A single line often inverts meaning once you see what it
answers, so neighbouring messages are always shown.
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Mar. 20, 2012 - House Appropriations Subcommittee Hearings - Rayburn Building. Unusual situation that the Hearing was confined to a discussion about NCATS. Only official witnesses were Francis Collins and Tom Insel (Director NIMH) who was there in his capacity as Acting Director of NCATS. Harold Varmus and I were there as "token" attendees for rest of NIH. It was a disgrace that the Hearing was only NCATS. Chairman Dennis Reyberg is not the brightest bulb on the porch.
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Mar. 22, 2012 - Small intimate dinner at Café Milano sponsored by Wayne and Katherine Reynolds. Dinner in honor of Susan Hockfield the retiring President of MIT. Usual glitterati - Rick Atkinson (author), Head of National Geographic, etc.
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Mar. 25, 2012 - Went to Baltimore to present John Bartlett with an award from AIDS Action Baltimore. He was delighted at my laudation. It was run by AIDS activist and friend of mine - Lynda Dee.. er
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Mar. 26, 2012 - Gave my Nifty-Fifty Lecture on a "Career in Public Service" TO Walter Johnson High School in Bethesda. It was fun since the students were so engaged with me.
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2012-03-27 00:00
Anthony S. Fauci
Mar. 27, 2012 - Went to National Portrait Gallery to have historical filming of my experience with HIV and my career. It is part of the National Portrait Project to film the histories of important Americans who have made major contributions.
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Mar. 28, 2012 - Senate Appropriations Subcommittee Hearing for NIH. Francis Collins, me, Varmus, Griffin, Insel, Hodes. Too bad that these hearing are only a total of 2 hours when we used to have 2 hours for NIAID alone. I got questions on the H5N1 issue.
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Mar. 29-30, 2012 - Intense meeting for 1 1⁄2 days of the NSABB to re-visit the decision regarding publication of the 2 manuscripts - Fouchier (Science) and Kawaoka (Nature). It was clear that the driving forces to still block full publication were Mike Osterholm and David Relman. Surprisingly, Arturo Casadevall was also adamant. I spent the entire 2 days in the room and gave rationale argument why the manuscripts should be published without my being too aggressive. At the end of the meeting it was voted 18 - 0 to publish the Kawaoka manuscript and 12 - 6 to publish the Fouchier manuscript. Thus, the NSABB reversed themselves. Several factors went into this. First was (although they were reluctant to admit it) was the fact that although the Fouchier manuscript was not clearly written and Ron himself had given the impression that these were really dangerous results, the fact is the NSABB completely misinterpreted the transmission experiments (see above regarding Geneva meeting of Feb. 16-17). They had thought that the animals that had been infected by aerosol had actually died when they did not. They only died when 1 million IDs were inserted directly into the trachea of the ferrets. In addition, some epidemiology data were presented that showed that in the wild in Chickens and even in some infections in people (in Egypt), the virus was assimilating some of the mutations described and engineered by Fouchier and Kawaoka. An interesting note: in typical bullshit fashion that I have seen before, Mike Imperiale and Lynn Enquist (NSABB members told May Patterson that they wanted me to declare right before the 2nd day that since I was a funder of the research that I had a conflict of interest in the discussions even though I had every right to be there since I am an ex officio member of the Board. They actually felt that I might not give grants to people who were funded by NIAID and who voted to not publish the manuscripts........absolutely amazing bullshit! In any event, I merely said at the beginning of the second day that as everyone knows I am the funder of the research, but that I respect greatly the members of the board and their opinions and this was "nothing personal, but strictly business". You could tell that the good people on the Board had no idea why I was saying this, but it apparently satisfied the "cowards" on the Board. If they are not strong enough to stand up for what they feel, they should not be on a USG Advisory Board. It will be interesting to see what the press such as Laurie Garrett who was blogging like crazy regarding how "courageous" the board was in standing up to the self-interest of the influenza research community when, in fact< she had no idea what the data showed - ya uss the NSABB typical Laurie Garrett. Also, I wonder what Phil Boffey is thinking. He was skeptical of me on our phone conversations when I said that he went too far with his alarmist Editorial in the NY Times on "Engineered Doomsday". He sort of rebuked me saying that the NSABB was a Board of "Top Scientists" and how could I be so at odds with them. I could not tell him at the time that they had completely mis-read the manuscript. Interesting and unprecedented situation. Also, on the first day of the meeting (March 29), the USG (mainly NSS) came out with the official DURC Policy that guides how we should approach DURC.
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April 5, 2012 - Appeared on Channel 8 "Capitol Insider" to discuss the NSABB situation.
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April 11, 2012 - Amazing shit. Mike Imperiale (mostly likely him) of the NSABB called a New Editor from Nature (Brendan Maher) and told him that he felt nervous about voting against publication of the manuscripts since he was afraid that I would not fund his grants if he did. I cannot believe the pettiness and cowardice of some people in Science.