that we had treating him differently than other people. the concern on the part of the White House is that if he rebounds after he is negative for several days, he will likely be out talking and mingling with people. If he infects someone following an inadvertent rebound, he will be blamed for infecting other people. My suggestion would be to treat him for five days have him stay in the White House virtually for an additional five days testing him everyday if he turns negative as soon as he turns negative send him out even if it's before the 10 day. And have him wear a mask in order to avoid him inadvertently infecting people if he rebounds, I would just test him every morning before he gets up and goes out to meet with people. If he is negative he will be OK, if he is positive continued isolating. Emergency phone call among HHS people (Becerra, Dawn et al) regarding convincing POTUS (and Ron) to declare a Public Health Emergency (PHE) for MPX. Becerra says that POTUS will rely heavily on my opinion. Problem is that they are concerned that if you declare a PHE for monkey pox then why not declare it for gun violence or for reproductive rights. That sounds very much like the negativistic attitude of RON.
PRESS: ABC “Good Morning America” Weekend; CBS Mornings (Weekend); CNN “New Day” Weekend; Fox News with Neil Cavuto July 24, 2022 Kevin O’Connor continues to call me 2x/day. The President continues to improve and is completed his 4th day (Sunday) on Paxlovid. He was out for four hours today by the pool doing reading work. The next big question is whether to give him eight days or 10 days instead of five days of Paxlovid. That would be a problem since it would be against FDA authorization and the public would cry out that we had treating him differently than other people. The concern on the part of the White House is that if he rebounds after he is negative for several days, he will likely be out talking and mingling with people. If he infects someone following an unrecognized rebound, he will be blamed for infecting other people. My suggestion would be to treat him for five days, have him stay in the White House virtually up to an additional five days testing him everyday. If he turns negative, as soon as he turns negative send him out even if it's before the 10 day period. And have him wear a mask in order to avoid him inadvertently infecting people if he rebounds, I would be OK, if he is positive continued isolating. Had long conversation with Ashish who was asking my advice. He started off the conversation by saying that the White House continues to have a lot of problems with Rochelle, the latest of which was the apportionment of vaccine doses. (See discussion above about strong consideration of asking her to step down). Ashish said that Ron wants my take on the situation with Rochelle/CDC and the distribution of vaccine doses. She wants to divide the vaccines for monkey pox according to the formula of 25% according to cases and 75% according to risk. This is something that we had discussed yesterday in a call with the secretary. During that call I promised that I would back Rochelle's proposal because of the fact that if they do not distribute more, namely 75%, according to risk, when we have outbreaks related to “Southern Decadence” and other gay pride functions we will not have vaccine in place to counter it. However Ron Klain is adamant that he does not want vaccines shipped to locations in which there are few cases and when they do not get cases or they do not administer vaccine to their case countthat the vaccine goes to waste (you cannot reship vaccine). I made the following point to the secretary yesterday and I repeated it word for word to Ron today. I would be supportive of a 25% for cases and 75% for risk distribution only if the jurisdictions that received the 75% for risk are given the vaccines in small apportionments. For example if they were scheduled to get 400 vaccines, you would give them 100 and tell them that if they don't use that 100 expeditiously the next shipment of 100 would not be given to them but would be given to a jurisdiction that has a high number of cases. I explained this to Ron when he called me today and told him that that would be my position. He said that Ron is very interested in what I would do and that this would hold a great deal of weight in the discussions that we will have tomorrow, which is Monday. Had a long conversation with Jeff about the above issue concerning firing someone at HHS/CDC. Similar to the situation that I faced years ago with Secretary Burwell wanting to fire Tom Frieden because of poor performance with Ebola where I defended Tom, I found myself defending Rochelle. Rochelle is a wonderful person, but she does not have control over her agency and she has to learn to balance the politically expedient thing while still maintaining solid scientific principles. The problem is she relies too heavily on the entrenched people at CDC who are smart and will meaning but who have no oversight or quality control from the outside. This allows them to proceed with somewhat antiquated if not ossified ideas. As the discussion went the options were to fire Secretary Becerra; however, this would be very difficult since it would be tough to get a Senate confirmation for a secretary within a relatively acceptable period of time. The other option is to fire Rochelle, but now is not the time to do that and it would be against my recommendation. One of the points that Jeff made is that they are considering in a humane way to ask Rochelle to step down at the end of the year before the beginning of the second-half of the first term. Despite my trying to protect Rochelle there is a very good chance that that will happen. Kevin O’Connor continues to call me 2x/day. The president continues to improve and is completed his 4th day on Paxlovid. He was out for four hours today by the pool doing reading work. The next big question is whether to give him eight days or 10 days instead of five days of pax livid. That would be a problem since it would be against FDA authorization and the public would cry out that we had treating him differently than other people. the concern on the part of the White House is that if he rebounds after he is negative for several days, he will likely be out talking and mingling with people. If he infects someone following an inadvertent rebound, he will be blamed for infecting other people. My suggestion would be to treat him for five days have him stay in the White House virtually for an additional five days testing him every day if he turns negative as soon as he turns negative send him out even if it's before the 10 day. And have him wear a mask in order to avoid him inadvertently infecting people if he rebounds, I would just test him every morning before he gets up and goes out to meet with people. If he is negative he will be OK, if he is positive continued isolating. Of note, Ashish states that he wants Kevin to go up in front of the cameras to describe the President's condition, but it is Ron who does not want him to go up as well as Karine JeanPierre. That is interesting because I am hearing that it is Ron who does not want Kevin to get up in front of a camera.
PRESS: MSNBC with Jonathan Capehart July 25, 2022 Spoke with Kevin O'Connor again this morning and evening. the president is doing extremely well and continues to improve. He we'll complete his fifth day of Paxlovid today. The next question will be when he can go out into society. I have a phone call with Ashish this afternoon and I will recommend that we not give him additional days of drug but that we have him stay masked inside for 5 days or until he tests negative by antigen test. They are concerned about rebound; however, I have told them that if he tests every morning for five to 10 days after his Paxlovid course ends and he does not show any positivity, he can go out that day and proceed with business. That would be much more acceptable to the general public then to give him an extra few days of drug which would not actually guarantee that he does not rebound.
PRESS: The Hill “Rising”; CBC Radio with Robin Bresnahan; July 26, 2022 Continuing my twice per day discussion with Kevin O'Connor regarding the president's condition. The POTUS Is doing very well and improving substantially each day. Today is one day following the termination of his Paxlovid therapy and his CT level is 35 which means that he has very little replication competent virus in his nasopharynx. He feels very well and we had a long discussion this evening with Kevin, Ashish Jha, and Ron Klain as to what the presidents activities could be looking forward. He tested negative today by antigen test and has a very nice CT level as mentioned above. The White House staff is concerned about possible rebound and I made a suggestion that he stay masked and in isolation until he gets two negative antigen tests in a row. After that he can go out and do duties on the outside provided that he does not travel and that he wears a mask. I would test him intimately a few times a week to see if he rebounds. It became clear to me that Ron Klain and the president rely heavily upon my advice but what to do with the president's condition. I have developed a very good relationship with Kevin O'Connor and he calls me twice a day. We had some serious discussions with secretary Becerra about having a consistent message about the distribution of the monkey pox vaccine. See above about the concern of having vaccine in places that are not being utilized well there are lines in other jurisdictions. I supported the CDC recommendation of distributing the vaccine with 75% to risk areas and 25% to actual cases so long as individual jurisdictions utilize the vaccine. The CDC will send out the vaccine in tranches that will not be followed up with more vaccine until the jurisdiction actually utilizes the vaccine so that we don't have unused doses in one area and demands more than supply in another area. We also discussed whether or not we should declare monkeypox a public health emergency. I argued strongly that we do that in order to send a signal to the MSM community that we are very serious about the situation that they find themselves under. We had the vaccine summit today in the Indian treaty room of the executive office building. I gave a talk on the NIH research agenda. Also I did an enormous amount of press today which overlapped with a number of meetings with the White House as well as with secretary becerra. Big time stressed today and I feel it.
PRESS: CNN “New Day” with John Berman; MSNBC “Morning Joe”; NPR “All things Considered”; News Nation Now TV; MSNBC “The Reid Out” with Jason Johnson July 27, 2022 Paper in Nature today validates my disagreement with the CDC last year when Vivek and I pushed back against their saying that you do not need to test after 5 days of isolation after infection since most of the transmissions occur in the first few days of infection and after day 10 you are OK (see prior notes): How long is COVID infectious? What scientists know so far Those with SARS-CoV-2 are often advised to isolate for only a few days. But evidence is mounting that some people can continue to pass on the virus for much longer. • David Adam POTUS back to work. The letter below is based on conversations I had last night with Ron, Kevin, Anita Dunn, Mike Donilon, etc.: I was part of the opening panel of the introduction of the UN aids report very beginning of the IAS meeting in Montreal. The name of the report presented by Winnie Byanyima (Exec Director of UNAIDS) is “In Danger”. Also on the panel was John Nkengasong (PEPFAR), Adeeba Kamarulzaman (President of IAS), Andriy Klepikov (Dir. Alliance for Public Health in Ukraine, Keren Dunaway, International Community of Women Living with HIV, Anita Vandenbald Canadian MP. AP reporting on the above: People are exhausted with epidemics and pandemics,” said Dr. Anthony Fauci, the U.S. government’s leading AIDS expert. “We have to fight twice as hard to get HIV back on the radar screen where it belongs.” Yesterday it was a little bit of a distributing and embarrassing situation where Raj Panjabi piggy-backed his own little mini session on monkey pox right after Vaccine summit at the White House at the very last minute without letting dawn or Connell know until literally I have to now will before he was asking her to speak. bottom line is it all is that although everyone agrees that Raj is a really good guy and his heart is in the right place he is really over his head in his job at the NSC in charge of pandemic preparedness. Dawn believes that the White House is well aware of that and that is the reason why they are appointing any “Monkeypox Tsar” Washington Post: The Fauci ‘ouchie’ was a near miracle. We need another. By the Editorial Board July 27, 2022 at 2:51 p.m. EDT Variety: Dr. Fauci, Roberta Flack and Zora Neale Hurston Documentaries on the Way, PBS Boss Announces Went to a terrific social function at the incredible home of Adrienne Arsht at 6 Chevy Chase Circle. It was a cabaret night where American Pops Orchestra founder/leader had a contest played old songs and had the audience guess the singer. I thought that I might win since I got only 2 wrong, but Renee Fleming won with an even better score. Had interesting conversation with Brett Baier where he finally admitted that the 2 recent Science papers by Worobey, Andersen, Rasmussen et al convince him that the lab leak theory is really not true.
PRESS: New York Daily News interview with Tim Balk; NPR WBUR Boston with John Ringer; Dr. Anthony Fauci says government response to monkeypox must address anti-gay stigmas Muri Assunção, New York Daily News July 28, 2022 Cases and hospitalizations continue to rise slowly with very little increase in deaths. I recommend to Becerra to declare PHE. Monkeypox: Global.health: 20,671 confirmed MPX cases, 42 suspected in 84 non-endemic countries. 4600 in USA. 2 children infected in USA from mother who had sex with bisexual man The Montreal Gazette concerning my comments (virtually at the UNAIDS report unveiling): Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases in the United States and chief medical adviser to U.S. President Joe Biden, said the UNAIDS report is “a reminder that the global plague” of HIV/AIDS “continues to rage,” even though much of our attention diverted to the global pandemic of COVID and now, monkeypox. “All of us in the global HIV community must work to reach vulnerable communities,” he said, and the report is a reminder that “we can do better in this, the fifth decade of AIDS. The priority must be to implement better treatment modalities, while improving and optimizing the next generation of interventions.” The COVID pandemic and, now, monkeypox, mean “people are exhausted with epidemics and pandemics. We have to fight twice as hard to get HIV back on the radar screen, where it belongs,” Fauci said. I was involved in a very difficult zoom cool this evening with Peter Marks. Rob Califf, Vivek, David Kessler, Julia Tierney (FDA), Hillary Marston, among others about the potential conflict that might occur tomorrow when Ashish has convinced the president to come out and say that anyone who's not been boosted recently should get boosted. However, we now know that both moderna and Pfizer will have the BA.5 bivalent boost available the first week of September. This will create a major messaging problem since we are telling people to get boosted with the vaccine that doesn't cover the current BA.5 variant when the actual variant-specific boost will be available 5 weeks from now. Somehow or other Ashish took the initiative to convince the president to say this without consulting with the FDA or the CDC. If these mixed messages go out it will be a major cluster. I tried to bring this up to them and suggested strongly that they have a zoom in the morning before any of these announcements are made in order to get a common message otherwise it will look like one of the worst mixed messages to come out in a long time. I'm starting to see right now the advantage of having Jeff as the coordinator since he understands the interactions among the different agencies of government whereas Ashish is smart, a very good communicator and is well meaning, but he is more about looking like he's taking the lead on things than coordinating. Later in the evening, I had dinner over jeff's and Mary’s house which was a great evening. Guests at the dinner besides Chris and I were: Susan Rice, Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin and his wife Charlene, Deb Harmon, Wally Adeyemo. The discussion was very stimulating particularly Susan Rice telling us stories of her escapades during the Obama administration and secretary Austin telling us about the tension in his multiple responsibilities. One of those discussions of the night was the desire of Nancy Pelosi to go to Taiwan which everybody feels is a very bad idea given the geopolitical situation. However for some reason she feels she needs to go there and everyone seems to be against it. July 29, 2022 See e-mail chain below regarding the confusion about mixed messages related to my note yesterday: From: Fauci, Anthony (NIH/NIAID) [E] <afauci@niaid.nih.gov> Sent: Friday, July 29, 2022 7:35 AM To: Marks, Peter (FDA/CBER) <Peter.Marks@fda.hhs.gov>; Califf, Robert <RMC001@fda.hhs.gov>; Tierney, Julia (FDA/OC) <Julia.Tierney@fda.hhs.gov>; Tabak, Lawrence (NIH/OD) [E] <Lawrence.Tabak@nih.gov>; O'Connell, Dawn (OS/ASPR/IO) <Dawn.Oconnell@hhs.gov>; Levine, Rachel (HHS/OASH) <Rachel.Levine@hhs.gov>; Murthy, Vivek (HHS/OASH) <Vivek.Murthy@hhs.gov>; Kessler, David (HHS/IOS) <David.Kessler@hhs.gov>; Varrone, Michael (HHS/OGC) <Michael.Varrone@hhs.gov>; Roos, Jason (OS/ASPR/H-CORE) <Jason.Roos@hhs.gov>; Mahon, Barbara (CDC/DDID/NCIRD/OD) <bdm3@cdc.gov>; Goldstein, Robert (CDC/OD) <qyd2@cdc.gov>; Berger, Sherri (CDC/OD/OCS) <sob8@cdc.gov>; Marston, Hilary (FDA/OC) <Hilary.Marston@fda.hhs.gov> Subject: RE: Confidential – Next Steps on Expanding Eligibility for Additional Booster Team: I know that we are all struggling with this and trying to get it right, but I really have a problem with the 4/8/12 message. It is not that it is incorrect from a medical and/or immunological standpoint. It is that it will it be very confusing. I know that we are trying to save lives by getting people vaccinated and boosted; however, for the overwhelming most part, the people who are going to get vaccinated (particularly the elderly) are already vaccinated and I am not sure how much we are going to move the needle in getting the “unboosted” to get boosted when we are simultaneously saying that in 5 weeks we will have a much better and more specific vaccine. That is an inherently confusing message that would be counterproductive. Right now if we were three months away or even two months away from a variant specific boost I could see making a big push to get people boosted now. However, starting with Monday we will be five weeks away from a variant specific boost. If we want to have one cogent prevailing message it is that we have a very important boost that will be available in five weeks. The message should be focused on that. Anything that confuses that will work against us. Just my take…. Thanks, Tony Anthony S. Fauci, MD Director National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Building 31, Room 7A-03 31 Center Drive, MSC 2520 National Institutes of Health Bethesda, MD 20892-2520 Phone: (301) 496-2263 FAX: (301) 496-4409 E-mail: afauci@niaid.nih.gov The information in this e-mail and any of its attachments is confidential and may contain sensitive information. It should not be used by anyone who is not the original intended recipient. If you have received this e-mail in error please inform the sender and delete it from your mailbox or any other storage devices. The National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) shall not accept liability for any statements made that are the sender's own and not expressly made on behalf of the NIAID by one of its representatives. From: Marks, Peter <Peter.Marks@fda.hhs.gov> Sent: Friday, July 29, 2022 6:58 AM To: Califf, Robert <RMC001@fda.hhs.gov>; Tierney, Julia (FDA/OC) <Julia.Tierney@fda.hhs.gov>; Tabak, Lawrence (NIH/OD) [E] <lawrence.tabak@nih.gov>; O'Connell, Dawn (OS/ASPR/IO) <Dawn.Oconnell@hhs.gov>; Fauci, Anthony (NIH/NIAID) [E] <afauci@niaid.nih.gov>; Levine, Rachel (HHS/OASH) <Rachel.Levine@hhs.gov>; Murthy, Vivek (HHS/OASH) <Vivek.Murthy@hhs.gov>; Kessler, David (HHS/IOS) <David.Kessler@hhs.gov>; Varrone, Michael (HHS/OGC) <Michael.Varrone@hhs.gov>; Roos, Jason (OS/ASPR/H-CORE) <Jason.Roos@hhs.gov>; Mahon, Barbara (CDC/DDID/NCIRD/OD) <bdm3@cdc.gov>; Goldstein, Robert (CDC/OD) <qyd2@cdc.gov>; Berger, Sherri (CDC/OD/OCS) <sob8@cdc.gov>; Marston, Hilary (FDA/OC) <Hilary.Marston@fda.hhs.gov> Subject: RE: Confidential – Next Steps on Expanding Eligibility for Additional Booster Dear Rob, Thanks. Perhaps the 4/8/12 messaging is going to be the best way to go then At least 4 weeks if you are over fifty until next booster (I know the immunologist don’t love this, but there are different antigens in the booster and mRNA vaccines are not the same as protein based vaccines. This seems to balance the potential benefits and risks) At least 8 weeks if your are under fifty At least 12 weeks if you recently had COVID If you are immunocompromised, you will need to wait at least 4 weeks, but follow your healthcare providers recommendation Best Regards, Peter From: Califf, Robert <RMC001@fda.hhs.gov> Sent: Friday, July 29, 2022 6:26 AM To: Tierney, Julia <Julia.Tierney@fda.hhs.gov>; Tabak, Lawrence A (NIH) <lawrence.tabak@nih.gov>; O'Connell, Dawn (OS) <Dawn.Oconnell@hhs.gov>; Fauci, Anthony S (NIH) <afauci@niaid.nih.gov>; Levine, Rachel (OS) <Rachel.Levine@hhs.gov>; Murthy, Vivek (OS) <Vivek.Murthy@hhs.gov>; Kessler, David A (OS) <David.Kessler@hhs.gov>; Varrone, Michael (OS) <Michael.Varrone@hhs.gov>; Roos, Jason (OS) <Jason.Roos@hhs.gov>; Mahon, Barbara (CDC) <bdm3@cdc.gov>; Goldstein, Robert H (CDC) <qyd2@cdc.gov>; Berger, Sherri (CDC) <sob8@cdc.gov>; Marks, Peter <Peter.Marks@fda.hhs.gov>; Marston, Hilary <Hilary.Marston@fda.hhs.gov> Subject: Re: Confidential – Next Steps on Expanding Eligibility for Additional Booster Had a good “Ashish session” late last night. He is moving forward, but understands that the faster than expected timetable for bivalent vaccine is a really good thing. He agreed that its critical that we reach agreement on the best set of words that capture the common ground that we want people to get boosted (now 5 RWE studies showing the big effect of even the 4th shot on reducing death and hospitalization), but with the bivalent imminent lower risk people have the good option of waiting. For those who get boosted now—they can still get the bivalent in xx weeks. From my view the only thing that will be bad for public health out of our options would be for us to have different messages. All other options are a net positive in terms of reducing death and severe illness. rmc From: Julie Tierney <Julia.Tierney@fda.hhs.gov> Date: Thursday, July 28, 2022 at 10:41 PM To: Robert Califf <RMC001@fda.hhs.gov>, Lawrence Tabak <lawrence.tabak@nih.gov>, "O'Connell, Dawn (OS)" <Dawn.Oconnell@hhs.gov>, Tony Fauci <afauci@niaid.nih.gov>, Rachel Levine <Rachel.Levine@hhs.gov>, Vivek Murthy <Vivek.Murthy@hhs.gov>, David Kessler <David.Kessler@hhs.gov>, "Varrone, Michael (OS)" <Michael.Varrone@hhs.gov>, "Roos, Jason (OS)" <Jason.Roos@hhs.gov>, "Mahon, Barbara (CDC)" <bdm3@cdc.gov>, "Goldstein, Robert H (CDC)" <qyd2@cdc.gov>, "Berger, Sherri (CDC)" <sob8@cdc.gov>, Peter Marks <Peter.Marks@fda.hhs.gov>, "Marston, Hilary" <Hilary.Marston@fda.hhs.gov> Subject: Confidential – Next Steps on Expanding Eligibility for Additional Booster As a follow up, we’re still working through the FDA statement and will circle back tomorrow morning with next steps. Thanks for your patience. Had a very interesting conversation with the HHS team regarding a memo at the secretary will be sending to the president regarding the declaration of a public health emergency (PHE). the secretary expressed some concern about whether we should do that or not but his staff actually wrote a memo making it seem like he definitely wanted it I brought this out to them when I read quickly the memo while we were on the Zoom and the secretary requested that I can't fully look at the memo and make comments. I actually think we should definitely declare a PHE and I modify it the conclusion of the memo to be unambiguous about this. It was really strange that the secretary said he had reservations and his staff wrote a memo that strongly recommended that we do it. In my memo back to them I told them that they have to make up their mind one way or the other and have the memo strongly recommend what he actually wants. I rewrote the conclusion assuming that he will take my recommendation to declare it July 30, 2022 (Saturday) Just got a call at 12 noon from Kevin O'Connor that the president has had a rebound with a positive antigen test today. He is asymptomatic. This is the real problem since there are no guidelines from the CDC which dictate what to do when you have someone who you are testing virtually every day. The CDC health advisory on what to do following a rebound after Paxlovid treatment does not mention testing at all. the duration of isolation is based purely on symptoms and time from resolution of symptoms. Here again it goes back to my objection many months ago of the guidelines the CDC put out about reentry into society following infection. I had insisted back then that even though it might not be practical for everyone to get testing and often people need to get back to work after five days, they still should have put some guidance in for people who can get tested period now we are flying in the dark. Ron Klain is going to want him out as soon as possible; however, given that he is known to now be antigen positive he has to isolate for five days and then the question will arise of how often to test him and if he is positive should he be let out even with a mask. Cliff Lane feels strongly that he should be in isolation so long as he is antigen positive and can go out once he has two negative tests in a row. Got a call from Ashish making sure that we are on the same page. Also, he asked me if we should start a 2nd course of Paxlovid. I told me not to unless the POTUS gets significant sxs Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-CO) spoke about a proposed rule that would lower Dr. Fauci's salary to $1.Stay ConnectedForbes on Facebook: ... Flag as irrelevant *****Wall Street Journal piece by Peter Loftus on July 29, 2022 is critical in its historical portrayal of the interaction of NIAID and Moderna/Pfizer. Important for the book!! WSJ: The Partnership That Made the First U.S. Covid Vaccine Gay community getting very agitated about that they perceive as the government’s slow response and resting the rapidly evolving multi pox outbreak: Frustration builds in LGBTQ community over government response to monkeypox Jen Christensen, CNN 12-15 minutes July 31, 2022 I gave the special session plenary lecture at the International AIDS Society (IAS) meeting in Montreal via a virtual presentation. I have given a plenary lecture and virtually every one of the IAS meetings since 1984. I reflected on what has transpired since the last meeting in Montreal which was in 1989. My presentation triggered a prolonged standing ovation from the audience. The session was chaired and moderated by Laura Waters of the UK. The president remains antigen positive for the second day in a row following his rebound. His CT values are 16 to 18. He has had no additional symptoms although he still has somewhat of a lingering cough. The plan is to keep him isolated until he asked two negative antigen tests in a row. I got a call from Rochelle who is stuck in Amsterdam following the cancellation of her flight from Amsterdam to Washington. She is coming back from a trip to Uganda and Kenya. She thanked me profusely for sticking up for the CDC's decision about allocation of vaccines for monkey pox. Got a call from Jen Ashton of ABC expressing concern about something that I have been almost obsessing about today and most recently. That is the fact that the public may be taking monkeypox too lightly assuming that it will stay confined to the population of men who have sex with men. In addition, we are doing nothing proactively to encourage people to cancel such events as ”Southern Decadence” and Black gay pride galas. We are starting to see cases of spillover into non men who have sex with men populations. Also, there is so much that we do not know about the Natural History of this disease and with the potential is to spread beyond MSM. I will have to talk to people at HHS and the White House that we cannot under play this outbreak. Call from Francis Collins, Acting Science Advisor to POTUS regarding NIH Director Choice – Charles Sawyer at MSKCC. Francis wants me to talk to him about the possibility of his being considered for the job of NIH director. It is essentially a recruiting call that Francis wants me to have with Charles. Apparently the president is not satisfied with either of the two names that was submitted to him: Mary Klotman (Duke) and Kimryn Rathmell (Vanderbilt). August 1, 2022 I have been somewhat concerned about Monkeypox the very beginning, but I am getting more and more concerned about it as time goes by. It clearly is spreading rapidly throughout the world the community of MSM with an estimated doubling time of about seven days; my concern is that we are all seeing some spray into the non-MSM communities such as the recent is very much bothering me is the continued plans to have MSM and gay pride galas at the same time that we are having acceleration of COVID as well as outbreaks of monkeypox (see above my conversation with Jen Ashton) I got my usual follow up call from Kevin O'Connor regarding the President's condition. He is concerned that his viral load is going in the wrong direction, namely, his CT value went from 18/16 to 16/14. He called me together with Walter Reed ID physician Wes Campbell to see if I agreed with them that they should not restart Paxlovid since the president does not have any new symptoms and his oxygen saturation is 98%. His chest is clear despite the fact that he has his typical nagging cough that antedated his illness. I agreed with them that they should not start a second course of Paxlovid. The administration will announce tomorrow that they are appointing a monkey pox Coordinator (Bob Fenton) and a Deputy Coordinator (Demetre Daskalakis). Clearly the response or at least the perception of the response of the government to monkeypox has not been good. They are hoping to reinvigorate the response by this appointment. Tonight, Kevin Munoz (WH Comms) called me and he asked me if it was OK to put a quote in the press release supporting this decision. The White House feels that because of my street credibility with the gay community that this would make the choice more acceptable. I agreed and provided a brief quote. Overwhelming evidence of benefit of vaccines and boosts: July 2, 2022 *****Important debate going on that relates back to the conflict that I had with the CDC I was concerned that they did not call for antigen testing following infection before someone is able to go back out into society. The president got infected, went on Paxlovid, and then rebounded. And so the question is when can he go back into society. Since he is the president and we test them every day he is staying isolated until his antigen test reverts to negative. At the same time, a number of papers including in the NEJM have shown that the median time of reversion to negative antigen test is actually five days and many people stay positive until day 8,9,10 and beyond. The CDC recommendations say that after five days since no requirement is made for testing (which I was very much against this decision and caused a ruckus by disagreeing with the CDC many months ago), A person can go out into society after five days with the mask so long as they have no symptoms. And after 10 days, if they still have no symptoms they can take their mask off. This obviously Will lead to people going out into society who are still antigen positive and are likely spreading the virus. That was my original concern when I disagreed with the CDC. BA.5 now 86% of isolates in USA: A lot of activity working with Rob at the FDA and Ashish and CDC to get the right messaging about recommendations for the booster in the fall. The FDA would like to say that the bivalent BA.5 boost is significantly better then the mono valent ancestral strain boost. There is a lot of pushback from the immunology community led by John Moore saying that the bivalent BA.5 boost is only marginally better then the monovalent ancestral strain. The data is somewhat confusing as explained below in an e-mail from Rick Koup to me. The debate is whether to ask people who are otherwise that low to moderate risk to get vaccinated now with the ancestral strain will wait until September when a supposedly much better boost is available. Most of us have no problem with low risk people waiting, however, I and others are concerned about overselling that the bivalent boost is much better then the ancestral boost, which is not the case I will list a couple of emails below that outline the dilemma: From: Fauci, Anthony (NIH/NIAID) [E] <afauci@niaid.nih.gov> Sent: Monday, August 1, 2022 6:53 PM To: Califf, Robert <RMC001@fda.hhs.gov> Cc: Murthy, Vivek (HHS/OASH) <Vivek.Murthy@hhs.gov>; Kessler, David (HHS/IOS) <David.Kessler@hhs.gov>; O'Connell, Dawn (OS/ASPR/IO) <Dawn.Oconnell@hhs.gov>; Ashish.K.Jha@who.eop.gov <ashish.k.jha@who.eop.gov>; Salcido, Dori A. EOP/WHO <Dori.Salcido@who.eop.gov>; Barclay, Lisa L. EOP/WHO <Lisa.L.Barclay@who.eop.gov> Subject: Follow-up of our call Rob: The point that I was making during the zoom call was that we should get the data which I believe is available that looks specifically at the titer of neutralizing antibody against BA.5 induced by the bivalent BA.5 boost versus the title of the neutralizing antibody against BA.5 induced by the monovalent ancestral boost. The reason I say we need that data at hand is because if we are going to say that the BA.5 bivalent boost is far superior to the ancestral boost and that is the reason should wait for it until the Fall, we better make sure that we have data that substantiates that. This is important, since there are people out there saying that the BA.5 variant boost is really not that much different from the monovalent ancestral boost when you compare neutralizing antibody titers against BA.5. If the data show that the BA.5 bivalent boost is only marginally better than the ancestral monovalent boost, we should say that the bivalent is “somewhat” better and not make it look like the bivalent is a major advance. Having said all of that, I still believe that the scenario that we agreed upon as delineated in your not to me is sound. I just do not want us to oversell how good and different the bivalent boost will be because this will trigger pushback from the immunology community. Best regards, Tony ------ From: Koup, Richard (NIH/VRC) [E] <rkoup@mail.nih.gov> Sent: Tuesday, August 2, 2022 9:08 AM To: Fauci, Anthony (NIH/NIAID) [E] <afauci@niaid.nih.gov> Cc: Lane, Cliff (NIH/NIAID) [E] <clane@niaid.nih.gov> Subject: RE: Follow-up of our call Hi Tony, Sorry about not getting back to you earlier. I don’t know why I didn’t see this on my cell phone this morning. There is no question that the bivalent BA4/5 will probably do better against BA4/5 than the current ancestral boost. This is based upon circumstantial evidence, some of which is presented below. (Mouse immunogenicity, infection with omicron). The actual human data do not exist yet. The best we have is from John Beigel in the mix and match study, which shows only a marginal increase in BA4/5 neut titers, and which Peter Marks decided not to present at the VRBPAC, probably because the data did not support his desired outcome. I think the problem is that the FDA wants to say that they have a better vaccine coming. Instead, they should be saying that if people need vaccination now they should get the vaccine now. As with all vaccines, they will be rolling out updated vaccines as they become available and when there are data to support the change. People in need of vaccines now should not delay in hopes of getting a “better” vaccine. John Beigel can share his data with you. Best, Rick Richard A. Koup, MD Acting Director Chief, Immunology Laboratory Vaccine Research Center, NIAID, NIH Tel: 301-594-8585 Fax: 301-480-2779 rkoup@mail.nih.gov Had my twice daily follow up conversation with Kevin O'Connor regarding the condition of the president. The POTUS continues to remain with minimal an unchanged symptomatology characterized by fatigue and his usual post nasal drip related cough. It is still rather concerning that his CT levels are still very low and have not come back reflecting a very high viral load. We maintain the decision discussed above about not treating a lab test and only reinstituting therapy if he has an exacerbation of symptoms. I emphasized that he must be followed closely for return of significant sxs, which might trigger retreatment. August 3, 2022 Spoke with Kevin O’Connor. POTUS stable, but still Ag positive. ------------------------ Monkeypox spreading globally: My comment in NY Times article by Sheryl Stolberg: “Centering the response operation at the White House gives the administration more flexibility to coordinate efforts across a range of agencies that might be involved, including FEMA, the Health and Human Services Department and the Department of Homeland Security. It also creates a designated team that has no responsibilities other than to combat monkeypox — a move that makes sense”, said Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, Mr. Biden’s chief medical adviser. NY Times keeps hammering HHS for slow response in getting vaccines out to the community for monkeypox. Article by By Sharon LaFraniere, Noah Weiland and Joseph Goldstein: NYT: “U.S. Could Have Had Many More Doses of Monkeypox Vaccine This Year” I met with Rino Rappuoli in my office today. They are planning to make him the chief scientific officer of a pandemic preparedness program by the Italian government in Sienna. Rino wants me, either before or after I leave the NIH to help them in an official way to set-up their program. I gave an interview with Nate Silver about a book that he's writing about risks in society. Rand Paul together with Roger Marshal, Rick Scott, Josh Hawley, Ron Johnson is holding a “hearing” on origins with the witnesses: Richard Ebright (Lab Director Waksman Lab. Of Microbiology, Rutgers), Kevin Esvelt, (Assistant Professor of Media Arts and Sciences MIT Media Lab) and Steven Quay (CEO, Atossa Theapeutics) all totally non-credible. Angel Rasmussen is blasting them on twitter as hacks. Once per year the minority are allowed to call a hearing and so Paul et al are using this as a publicity stunt. The majority has not even showed up. It is a total farse. I got a follow-up from Chase Crawford from my legislative staff who listened to the hearing and the result was expected in which Ebright came out strong saying that we did do gain of function and that I lied Quay also said that. However Esvelt said that some may call this gain of function whereas other scientists would say it's not since gain of function is such an ill defined term. He came the closest to reality. The rest of them would just pounding away that NIH funded gain of function and it likely caused the outbreak and that I lied saying that we did not. COVID: August 4, 2022 The Wrap: Fox News host Tucker Carlson continued to imply that infectious disease expert and White House advisor Dr. Anthony Fauci somehow is responsible for creating the coronavirus pandemic during Wednesday night’s episode of “Tucker Carlson Tonight.” *****Critically important issue with CDC. Usual problem The CDC surprised us all by announcing that they are going to come out tomorrow with an updating of their guidelines across several areas including how one addresses getting back in to the public after a bout of COVID. The updated recommendations that they give are really inherently inconsistent. A number of things about them are troublesome, but the one that really stands out is the fact that they say that if you are infected you must isolate for five days and if you decide to test and have tests available you cannot go out into society with positive tests until after day 10. If you test negative for two days in a row within the 10 day period, you can go out into society but you still have to wear a mask until day 10. Importantly and disturbingly, if you test positive on day 10 since you have already reached the 10 day mark you can then still go out into society without a mask!!!! On the other hand, if you decide not to test at all, on day five you can go out into society with a mask and then on day 10 after day 10 you could take the mask off without knowing whether you're positive or not. This seems just so inherently inconsistent that it's going to be very difficult to explain that to the public. When Ashish heard that this was going to be announced tomorrow he demanded that Rochelle brief us on it tonight. When she did it became clear that the above contradictions existed (see above). Prior to that meeting, Rochelle called me up during the day and tried to explain what they were doing and it immediately didn't make any sense to me. I called up Cliff and he agreed with me. They seem to think that a positive test on day 10 doesn't necessarily mean that you're dangerous to go out into society because you should really be not infective after day 10 when in fact if you have a documented positive antigen test on day 10 all the data indicate that you definitely are transmissible since a positive antigen test means that you have replication competent virus. And so, the recommendations for those who cannot test because they don't have access to test are inherently contradictory to the recommendations for those who can test. This is going to drive Ron Klain completely crazy. In fact, Ashish called me up and said that Ron Klain is already so furious with Rochelle (even before he has heard this) that he fears that her job is in serious danger. Covid perhaps plateauing: POTUS continues to improve: William Patrick Connelly, Jr who threatened me and my family goes to jail. This is the guy yhat Brett Rowland tracked down. See Washington Post article: West Virginia man sentenced for threats against Fauci, officials Thomas Patrick Connally, Jr., was sentenced to more than three years in federal prison COVID cases: United States • Total Cases: 91,676,264, 7-Day average: 117,351 (-7.3%) • Total Deaths: 1,027,370, 7-Day average: 378 (-4.9%) • Total new hospital admissions: 5,078,893, 7-Day average 6,112 (-4.4) Worldwide [Source: WHO] - most recent day • Total Cases: 578,142,444 ( 972,954 new) • Total Deaths: 6,405,080 (2,491 new)
PRESS: MSNBC Black/Hispanic Journalists Fireside chat with Alicia Menendez; August 5, 2022 Met with Hans Kluge – WHO Regional Director for Europe. He is seeking my advice on multiple issues such as COVID, MPX, and vaccine related polio. He said the Europeans rely very heavily on my opinion: Heard from Rochelle last night. Latest decision is that they wil hold off on the above announcement. Had meeting with Bruce Tromberg, Rochelle, Robbie Goldstein and CDC folks together with FDA folks (Rob Califf and team) and Steve Sha to try to get an agreement about guidelines for testing for isolation/quarantine when to stop isolation/masking, etc. We are coming to an agreement that is not perfect, but that is workable. Had another Zoom with the same team + Dawn O’Connell to explain to her our POTUS still positive on day 7 following rebound. ****Had a really major victory today resulting from a great collaboration between FDA, CDC, BARDA, me and John Beigel who was responsible for the design of a trial that would confirm that the study published in the journal Vaccine in 2015 by Frey et al and Bob Belshe showed that 1/5 the dose of the MVA monkey pox vaccine administered intradermally was as effective as a full dose of the subcutaneous administration. When we made this known to Bavarian Nordic (BN), lower level marketing people in the company objected strenuously, very likely because they saw this as a diminution in the need for full doses. Amazingly, they distorted the data and tried to marshal congressional support for blocking the use of the doses in the 1/5 dilution intradermally. This was an egregious attempt to interfere with the sound public health maneuver. To make a long story short when John Beigel showed all the data from the 2015 paper come it became clear that this was a very important way to expand the number of doses that were available. We finally got the leadership of BN to agree to continue to ship us the doses since their lower level people as indicated above were trying to block shipment in order to prevent us from distributing the vaccine in the 1/5 dilution. After much discussion with the FDA, we finally convinced them to issue an emergency use authorization (EUA) for the administration of the MVA vaccine in the1/5 intraderma; dilution. This is a major victory for the prevention of monkey pox because it turns 300,000 doses into 1.5 million doses and 1,000,000 doses into 5,000,000 doses. I consider this one of the major victories that I was a part of in trying to expedite the response to monkey pox.
PRESS: WTOP Podcast with Luke Garrett & Megan Cloherty; CNN with Erica Hill; MSNBC with Andrea Mitchell; August 6, 2022 Continued drama now involving Larry Horowitz calling me up talking about how angry Ron Klain is at Rochelle for wanting to come out with a statement that the vaccines do not protect against infection at all. I have to look at the data but I think that although protection against true infection is low to modest at best, it is not zero and so I cannot figure out, and I am sure that this is what is bugging Ron, why the CDC needs to put that statement out now exactly at the time when we are pushing people to get the new BA.5 variant in early to mid-September. August 7, 2022 (Sunday) Long conversations with the CDC team (Sherri Berger; Rochelle), Steve Sha, Vivek, Kessler to get the wording correct on the condition to end isolation regarding testing and masking. August 8, 2022 For some time now the issue of ”Long COVID” has been gaining momentum with much frustration in the community since recent studies showed that up to 20% of people develop more COVID following infection. Senator Tom Kaine (D-VA) has been a strong advocate for support since he is suffering for well over a year from long COVID characterized by dysesthesias. The NIH has been given $1.15 Billion to study long COVID. However, I have been very disappointed in the initiatives that have been brought forth under the leadership of NHLBI with Gary Gibbons and Amy Patterson as well as Walter Koroshetz. Rachel Levine is now been given the leadership for this at HHS. Recent description: Politico: Tim Kaine has long Covid. That’s not moving Congress to act. While Kaine and other Democrats in the House and Senate are pushing for action, they have failed to gain meaningful momentum due to lack of GOP support. We had important conversations with activists James Krellenstein, Gregg Gonsalves, Peter Staley and Emily Bass regarding MPX vaccination. Peter alerted me today that James and other activists are concerned about misrepresenting the effective of the 1/5 approach to Jynneos (see above). I put together a hastily arranged Zoom at 12:45 PM to get us together and figure out what the problem is. The problem is that the activists are concerned that the data are not strong that 1/5 the dose of Jynneos intrasdermally (ID) will be protective. their argument is a bit inconsistent since the antibody titers induced by Jynneos ID are exactly equivalent to a full dose delivered subcutaneously (SC). The activists do not seem to be concerned about the efficacy of the SC dose, but they are concerned that we might be overselling the efficacy of the 1/5 dose. This may be an example of their making the perfect being the enemy of the good. It is much better to have some vaccine rather than no vaccine and so we needed to settle what their concern was since the FDA will be issuing tomorrow an EUA for the 1/5 ID dose. I got the activists on the zoom with Cliff, John Beigel, and me and we hashed it out. Peter Staley was agreeing with us and we finally got James and Gregg to come to the agreement that it is best to go ahead with the 1/5 ID program at the same time as trying to get data with a clinical trial that John will do as to the efficacy. That is better than having not enough doses and having a 5 minute notice getting the activist community together with my team to try and straighten out a potential disagreement. We had another zoom discussion with the HHS team led by Sherri Berger (CDC) to try to get the precise language for the CDC updating of their website discussion of the efficacy of the vaccine in preventing infection and transmission (see above). I believe that we got it right after a very good discussion among the group. The critical issue was to indicate that the vaccine protection against infection and transmission is only modest and diminishes with time. The concern was on the part of the White House that the CDC would say that it was zero. Now this is not really a consideration since the wording indicates in a positive way (by my suggestion) that although the protection against infection and transmission wanes overtime, that is a good reason why we encourage people to get the updated BA.5 bivalent boost. I believe we avoided a confrontation between the CDC and the White House which would have endangered Rochelle
PRESS: Interview with Giuseppe Sarcina of Italian newspaper – Corrierre Della Sera; August 9-11, 2022 Global – 585,086,861/6,422,914; USA – 92,426,945/1,030,777 Cases and hospitalization plateauing but deaths still at ~300-400/day Had a wonderful trip to Seattle where I received the honorary “Hutch” award from the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research center and the Seattle Mariners baseball organization. I did a fireside chat at the Medical Center with Larry Corey and then threw out the first pitch that evening for the Mariners and New York Yankees baseball game. In contrast to the disastrous pitch at the Washington Nationals game two years ago, this was a perfect pitch to the manager of the Mariners, Scott Servais, who served as the catcher. Sat in the “owner’s box” at the stadium and watched the game. Had a great conversation with Eddie Vedder (lead vocalist and guitarist for the rock band Pearl Jam.) and his wife Jill. Eddie reminds me a lot of Bono. One of the things that was striking about the evening at the ball game was that when they announced me as receiving the award with giant pictures of me on the photocam, I received a prolonged standing ovation from 45,000 people in the stands. Yet, the far right as exemplified by the newspaper The Washington Examiner put on YouTube the headline “Fauci booed at Mariners game. They put the microphone next to about five or six people out of 45,000 who were booing and saying I should go to jail and they completely ignored the 45,000 people that gave me a prolonged standing ovation. This is so exemplary of the distortion of reality by the far right. Monkeypox continues to surge: August 12, 2022 Deaths seem to be up a bit at around 400/day! August 13, 2022 More drama with regard to the CDC and Rochelle Walenski. After much going back and forth between the CDC and the other docs including me, Vivek, Steve Cha, and to some extent David Kessler, we thought we had gotten them pulled back from making the statement that the vaccines were not effective at all in preventing infection and transmission. The reason this is an issue is that if they came out with that statement, which in fact is not entirely true since there is some degree of modest but declining protection as you would expect, then this would conflict with the statement and effort of recommending that people get the updated bivalent BA.5 vaccine in September. In addition, it would undermine the DoJ’s efforts at mandates for vaccines under certain circumstances. In any event, the CDC agreed to pull back on the statement of absolute lack of efficacy of vaccines against infections and transmission and take a more measured approach of saying that the vaccines provides only modest and waning efficacy against infection and transmission and that is why we should heed the advice of getting the updated booster in Sept. However, although they did this on their website, the MMWR that cam out yesterday had the same original damning language. When Larry Horowitz and Ashish noticed this, Larry went off the wall and in a somewhat agitated manner called me up this AM and said that this is the last straw and he was sure that when Ron Klain gets back from Spain this weekend he would fire Rochelle. Ashish was more measured and seems to have come to the conclusion that sooner or later (maybe not right now) Rochelle would have to go. Let us see what happens…..probably nothing August 14, 2022 Had a wonderful dinner last night at the extraordinary home of Adrienne Arsht at 9 Chevy Chase Circle, Chevy Chase, MD. Guests included Alexandra Villard de Borchgrave (Chairman. Light of Healing Hope Foundation and former war correspondent), Jonathan Capehart (MSNBC and Washington Post), Pamela Melroy (former astronaut and Deputy Administrator, NASA), Sen Bill Nelson and Wife Grace (Administrator, NASA), Vivian Salama (WSJ – war correspondent), Jonathan Goodrich (Attorney, Interior Department). 35,000 cases of MPX globally: August 15, 2022 Great disparity of COVID deaths comparing USA and other countries:
PRESS: The Shade Room (Online streaming); The Grio TV; August 16, 2022 I had a very important and moving conversation with Ron Klain in his West Wing Office today at 11:45 AM (bright, sunny, mild day). I announced to Ron that I would be stepping down from all of my positions including chief medical advisor to the President. I will make the announcement next week and my date for stepping down will be sometime in December of this year. One of the concerns that Jeff Zients and I had would be that Ron would want to push back on my leaving giving all the trouble that he's having with the CDC. However, he somewhat surprised me by saying that his instinct would be to push strongly to convince me not to leave, given that he considers me “one of the most important public servants in the history of the country” given that I have saved millions of lives over the last several years. He would be almost embarrassed trying to convince me to change my mind about something that I obviously have thought about for some time and that I thoroughly deserve. He went on to say so many nice things that I was embarrassed. He said that he considered it a major privilege in his life to have had the opportunity to work with me both during the Obama administration with Ebola and now with COVID and monkey pox. He said that he would arrange tomorrow for me to either see the president if the president comes to the White House tomorrow; if he does not come to the White House then arrange a phone call between me and the president tomorrow. It was a most moving meeting the extraordinary praise shown towards me and the sincere appreciation for all that I have done for the country and the world during my long career. He sounded extremely sincere. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------- NIH will write a Science Forum on NIH accomplishments in COVID. Below is a preliminary outline of what will be said. I added a mention of the role of the COVID - 19Prevention Network (CoVPN) in the clinical trials of all the vaccines: Key COVID-19 Milestones – NIH High-level COVID-19 Accomplishments January 10: The genetic sequence of the SARS-CoV-2 virus was released, which was used as the blueprint for the rapid development of the mRNA COVID-19 vaccines. Blurb: SARS-CoV-2 genetic sequence released Image: Ask Palladian for timeline image January 13: NIH and Moderna finalized the design of a vaccine candidate and began working to produce it. Blurb: NIH/Moderna finalized COVID vaccine candidate design Image: https://www.flickr.com/photos/nihgov/50047466123/in/album-72157713108522106/ January 31: The United States declared COVID-19 a public health emergency. Blurb: U.S. declared COVID-19 a public health emergency February 25: NIH launched the Adaptive COVID-19 Treatment Trial (ACTT) series of studies with a randomized, placebo-controlled clinical trial to evaluate the safety and efficacy of the antiviral remdesivir in adults hospitalized with COVID-19 (ACTT-1). Press release Blurb: NIH launched trial of the antiviral remdesivir Image: https://www.shut terstock.com/image-photo/remdesivir-covid19-liquid-medicationbackground-1706609728 March 11: The World Health Organization declared COVID-19 a pandemic. Blurb: WHO declared COVID-19 a pandemic March 16: The Phase 1 clinical trial started for the investigational vaccine, known as mRNA-1273, codeveloped by NIH and Moderna. Press release Blurb: NIH/Moderna COVID vaccine Phase 1 clinical trial started Image: 3.16.20 Phase 1 Moderna April 17: NIH launched the Accelerating COVID-19 Therapeutic Interventions and Vaccines (ACTIV) initiative, a public–private partnership focused on developing treatments and vaccines for COVID-19. ACTIV streamlined the process for adding new agents into trials and rapidly deployed existing NIH networks of more than 620 trial sites across the U.S. and internationally. The initiative evaluated over 800 therapeutic agents and prioritized 33 for inclusion in ACTIV master protocols. Six of these agents have shown compelling evidence of benefit in randomized clinical trials. Press release Blurb: NIH launched ACTIV, a public-private partnership to develop treatments and vaccines Image: 4.17.20 ACTIV April 21: After convening a panel of academic and government experts to critically review and synthesize available data from clinical trials and other study reports, the first NIH COVID-19 Treatment Guidelines were published to provide clinicians with guidance on how to care for patients with COVID-19. The panel has issued more than 50 updated editions since April 2020 and the guidelines have been visited more than 30 million times. Press release Blurb: NIH published the COVID-19 Treatment Guidelines April 29: NIH launched the Rapid Acceleration of Diagnostics (RADx) initiative to speed innovation leading to reliable diagnostic testing. Press release Blurb: NIH launched RADx initiative to speed innovation in diagnostic testing Image: 4.29.20 RADx May 22: Preliminary peer-reviewed data from the ACTT-1 trial indicated that the antiviral drug remdesivir is safe and improved clinical outcomes for hospitalized adults with COVID-19. Press release Blurb: Antiviral drug remdesivir found safe and effective. Image: https:// www.shutterstock.com/image-photo/medication-prepared-people-affected-bycovid19-1731814354 May 24: NIH created a public COVID-19 OpenData Portal to openly and quickly share COVID-19-related drug repurposing data and COVID-19 variant-specific effects against all approved drugs. It was a key resource for the ACTIV Tracking Resistance And Coronavirus Evolution (TRACE) efforts. Blurb: COVID-19 OpenData Portal shares data on drug repurposing and variant effects with drugs. Image: 5.20 COVID Data Portal variants July 8: NIH launched the COVID-19 Prevention Network (COVPN), a clinical trials network to test COVID-19 vaccines and other prevention tools. Press release Blurb: NIH launched COVID-19 Prevention Network to test COVID vaccines and treatments. July 27: The Phase 3 clinical trial started for the investigational vaccine mRNA-1273, co-developed by NIH and Moderna. The trial enrolled approximately 30,000 adult volunteers who did not have COVID-19. Press release Blurb: NIH/Moderna COVID vaccine Phase 3 clinical trial began, enrolling ≈30,000 adult volunteers. Image: https://www.shutterstock.com/image-photo/covid19-vacci nation-asian-male-patientgetting-1831245058 August 4: NIH launches the first ACTIV clinical trials to test the safety and efficacy of treatments both for mild and moderate COVID-19 patients and for patients hospitalized with COVID-19. ACTIV-2 press release, ACTIV-3 Press Release Blurb: First ACTIV trials to evaluate the safety and efficacy of COVID therapeutics begin. Image: 8.4.20 ACTIV trials September 16: Recognizing the need to ensure inclusive participation in vaccine trials, NIH launched Community Engagement Alliance (CEAL) Against COVID-19 Disparities. CEAL provided outreach and engagement opportunities in racial and ethnic minority communities disproportionately affected by the COVID-19 pandemic. (In 2021, NIH supplemented the effort with $29 million in funding from the American Rescue Plan). September press release Blurb: NIH launched CEAL to ensure diversity in vaccine trials and reach out to disproportionately affected communities. Image: 9.16.20 CEAL September 30: NIH expanded research to improve COVID-19 testing among underserved and vulnerable populations as part of the RADx initiative, the RADx Underserved Populations (RADxUP) program. Press release Blurb: NIH expanded RADx initiative to improve COVID-19 testing in underserved populations. Image: 9.30.20 RADx UP October 2: Quidel Sofia 2, the first point-of-care test to detect COVID-19 supported by NIH’s RADx initiative, receives emergency use authorization (EUA) from the FDA. Blurb: First RADX-supported COVID test received EUA. Image: 2.2.20 Test Kit December 11: The ACTT-2 trial found that baricitinib, an anti-inflammatory drug, reduced time to recovery for people hospitalized with COVID-19 who were treated with remdesivir. Press release Blurb: Trial results showed remdesivir in combination with anti-inflammatory drug baricitinib reduced hospital recovery time Image: https://www.shutterstock.com/image-photo/medication-prepared-peopl e-affected-bycovid19-1970653763 December 15: The first over-the-counter COVID-19 test, developed with support from NIH’s RADx initiative, received an FDA emergency use authorization. Blurb: First RADx-supported over-the-counter COVID-19 test received EUA. Image: 12.15.20 RADx OTC December 18: FDA authorized the NIH-Moderna vaccine for emergency use for people 18 years of age and older. The NIH-Moderna vaccine went on to receive authorization for various age groups and is now available for everyone over the age of 6 months. Blurb: FDA grants EUA to NIH/Modera vaccine Image: https://www.shutterstock.com/image-illustration/cracow-malopolskie-poland-october10-2021- 1891094320 January 5: NIH’s RADx launched an interagency variant task force to evaluate the impact of new variants on the performance of all authorized point of care and over the counter diagnostics, as well as tests in pre-authorization review. This ongoing partnership with FDA informs regulatory decisions, RADx investments, manufacturer designs, and government procurements. Blurb: Interagency variant task force launched to evaluate impact of variants on COVID tests Image: 1.5.21 variant tests January 20: The ACTIV Tracking Resistance and Coronavirus Evolution (TRACE) initiative launched. It is focused on identifying emerging variants of SARS-CoV-2. TRACE aims to prioritize which viral variants should be studied to determine the effectiveness of vaccines and therapeutics, coordinate data sharing, and report results regularly to allow confident decision making by the U.S. Government, health professionals, and pharmaceutical organizations. Blurb: The ACTIV Tracking Resistance and Coronavirus Evolution (TRACE) initiative began to identify, evaluate, and report on emerging variants. Image: https://www.flickr.com/photos/nihgov/52129878815/in/album-72157713108522106/ February 27: FDA authorized the Janssen COVID-19 vaccine for emergency use. NIH supported the development of the single-shot vaccine, which does not require special refrigeration. Blurb: FDA grants EUA to Janssen COVID vaccine Image: https://www.shutterstock.com/image-photo/izmir-turkey-january-17-2021-coronavirus1925271767 March 31: In collaboration with the CDC, NIH launched an innovative community health initiative called “Say Yes! COVID Test” for counties in North Carolina and Tennessee to determine if frequent self-administered COVID-19 testing can help residents reduce community transmission. Say Yes! COVID Test went on to distribute 6.8 million rapid tests that were developed with RADx support in numerous targeted areas throughout the country. Press release Blurb: NIH launched community health initiative Say Yes! COVID Test to assess frequent selftesting. Image: 3.31.20 Say Yes COVID Test April 15: NIH announced the Safe Return to School Diagnostic Testing Initiative, which awarded up to $48 million over several months to fund projects to build evidence on safely returning students, teachers, and support staff to in-person school in areas with vulnerable and underserved populations. (Additional funds issued July press release). April press release Blurb: NIH launched Safe Return to School Diagnostic Testing Initiative Image: https://www.shutterstock.com/image-photo/side-view-portrait-yo ung-africanamericanman-1967011807 August 4: Part of the ACTIV initiative, an NIH-supported clinical trial showed that treating moderately ill hospitalized COVID-19 patients with a full-dose blood thinner reduced their need for organ support, such as mechanical ventilation, and improved their chances of leaving the hospital. Press release Blurb: ACTIV-4 clinical trial found that a full-dose blood thinner improved outcomes for moderately ill hospitalized patients. September 15: NIH announced $470 million in funding for a nationwide study of tens of thousands of people to support research on the long-term effects of COVID-19 called the NIH REsearching COVID to Enhance Recovery (RECOVER) Initiative. Press release Blurb: NIH funded REsearching COVID to Enhance Recovery (RECOVER) Initiative to study COVID’s long-term effects. Image: Can we use this image from the timeline? NIH Strategic Response to COVID-19 | NIH COVID-19 Research October 9: Brii Biosciences filed for an FDA emergency use authorization for the ACTIV-3 monoclonal therapeutic antibody combination amubarvimab/romlusevimab that demonstrated clinical effectiveness in preventing progression of disease for mild to moderate COVID-19 patients. Blurb: ACTIV-3 trial found monoclonal therapeutic antibody combination effective in preventing disease progression in mild to moderate patients. October 27: NIH announced the Independent Test Assessment Program (ITAP), which established an accelerated pathway to support FDA evaluation of tests with potential for large-scale manufacturing. The program is an extension of the NIH RADx initiative. In less than two months, the first two over-the-counter tests that went through the ITAP accelerated pathway received EUAs, contributing millions of tests per month to the domestic supply. Press Release Blurb: NIH announced ITAP, an accelerated pathway to support FDA evaluation of COVID tests. Image: https://www.shutterstock.com/image-photo/portland-usa-feb-5-2022-closeup2118748202 January 26: The NIH clinical trial on booster doses of different COVID-19 vaccines to determine the safety and efficacy of mixed vaccine regimens found that all combinations of primary and booster vaccine resulted in increased neutralizing antibody levels. The data strongly suggest that mixed COVID-19 vaccines could increase protective efficacy against symptomatic SARS-CoV-2 infection. Press release Blurb: NIH clinical trial data strongly suggest that mixed COVID-19 vaccines could increase protective efficacy against symptomatic SARS-CoV-2 infection. Image: FC getting his vaccine? https://www.flickr.com/photos/nihgov/50747919667/in/album72157717478402642/ OR https://www.shutterstock.com/image-photo/black-teen-girl-showsvaccine-mark-1899903244 June 2: Topline results from the ACTIV-1 Immune Modulators clinical trial showed that immune modulator drugs improved survival for people hospitalized with COVID-19. Press release Blurb: ACTIV-1 immune modulators trials meet secondary endpoint/improved survival July 20: The CDC recommended that Novavax’s COVID-19 vaccine be used as another primary series option for adults in the United States ages 18 years and older. NIH supported development of the Novavax vaccine, NVX-CoV2373, and is studying it in the “mix & match” trial, where adult volunteers who have been fully vaccinated against COVID-19 receive booster doses of different COVID-19 vaccines to determine the safety and immunogenicity of mixed boosted regimens. Blurb: CDC recommended Novavax vaccine for adults Image: https://www.shutterstock.com/image-photo/novavax-coronavirus-vaccine-d octorsnurses-hands-1904970715 April 29: Two years after its launch, RADx-supported companies increased cumulative U.S. capacity by >2.5 billion tests, helping drive a national paradigm shift where over the counter (home) and point of care tests become the dominant form of testing. Blurb: After two years, RADx-supported companies increased U.S. capacity by >2.5 billion tests Image: 4.29.22 RADx test capacity Monkey pox cases in the UK starting to trend downward: August 17, 2022 E-mail from Ron Klain after I met with him and asked to speak with the POTUS: From: Klain, Ronald A. EOP/WHO <RK.COS@WHO.EOP.GOV> Sent: Wednesday, August 17, 2022 10:19 AM To: Fauci, Anthony (NIH/NIAID) [E] <afauci@niaid.nih.gov> Cc: Goepfert, Stephen M. EOP/WHO <Stephen.M.Goepfert@who.eop.gov> Subject: [EXTERNAL] RE: Thank you Tony, Sad for me, sad for America, but no one has earned it more. The President is anxious to speak with you today – he travelled to Delaware last night. I am copying Stephen Goepfert here, who is with the President in Wilmington, to arrange the timing for your call. Ron I just had a wonderful conversation with President Biden. He called me up (started the conversation with “Hi, Joe here….”) and told me how much he admired me and how much of a pleasure it was to work very closely with me over the past year and three quarters. He told me that he wanted to guarantee that I would have as much protection as I need for as long as I need it. I told him how much I enjoyed working with him and that I was actually thinking of leaving government at the end of the last administration. However, when he became president and offered me the job as his chief medical advisor it was a job that I absolutely could not refuse. I also told him that working with him over the last two years was the capstone of my career. He was quite moved by that and seemed to be very pleased with hearing that.
PRESS: Interview with Rolling Stone (Matt Sullivan) regarding story on Steph Curry August 18, 2022 Global – 590,659,276/6,440163; USA – 93,124,238/1,034,118 ---------- CDC (Rochelle Walensky) comes out with a strong statement of “mea culpa” admitting that the CDC is broken and has failed terribly in the response to the COVID pandemic. LONG OVERDUE! CDC Moving Forward Fact Sheet. NY Times (La Franiere and Weilland): Walensky, Citing Botched Pandemic Response, Calls for C.D.C. Reorganization Among other flaws, public guidance during the coronavirus pandemic was “confusing and overwhelming,” the agency said. ------------------------ RFK, jr continues his destructive ways: Ars Technica: Anti-vaccine activists giddily celebrate as poliovirus spreads in NY -------- I defend CDC and Rochelle regarding their admission of their botched response by commending them for honesty and trying to reform. I did this on MSNBC with Andrea Mitchell.
PRESS: MSNBC with Andrea Mitchell; Podcast “In the Bubble” with Any Slavitt; CNN – “The Situation Room” with Wolf Blitzer August 19, 2022 Cases seem to be plateauing throughout the country with some exceptions. Perhaps we are coming into a downswing as we enter the Fall
PRESS: Interview with Marissa Evans of LA Times on racial disparities in MPX; WTOP Radio; August 20, 2022 Had my usual every three-week zoom meeting with Drs. Li and Hellmann. I explained to them that as of Monday at 11:00 AM when I made the announcement of my stepping down from the NIH, I will enter a new chapter in my career and in my life. There's obviously stress and anxiety associated with this decision. However, there's also excitement for the new adventure and unknown. Had a wonderful Zoom meeting with Nathan Chen at 12:30 PM. He had been wanting to meet me for some time now and we finally connected by zoom. He was so modest and nice and kept expressing what an honor it was to meet me and speak with me. He is going into his third year at Yale having taken off most of two years to practice for the Olympics where he gave probably the most historically perfect performance to win the gold medal. He plans to go to medical school after he graduates. I was struck by his maturity and modesty when I asked him why he was interested in medicine. He said all his life he had been practicing to make himself better and better and better, but it was all about himself. Now he wants to do something that has a positive impact on society and on other individuals. The sign of a very mature young man. I had a very long (1 hour and 10 minue) exclusive interview with Yasmeen Abutaleb (Washington Post) concerning my upcoming stepping down from Government service. Embargoed until Monday at 11:00 AM August 21, 2022 Interesting trivia (Sports Business Journal): Dr. Anthony Fauci’s First Pitch Sets Baseball Card Record By Tom TaylorJuly 28, 2020 • • • Topps has issued a trading card of Dr. Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, throwing out the first pitch of the MLB season last week. The card was only available for 24 hours, under the company’s Topps Now brand, but it set a new record with 51,512 sold. August 22, 2022 TODAY IS THE DAY! I announce that I will be stepping down from the NIH as well as from my position as chief medical adviser to the president effective December, 2022. There has been a literal avalanche of positive feedback about my announcement with hundreds and hundreds of texts and emails of congratulation and praise for me. President has come out with a statement as have a number of other prominent individuals. See the president statement below: Statement from President Joe Biden on the announcement of Dr. Anthony Fauci’s Departure from NIAID AUGUST 22, 2022•STATEMENTS AND RELEASES During my time as Vice President, I worked closely with Dr. Anthony Fauci on the United States’ response to Zika and Ebola. I came to know him as a dedicated public servant, and a steady hand with wisdom and insight honed over decades at the forefront of some of our most dangerous and challenging public health crises. When it came time to build a team to lead our COVID-19 response – in fact, in one of my first calls as President-elect – I immediately asked Dr. Fauci to extend his service as my Chief Medical Advisor to deal with the COVID-19 crisis our nation faced. In that role, I’ve been able to call him at any hour of the day for his advice as we’ve tackled this once-in-a-generation pandemic. His commitment to the work is unwavering, and he does it with an unparalleled spirit, energy, and scientific integrity. Dr. Fauci has served under seven Republican and Democratic Presidents during his career, beginning with Ronald Reagan. He was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2008 under President George W. Bush. For almost four decades, he has served as Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, helping our country navigate health crises ranging from HIV/AIDS to COVID-19. Because of Dr. Fauci’s many contributions to public health, lives here in the United States and around the world have been saved. As he leaves his position in the U.S. Government, I know the American people and the entire world will continue to benefit from Dr. Fauci’s expertise in whatever he does next. Whether you’ve met him personally or not, he has touched all Americans’ lives with his work. I extend my deepest thanks for his public service. The United States of America is stronger, more resilient, and healthier because of him. Statement of Sec. Becerra: Statement by HHS Secretary Xavier Becerra on Upcoming Departure of Dr. Anthony S. Fauci Today, Anthony S. Fauci, M.D. announced he is stepping down in December 2022 from the positions of Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) and Chief of the NIAID Laboratory of Immunoregulation, as well as Chief Medical Advisor to the President. U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Xavier Becerra issued the following statement: “This is a decision we all knew would eventually come but hoped never would. As HHS Secretary, I am privileged to know Dr. Fauci professionally and personally and deeply admire his decades of public service that have undoubtedly improved the health of millions of people globally. When I arrived at HHS, the world was one year into the COVID-19 pandemic. I quickly came to rely on Dr. Fauci’s wisdom and counsel in our response, and along with his scientific acumen, I treasure his ability to break down complex science in simple terms to the American people to save lives. “His selfless passion to bring hope and healing to people fighting for their health knows no bounds. In fact, Dr. Fauci’s pioneering approach to tackle public health decades ago included a critical role in our nation’s domestic and international response to HIV/AIDS, ultimately helping create the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief. “I will be sorry to see Dr. Fauci depart in December, but I wish him all the best in his future endeavors and look forward to witnessing his next chapter.” Larry Tabak statement: Statement from Lawrence A. Tabak, D.D.S., Ph.D., on the departure of Anthony S. Fauci, M.D. Anthony S. Fauci, M.D., Director, National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Today marks the end of an era with the announcement by Anthony S. Fauci, M.D., that he will be stepping down as the Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), Chief of the NIAID Laboratory of Immunoregulation, and Chief Medical Advisor to President Biden. Tony’s departure will cause a tectonic shift in the modern history of the National Institutes of Health. He is the model public servant — dedicated and selfless, and a brilliant scientist and physician who is passionate about developing treatments and cures for those who are sick and suffering. He has dedicated his life’s work to advancing knowledge about the causes of complex diseases ranging from HIV to asthma, rarely satisfied with anything less than a cure. For Tony, it’s personal. He works tirelessly on behalf of all patients, often at great personal expense, and always bringing his Brooklyn tenacity to the fight. I know of no one more dedicated than Tony to the mission of the NIH and the health of the American people. Tony’s NIH career spans 54 years, 38 of those leading NIAID, advising seven U.S. Presidents, and reassuring the public as America’s doctor during outbreaks of infectious diseases, from HIV to Ebola to COVID-19. Without exception, he is always guided by the science. It’s been an extraordinary privilege and honor to have worked by his side and to have learned so much from him — I will miss him greatly. But I also look forward to seeing what Tony will do next. I have no doubt that he will continue to have an enormous impact on the world. Lawrence A. Tabak, D.D.S., Ph.D. Performing the Duties of the NIH Director Ashish K. Jha, MD, MPH @AshishKJha46 Tony Fauci is the most consequential physician scientist of the past half century Having served 7 Presidents through HIV/AIDS, Anthrax, H1N1, Ebola, Zika, and of course COVID Thousands consider him their mentor, including me Grateful for your service to our country Dr. Fauci Ronald Klain @WHCOS I cannot think of a public servant who has done as much to save as many lives for as long a period as Dr. Tony Fauci. And he is a gem of a person. Tweet See new Tweets Conversation Barack Obama @BarackObama I will always be grateful that we had a once-in-a-century public health leader to guide us through a once-in-acentury pandemic. Few people have touched more lives than Dr. Fauci – and I’m glad he’s not done yet.
PRESS: Beautiful article in the Washington Post by Yasmeen Abutaleb: Fauci plans to step down in December after half a century in government By Yasmeen Abutaleb Updated August 22, 2022 at 2:20 p.m. EDT|Published August 22, 2022 at 11:00 a.m. EDT NY Times by Cheryl Gay Stolberg: Fauci Says He Will Step Down in December to Pursue His ‘Next Chapter’ MSNBC with Rachel Maddow (Rachel was extremely laudatory) August 23, 2022 NY Times Opinion piece by Gregg Gonsalves is really nice: OPINION GUEST ESSAY Anthony Fauci’s Retirement Marks the End of an Era , 5:00 a.m. ET
PRESS: WTOP with Nick Iannelli; CNN “New Day” with Kaitlan Collins; WGN Bob Sirrott Show (Chicago Radio); Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC Radio); FOX News “Live” with Neil Cavuto; BBC Newsnight TV; NPR “All Things Considered” with Mary Louise Kelly August 24, 2022 The number of texts and e-mail of thanks and praiseupon the announcement of my stepping down are stunning, ranging in the several hundreds. I am getting truly exhausted trying to answer all of them. ----- NEWS CLIPPING — WASHINGTON POST — CONDENSED (1 SOURCE PAGE) “Jill Biden rebounded after a course of Paxlovid just the way I did!! -------- Cases slowly (very slowly) coming down: Very nice article about me and retirement in Nature: ‘He has saved countless lives’: US…” Perspective by Robin Givhan Senior critic-at-large|Follow August 23, 2022 at 7:10 p.m. EDT With all of the praise and adulation that I'm getting from so many sources, the far right GOP keep saying that they're going to investigate me after I stepped down even though there's absolutely nothing to investigate me about; they are looking very mean spirited. August 25, 2025 Interesting cartoon in Washington Post concerning my stepping down: We are really not coming down in cases/hospitalizations/ or deaths very sharply. We seemed to have hit a plateau with a very slight trend downward. United States • Total Cases: 93,777,133, 7-Day average: 90,676 (-6.7%) • Total Deaths: 1,037,281 7-Day average: 390 (-11.6%) • Total new hospital admissions: 5,198,924 7-Day average 5,614 (-6.6%) Worldwide [Source: WHO] - most recent day • Total Cases: 596,119,505 (829,163 new) • Total Deaths: 6,457,101 (2,564 new) ------- In Science indicating how Tucker Carlson was ranting about me after hearing of my stepping down: Almost everything Tucker Carlson said about Anthony Fauci this week was misleading or false Science fact-checks the Fox host’s rant against “Saint Tony,” who announced his retirement on Monday • 25 Aug 2022 • 6:10 PM By Jon Cohen Tweet from Bill Gates: Tony, you were an amazing public servant long before COVID-19 struck – and now you are a hero to millions of people, including me. npr.org Fauci to step down in December after decades of public service Dr. Anthony Fauci helped guide the U.S. through the COVID crisis, and earlier in his career played a key role in the response to AIDS. He has served under seven presidents. The Soapbox Quoting the New Republic: We May Never See Another Lifelong Public Servant Like Anthony Fauci In a distinguished government career spanning more than half a century, he expertly steered America through two devastating pandemics. But given how Republicans have maliciously attacked him, why would anyone want to follow in his footsteps?
PRESS: Bloomberg News with David Westin; Spectrum News Los Angeles with Giselle Fernandez; August 26, 2022 Dan Diamond story in the Washington Post: Health House panel: Trump sought to pressure FDA on covid vaccines, treatment The report offers fresh details about that campaign and how it rattled agency officials. This panel report documents the attempts of Peter Navarro and Hatfill to undermine me and get me fired since I pushed back on Hydroxychloroquine: https://coronavirus.house.gov/sites/democrats.coronavirus.house.gov/files/2022.08.24%20The%20Tru mp%20White%20House%E2%80%99s%20Relentless%20Attacks%20on%20FDA%E2%80%99s%20Corona virus%20Response.pdf
PRESS: London Times Radio with Carole Walker; Gray TV interview; August 29, 2022 Previous 2 days my daughters and partners were here for the weekend. Very slow with regard to COVID. Clearly people like John Moore (who is the most reasonable) and Paul Offit (not so much) are pushing back on the drive to boost people in September with the “updated” BA.5 bivalent since they say that boosters are not needed (Offit) or that the original vaccine is as good as the bivalent (Moore) Ashish Jha called me today asking advice on when to give the POTUS the bivalent BA.5 boost. I told him 3 months after his recent infection. Same for the First Lady. ------- Monkeypox cases starting to plateau – probably a combination of behavioral modification + vaccine availability: Statement from Tedros: Then, on my friend, Tony, Tony Fauci. We have been friends for many years. I respect him dearly and greatly. He’s an incredible scientist, amazing human being and congratulations to him for all the job that he has done. I know retirement doesn’t mean he will stop working. Retiring for him is like changing a tyre, meaning another mission, and I look forward to continue working with him closely through other things he will, I know, continue to do. So, I wish him all the very best. Tony is so special and everybody knows, I think. With COVID, we are still doing worse with deaths than any other country:
PRESS: Interview with Swiss newspaper -Finanz und Wirtschaft; August 30, 2022 USG (FDA) getting ready to issue EUA for BA.5 bivalent boost
PRESS: JAMA Interview with Editor-in-Chief Kirsten Bibbens-Domingo; August 31, 2022 NY Times Opinion piece by Ari Schulman (rather critical of me): Why Many Americans Turned on Anthony Fauci
