A single line often inverts meaning once you see what it
answers, so neighbouring messages are always shown.
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June 29, 2010 - Went with Chris to South Lawn of the White House to celebrate her election to the Bioethics Commission. Turned out it was a massive get together on a very hot day for all Presidential appointees. They were completely disorganized in getting people cleared through the gates and it was a logistic disaster. The delay was probably related to multiple checking of IDs related to the "gate-crashing" of a WH party a few months ago.
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July 11, 2010 - Went to Atlanta for the day (Sunday) to give plenary at the CDC sponsored international Conference on Emerging Infectious Diseases. Hot July day. I shared the Plenary opening evening addresses with Tom Frieden and Kevin DeCock. Good camaraderie among CDC people and me. Came back to DC that night.
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July 12, 2010 - Attended swearing in of Harold Varmus as the new Director of the National Cancer Institute. Starting to do a lot of press in anticipation of the International AIDS Meeting in Vienna next week. Am looking forward to this meeting since I am giving a Plenary Lecture on Pathogenesis of HIV Disease: Opportunities for Interventions.
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July 18, 2010 - Leave for Vienna (Sunday) - Disaster for travel - flight cancelled on the runway, switch from direct flight to Vienna (Austrian Airlines) to United to Frankfurt connecting to Vienna. United flight sits on IAD runway for 2 hours due to thunder storms - miss connection in Frankfurt. Finally get the Vienna on Monday afternoon (19th July). Trying to stay cool and un-ruffled. Good to have Johanna McDonough meet me at airport. She had rescheduled me from IAD to get me to Vienna. She is a lifesaver.
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2010-07-19 00:00
Anthony S. Fauci
July 19-21, 2010 - Really great meeting in Vienna. My talk was a knockout. Also, very good press from Vienna - PBS Newshour, CNN, WTOP, CBS radio, also NY Times, Washington Post, etc. Meeting was a complete success. We announced the results from the CAPRISA microbicide trial. First success with topical microbicides.
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July 22-23, 2010 - Good press follow-up from meeting - NPR Science Friday among others. Note that we have been going through a record breaking heat wave on the East Coast with a concentration in DC. Temps between 92 and 101 F for the past several weeks. Welcome to Washington! Also, over the past 2 weeks I have been informed that I have won the Paul Janssen Prize from Belgium ($100,000.00) (cannot take the money since the prize is sponsored by J & J - what bullshit). Also won the Will Roger Prize for $50,000.00 (yes, I can accept the money). To be given to me in LA - am looking forward to this. This has been a very busy, hot, exciting summer. Am chronically tired, but good things are happening, particularly in the lab (a4B7) and with commentary papers that I am writing including some really nice ones with Gary Nabel on HIV vaccine and universal flu vaccine.
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Aug. 4, 2010 - Memorial service for Bob Chanock, giant in virology for 50 years at NIAID. Major figure in virology research - discovered M. pneumonia; several parainfluenza viruses, his groups also discovered norovirus (Norwalk agent), made vaccine for rotavirus and hepatitis A, etc. I gave one of the eulogies at his service.
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Aug. 5, 2010 - Dinner with Larry Corey who has just been offered and accepted President and CEO of the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle, where he has worked for many years. Big career decision regarding his future role in helping lead the HIV vaccine effort as PI of the HVTN.
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Aug. 18, 2010 - Big controversy regarding the conflicting studies of the role of XMRV (xenotropic mouse leukemia virus-related virus) in chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS). 2 papers coming out almost simultaneously from FDA (Shy-Ching Lo)/NIH (Harvey Alter) in PNAS and the CDC in Retrovirology. FDA/NIH finds correlation (86% vs 8.% in normals), while CDC finds no correlation. I have been involved in trying to get to the bottom of this prior to publication of the discordant results since we knew of the data before the papers were published. I believe that the FDA/NIH study is contaminated and I do not believe Shy Lo since in the late 1980s he had claimed with what appeared to be fool-proof data that AIDS was associated with a new species of mycoplasma (M. fermentans) as a co-factor. The data proved to be spurious,, but people seem to have forgotten about this. I have convinced Ian Lipkin from Columbia (Mailman School of Public Health) to referee coded sample examination of FDA looking at negative samples from CDC study. The exercise was somewhat inconclusive. Lo does not want to do another study starting with identical CFS samples that are coded together with known normals and known spiked samples to really settle this. The issue is that highly emotional CFS crowd now wants to treat CFS people with anti-retroviral drugs, despite no evidence of causality and several negative studies besides the CDC study.