A single line often inverts meaning once you see what it
answers, so neighbouring messages are always shown.
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Jan 25, 2008 - Gave lecture Global health at USA Families Conference at the Mayflower Hotel. The speaker before me was my friend former Senator Tom Daschle. Tom gave a great talk on health care in the USA based on a book that he has just written. Of note, he is the health advisor for Barack Obama. This is good since Tom likes me a lot and this could be my entry into getting to know Obama a bit better since I know Hillary much better than I do Obama. This evening went with Chris to an elegant "private" dinner (black tie) at the Academy of Achievement Town House at 1222 16th Street, N.W. given by Catherine and Wayne Reynolds. They have been very generous to me in inviting me to these great affairs. In typical Catherine Reynolds style, the details of the evening were amazing. Great food and elegant wines (Montrachet and Margaux) and champagne (Dom Perignon). Guests were terrific. Sens. Daschle, Cochrane, Byron Dornan; Bob Barnett,; Congressman Dingle; Mack McCarty; John Negroponte; Mike Chertoff Steve and Alice Rosenberg, maries. Bruce Miller. etc. Highlight of the evening was the command private performance by Bernadette Peters, who was amazing - talented and beautiful at 60 years old (next month)! I was struck by how short she is in real life. Google lists her as 5'3", but she was about 1.5 inches shorter then I and she had spiked (3 inch) heels on - great looking woman and incredibly nice as we spoke with her after the performance.
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Jan. 26, 2008 - Activity mostly centered around the Democrat and Republic primaries. McCain surging from way behind, Giuliani is out. Obama closing in on Hillary.
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Jan. 28, 2008 - Went to White House to nail down with Dan Price, Gary Edson, Patrick Marcham, Mark Dybul, Paul Brown, Bobby Pittman and others the various aspects of the initiatives that the POTUS might want to announce at G-8, or the Upcoming (Feb) Africa trip, or the DC Global Health Summit. My TB vaccine initiative ($40 million) is in. Malaria vaccine and drug discovery is likely out. Neglected Tropical Diseases is in. That night, in the SOTU Address, the POTUS asked for $30 billion for PEPFAR and praised the POTUS Malaria Initiative (PMI).
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Feb. 1, 2008 - Did dry run of my upcoming presentation to VP Cheney on Bruce Miller. He really liked it. Will soon set up for the VP.
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2008-02-03 00:00
Anthony S. Fauci
Feb. 3, 2008 - NY Giants beat NE Patriots in an upset in the Super bowl played in Phoenix. NY's defensive line kept Tom Brady off balance all night and Eli Manning played incredibly well.
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Feb. 4, 2008 - CROI meeting in Boston. Went to show the flag, meet with African investigators from Uganda (Rakai) and see vaccine presentations. Ron Desrosiers gave his talk about the imbalance between discovery and development in vaccine agenda and said there is no evidence that any existing vaccine candidate will work. I do not necessarily disagree; however, he was terribly gratuitous in saying that "The NIH has lost its way on vaccine research". It is easy to criticize and place blame...much easier than having creative ideas to solve the problem. He is not a bad guy, but he was an asshole today.
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Feb. 6, 2008 - Had lunch at café Milano with Franco Nuschese (Owner of Café Milano) to discuss an issue with the United Arab Emirates (UAE). He would like to bring the health minister to the USA and have me show him around the NIH. Also, he wants me to go to UAE and help them with advice about research programs, i.e. establish an NIH-like system in UAE. Franco knows the Middle east well since he has many contacts there and want to help the country develop their biomedical research enterprise. He will arrange appropriate meetings.
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Feb 8-9, 2008 - Flew to San Francisco and took "red-eye" back to give the Merle Sande memorial Lecture at the Gladstone Institute at SF General Hospital (Mission Bay Campus). Warner Greene (Director, Gladstone) and Tom Quinn arranged the visit. I gave a lecture of "HIV/AIDS in 2008" and paid tribute to merle. Told some stories about our friendship and experiences on the NY Hospital House Staff together where he was my resident when I was an intern. Very moving evening with many of merle's old friends from NY Hospital, SF, Utah and Uganda.
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Feb. 14, 2008 -- Had meeting with Carl Dieffenbach, Peggy Johnston, Larry Corey, Scott Hammer (Chair, PAVE 100 clinical trial), JJ. McGowan, Hugh Auchincloss, Cliff Lane, Carole Hudgings, Patty Conrad, Ralph Tate, Gary Nabel to discuss the great dilemma about proceeding or not with PAVE 100 in light of the failure of the recent Merck STEP trial of a somewhat similar T cell based vaccine for HIV (see reports of STEP study failure). STEP trial was performed within the HVTN (by Larry Corey's operation). It used an adenovirus (Ad) 5 vector prime and 2 boosts with gag, pol, nef. DSMB stopped study because of "futility" in that the vaccine did not protect against acquisition of infection (not expected to since it is a T cell vaccine) and also did not alter set point of virus. Importantly, for reasons that no one can figure out, vaccinees (not placebos) who had high pre-existing titer of antibody against Ad5, did worse than unvaccinated in acquisition of infection. The PAVE 100 trial (VRC-Gary Nabel) is also using a T cell vaccine approach with 3 DNA-gag, pol, nef, env prime/boost followed by an Ad5-gal pol env 4" shot. Question is whether we should go ahead with the PAVE 100. Basic researchers in AIDS (Ron Desrosiers, Doug Richman, Dennis Burton, etc.) want to stop all vaccine clinical trials until we figure out the "basic science". We should actually probably tilt the balance more towards discovery rather than development of vaccine candidates since we still have no idea what a protective immune response is or even how or if we can elicit it. However, the "basic" people have their own whining agenda since they feel that any money towards a trial is money away from their grants. Also, they are very jealous of Bart Haynes who got a lot of money for CHAVI (which is actually more basic than applied). I am holding a "Summit" on March 25, 2008 to examine this balance between basic and applied in HIV vaccine research.