A single line often inverts meaning once you see what it
answers, so neighbouring messages are always shown.
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April 2, 2015 - Gave Q and A-type lecture on 7th floor of Humphrey Building hosted by Bill Schultz the General Counsel of HHS. Big crowd of all the OGC people from the department. I told the story (via questions from Bill) about my dealings with multiple administrations. After the session 12:30 PM to 1:30 PM, Sylvia Burwell had asked to see me in her office. She had just come back from the White House. She profusely thanked me and the NIH team for all we are doing with and with the vaccine trials. Apparently Tom Frieden had told her that he did not want to CDC to "move into Guinea" because of the instability. A bit puzzling since the CDC is already there. We still plan to extend the RCT vaccine trial to Guinea. review from the NY Times up and walking. Unfortunately, despite 3 negative CT's for blood, he reverted (after one negative) to positive in his left axilla sweat/skin.
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April 3, 2015 - doing great. Dilemma is the persistently weakly + PCR of axillary sweat. Has resting tachycardia that might be subclinical cardiomyopathy. Has been seen in other recovered patients in the USA (Emory/Nebraska). Gregg Gonsalves (old ACT-UP and TAG) who is now a Ph.D. student at Yale has brought to NIH (7A-24) a few (three) Yale students to interview me on a piece that they are writing on the issues with unnecessary quarantine of people working with Ebola. They are interviewing me because of the stand that I took in opposition of Gov. Cuomo and Christie a few months ago.
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April 5, 2015 (Easter Sunday) - CBS ran their Sunday AM special profile of me in a Q and A with Scott Simon (NPR). It turned out magnificently. I received scores and scores of e-mails of congratulations, many-fold more than even when I did 2 "Full Ginsberg's" a few months ago. E-mails from as diverse people as Gary Edson, Josh Bolton, Lisa Monaco (NSC), Catherine and Wayne Reynolds, old friends from NY Hospital, etc., etc. Will have to make decision about doing a single PCR on axilla and if negative, then stop testing rather than looking for 2 consecutive negatives. This is unchartered waters, since he has already had multiple negative blood PCRs.
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April 6, 2015 - Axillary sweat PCR now negative. We will take him out of isolation tomorrow and have upgraded his condition from "fair" to "good". Plan to do MRI of heart (still has sinus tachycardia at rest) and brain and then discharge him sometime this week.
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2015-04-07 00:00
Anthony S. Fauci
April 7, 2015 - now out of isolation due to negative blood and axillary sweat. semen specimen shows high level of PCR signal - 18 CT! Clearly the semen is a privileged site for the virus since his blood has been consistently negative. Preparations for extending the RCT vaccine trial to Guinea coming along. Cliff doing yeoman's work with the French (Yves Levy - INSERM and Jean Francois Delfraissy). French are intent on showing that they are taking the lead in this. This relates to their traditional relationship with Guinea. Will go to White House tomorrow to discuss with the POTUS and NSC "getting to zero in Guinea".
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April 8, 2015 - Larry Kramer's new book is out. See review from the NY Times below and see yellow highlight:
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April 8, 2015 (Cont'd) -- Cold, damp and drizzly day in DC. Unseasonably cold (40s) for mid-April. Went to White House Situation room for meeting at 1:50 to 2:50 PM with the POTUS and the NSC. Purpose of meeting to discuss "getting to zero cases of Ebola in Guinea". Present at the meeting among many were Eric Holder, Gen. Martin Dempsey, Denis McDonough, Valerie Jarrett, Susan Rice, Samatha Powers (by teleconference), Tom Frieden (by teleconference), Amy Pope (new Ebola Response Coordinator, replacing Ron Klain), Gayle Smith, Lisa Monaco, etc. I presented the recent information on the RCT for ZMapp. We have enrolled 5 patients: |Gorman in the USA, I in Liberia and 3 in Sierra Leone. I also updated on the Phase 2 RCT vaccine trial in Liberia. As indicated above, we are planning to move the trial to Guinea in collaboration with the French, the Guineans, and the Liberians. Tom Frieden is very anxious about this since he feels that it could go badly (suspicion on the part of Guineans that we are hurting them). He called me up before the WH meeting strongly urging me not to pre-emptively bring up the possibility of expanding the trial to Guinea. I agreed not to pre-emptively bring it up; however, if the subject does come up, I will say that we are considering this. Nervous Tom was OK with this. The POTUS looked very tired during the meeting and Tom, in his presentation, went on and on until the POTUS said: "OK, I get it". Will discharge HE tomorow. Eye exam shows some uveitis and MRI of heart shows some residual cardiac dysfunction and MRI of CNS shows evidence of prior meningoencephalitis. Looked at MRI of brain tonight with Avi Nath. There are considerable abnormalities in the white matter and in the corpus callosum. Considerably worse than what his neurological status would indicate. Went over to see tonight. He is getting ready to go out to dinner in Bethesda with his parents. Took a bunch of photos with us all together. Leave tomorrow for Dallas.
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April 9, 2015 -- Good day here at NIH. We discharged) today. A lot of warm emotion as many of the SCSU staff gathered with and his parent in the SCSU nurses station to say goodbye. Partners in Health paid for a chartered plane to take them back to Dallas, TX. He could have flown commercial; however, we wanted to avoid the ignorant panic if anyone found out that he did so. Very cold day here in Bethesda/DC. Went doe to HHS to reception honoring retiring Deputy Secretary Bill Corr. He was very pleased that I came down there. Bill was Chief-of-Staff to Donna Shalala for 8 years and then 6 years with this administration as Deputy Secretary. A fine man and excellent Public Servant. Amazing thing happened to Dan Chertoff who has been a leading player in the care of Dan wore himself out taking day call every day in the SCSU (as well as coming in at night during the crisis periods). To make matters worse, his father passed away during all of this. And so now that it is over, he took his wife Jessica and his child for a vacation in the Dominican Republic. His went through all of the appropriate notifications of travel via our OMS, the State of Maryland, the CDC, and the embassy of Dominican Republic. Somewhere along the way, someone, including the CDC, dropped the ball and did not inform him that the DR has a policy of not accepting people who have taken care of Ebola patients even though by our criteria, he is "low, but not zero risk" and so should have no travel restrictions. Bottom line is that the DR kicked him out of DR soon after he landed. They were waiting for his at his hotel and with apologies, put him and his family on a plane at their expense and sent him back to the USA. Amazing bullshit! Truly unbelievable how stupid they are and how incompetent were the people that should have warned Dan.
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April 10, 2015 - Jack Whitescarver and Wendy Wertheimer sent in to Francis Collins their letter of resignation from the OAR. Jack is 78 and wanted to stay until he reached 80. However, he and Francis have not been getting along since Francis feels that Jack has been too slow and non-specific in shifting the AIDS money to focus on the high priority areas such as vaccine, prevention, cure and co-morbidities. The relationship has soured and so Jack feels that it is time to go. I, myself, love Jack, but am not satisfied with how they are handling the re-distribution of the AIDS money. Clearly there is too much AIDS money in NIDA and in NCI that is not being used for AIDS projects and to call it AIDS-related is a stretch. We had a meeting in my library today with Larry Tabak, Wendy W. and Jack to discuss this issue. I got pissed off at Wendy since she essentially accused me of saying (which I did not) that behavioral research grants were not good science. That is not what I said. I said that we were doing proportionately too much behavioral research out of NIDA and that the Congress (Rep Andy Harris R-MD et al) are trying to decrease the AIDS budget (see above) and we had better be spending it all on research that is high priority such as vaccine and cure; otherwise, they will have an excuse to cut the budget. Larry Tabak is totally in my corner and even Jack admitted that he agreed. However, the behavioralist community keeps pushing to do a lot of behavioral research. Clearly, the studies might be sound, but they do not contribute to the end of the pandemic. You can study behavior when it comes to AIDS; however, it has been very difficult to "change" behavior.