A single line often inverts meaning once you see what it
answers, so neighbouring messages are always shown.
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Sept. 24, 2021 Alas! Rochelle listened to me. She overruled the recommendation of the ACIP. She actually called me last night at 11:25 PM and then a couple of minutes later to tell me that she had taken my advice and overruled their rejection of the third bullet. Unfortunately David Awwad had put a "do not disturb" between 11:00 PM and 5:00 AM on my cell phone and I missed her call. I then texted her add 5 30 AM telling her that I was sorry that I missed her call. She texted me right back and we spoke by phone at around 5:40. I congratulated her on what she had done and told her that she has now shown clear leadership as the director of CDC. Her recommendations are indicated below " CDC recommends: • people 65 years and older and residents in long-term care settings should receive a booster shot of Pfizer-BioNTech's COVID-19 vaccine at least 6 months after their Pfizer-BioNTech primary series, • people aged 50-64 years with underlying medical conditions should receive a booster shot of Pfizer-BioNTech's COVID-19 vaccine at least 6 months after their Pfizer-BioNTech primary series, • people aged 18-49 years with underlying medical conditions may receive a booster shot of Pfizer-BioNTech's COVID-19 vaccine at least 6 months after their Pfizer-BioNTech primary series, based on their individual benefits and risks, and • people aged 18-64 years who are at increased risk for COVID-19 exposure and transmission because of occupational or institutional setting may receive a booster shot of Pfizer-BioNTech's COVID-19 vaccine at least 6 months after their Pfizer-BioNTech primary series, based on their individual benefits and risks. PRESS: Breitbart: Fauci Defends NIH Funding Wuhan Lab: 'Only Regret' Is That It's Caused 'Such a Degree of Distraction' - This was an interview that I gave to Major Garrett on his podcast.
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Sept. 25, 2021 - Global - USA - 42,800,000/684,900 I had a wonderful evening this evening. Joan Baez and her son Gabe who were supposed to go to New York City with Gabe's daughter Jasmine who wanted to go to a concert in Queens, NY. In addition, Joan was supposed to meet with officer Mike Fanone. For some strange reason officer Fanone just dropped out of sight and did not meet with her. He's the officer who was brutalized during the attack on the capitol on January the 6th, 2021. Really rather stange. And so, Joan and Gabe were stuck in Washington and planning to fly back to California tomorrow. Since they had nothing to do she took a chance and called me up to see if I was free. I was, and we had Joan and Gabe over the house for a pasta dinner. Gabe was constantly on the phone with his daughter in Queens who was totally excited at the concert and kept calling him. It was totally delightful as Joan is such an extraordinary person. We had a wonderful time.
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Sept. 27, 2021 - Global USA Things turning around with all parameters starting to come down even though things are still bad: New reported cases All time Last 90 days 7-day average -- 200,000 cases 100,000 l I I Feb. 2020 May Aug. Nov. Feb. 2021 May Aug. Tests Hospitalized Deaths UTM vv Feb. 2020 Sept 2021 Feb, 2020 Sept 2021 Feb. 2020 Sept. 2021 DAILY AVG. ON SEPT. 26 14-DAY CHANGE TOTAL REPORTED Cases E19 .633 -18% 42,905,619 Tests 1,740,685 +6% Hospitalized 86,043 -15% Deaths 20a. 423% 688,157 About this data There is now considerable confusion about exactly who should get the boost. We know what the general categories are; however, when people ask exactly who within these categories should get vaccinated there is lack of clarity. For example, when you say people with underlying conditions, exactly what are those underlying conditions. It is found somewhere on the CDC website, but it is very difficult to find and it does not very succinctly tell you what these conditions are. For example, of the underlying conditions we always talk about the fact that obesity is very importan in that regard . Yet, when you search for it, obesity is not in those areas that are easily accessible. PRESS: CNN "The Situation Room" with Wolf Blitzer
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Sept. 28, 2021 Yesterday was an important day during one of the zoom calls with the "TV doctors ", i.e. people who are practicing physicians and public health people who regularly appear on TV shows. I made it very clear that I was very much in favor of providing booster shots for virtually everyone who is eligible for a vaccination. I said to the group of perhaps 50 people , mostly doctors, that the idea that only thing that you have to worry about with vaccines is keeping people out of the hospital is a false narrative since there are many people who do not require hospitalization who suffer greatly from getting infected with the virus. I know that this is contrary to the current recommendations of the CDC and the current authorization by the FDA . However, I believe that the judgment of who should get it was overly determined by an understandable consideration of the lack of doses for people in the developing world. In addition, there is a concern about safety regarding myocarditis for younger people, mostly men; however, once this is taken care of in my mind there is no reason not to vaccinate essentially everyone. This becomes even more important since there is great confusion right now with the so called gradation and prioritization of who should get vaccinated regarding when and how. We are getting a lot of blowback about this confusion which I totally predicted when I said we should make things very simple. Anyway, I made my thoughts very clear to the group on this call. Another important thing that is rolling out is that Rochelle is getting a lot of widespread credit , which she deserves, about making a broader recommendation than the ACIP indicated. As indicated above , she made this decision based on very intensive persuasion that I made to her late at night before she actually made the announcement. Just a statement about things that have been evolving overtime. There is a lot of discussion right now and scrambling about getting doses of monoclonal antibodies for people who get infected. This is a major change from previously when monoclonal antibodies were underused. In addition, I have not mentioned it but on a very regular basis, literally weekly, we brief the governors is on a governors's call; we brief the principles (cabinet members and others); we have a zoom call with the physicians and public health people who are out there on the TV circuit (see above) in order to keep them up-to-date as to what we are thinking ; and we briefed the President himself. I do not take notes after each of these ; however it is important to mention that they occur on a very regular basis. Noteworthy is the fact that I had an extraordinary podcast interview for one hour with famous actor Alec Baldwin. He is an amazingly intelligent , funny, an extremely likable person who was very much in tune with my history and my life and asked very penetrating and important questions. Without a doubt, from a intellectual and substantive standpoint it was one of the best if not the best interview that I have ever given. It was a good day for interviews in that my interview with Ed Yong for the Atlantic festival was also extremely good. This is not surprising as Ed is one of the most impressive writers and interviewers that I have ever met PRESS: MSNBC "Morning Joe" with Joe, Meka and Willie; NBC Nightly News with Lester Holt; NBC with Lester Holt for "kids"; Interview with Ed Young as part of "The Atlantic Festival"; Podcast with Alec Baldwin.
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2021-09-29 00:00
Anthony S. Fauci
Sept. 29, 2021 - Global - 232,600,000/4,800,000; USA - 43,200,000/691,500 Had a very tough and ridiculous interview with Hugh Hewitt. Hugh, who usually is a reasonable, albeit very conservative person, was extremely aggressive with me in an interview in which he kept insisting that people are not getting vaccinated because I am telling them to get vaccinated and strongly suggested that I step down and retire since I am the obstacle to people getting vaccinated. He quoted a survey saying that middle to right people want me to retire and are not getting vaccinated because I'm the messenger telling them to get vaccinated. Truly an incredible train of thought on his part. He said we need fresh faces telling people to get vaccinated and if we had fresh faces then people would get vaccinated. I countered by saying we do have fresh faces in the form of Rochelle Walensky and Vivek Murthy. And so does he consider that although all three of us are saying to get vaccinated including two new fresh faces that people are not getting vaccinated merely because I'm one of the three people telling them to get vaccinated?? I have never heard of a more distorted train of thought. This conversation triggered in me some serious thinking about several things including when I actually would want to retire from the untenable situation that I am in of having 10s of millions of people hate me because I stand for the truth. Also, this nonsense about conflating the discussion about gain of function with the lab lead theory is preposterous and totally distracting and draining of everyone's energy. Richard Ebright with his gain of function obsession is a total asshole who is pushing this theory because he "wants to be somebody". I am terribly disappointed with Jesse Bloom and David Relman for doing somewhat of the same thing. they have been pushing to stop any gain of function research for a long time and I believe that in some respects they are pushing for an even hoping that this was a lab leak , which the molecular analysis of the viruses that we used in the lab compared to the virus SARS-CoV-2 clearly indicate that it is molecularly impossible for the viruses under the auspices of the NIH grant to have been manipulated into or evolved into SARS-Cov-2. The opposition to me is part of the "big lie" - "Lock her up"; Trump won the election; January 6th was really a friendly visit to the Capitol; "the China virus" and Trump was correct, "Fire Fauci" since he was wrong all along and so let's discredit him, and so on. Quite frankly , I am finally coming to the realization that our democracy is truly threatened and that it is possible, even likely, that our democracy will crumble with the 2024 election. If trump wins , we are finished . If trump loses, his far right lunatics will likely try again to overthrow the election. And with the attempts to have state legislators (Republican) validate the electoral votes, I am really afraid that they might be successful. Having said all of this, there is no way that I am going to retire before this outbreak is under control. I continue to give regular interviews about every couple of months with Sheri Fink who is doing a book on COVID-19. I am trying to stay out of any Trump versus Fauci discussion and focus more on the evolution of the outbreak. Matthew Memoli is turning into a real problem. He has written an email dated July 30th to me to Hugh Auchincloss and to Cliff Lane. The long and short of it is that he feels that vaccinating people is a bad idea even though he is the major proponent of challenge studies for vaccines. He believes that by vaccinating people we will be selecting for variants which in the long run will be detrimental to the population. This is a little bit more sophisticated effort than that of Scott Atlas. He has gone further than that, however. He has released the email to congressional committees and to the press and now without a doubt he is going to be talking about the fact that even though he is a clinical center employee he will refuse to follow the vaccine mandate that soon will be implemented at the NIH. In addition, he likely will go on the media spouting this extraordinary philosophy of his. I have made it clear to everyone that we should not interfere in any way with what he is doing because without a doubt he will say that we are trying to muzzle him and that will create more of a problem than the incredible nonsense that he is spewing. It looks like we will just have to buckle down and let him proceed with his craziness and hopefully he will not do a lot of damage to our attempts to get people vaccinated. It is inconceivable to me that he actually feels that it is OK to let everybody get infected just so that we can get immunity where the virus is not selected for by vaccine induced immunity. Letting people get infected has led to 680,000 deaths in the USA thus far. How can he miss the fact that the virus circulating within people who don't get an adequate immune response will lead to variants just as easily as vaccine immunity-induced mutations. He just makes no sense at all. Matt Memoli has now gone completely rogue. He is turning into a complete Scott Atlas (see above). Not only does he think that we should not be vaccinating people, he believes that mandating is unethical because it's going to make matters worse vis-à-vis the immune response. I thought nothing could be worse than that, but now he's done something unbelievable. He has taken a speech or an interview that I gave saying that although children statistically do much, much better than adults which regard to developing severe disease there are still (given the delta variant) a significant number of children who get sick and hospitalized and in fact there are more deaths among children from COVID-19 and there are after flu. He comes out now with an email to me saying that this is untrue and that there are more deaths by far with flu rather than COVID19. In fact, he wants me to publicly retract my statement!!!! However, what he is doing is that he is looking at "estimated burden of flu" which is calculated with a model at the end of the year which is usually three times the amount of the "reported cases". I was referring to the reported cases which are much less. And so, he seems to be out to make me look bad for reasons that I don't understand except that he is a complete contrarian. He's an infectious disease person who doesn't want to vaccinate people, who thinks mandates are unethical, and who is now telling me that I need to retract statements that I've made. He's a junior member of the institute and he is telling the institute director that I need to retract the statement based on information that he thinks is incorrect, but is correct. Unbelievable what I have to deal with! We have decided that we are not going to do anything with him; w are not going to approach him; we are not going to even talk to him about this since I know from my experience that if we do anything, he will say that we were trying to muzzle him. As far as I am concerned he could say whatever he wants to say, as crazy as it is, whatever he wants to say. Also he said that he is refusing to get vaccinated The problem with this is that the new rule from the federal government is that if he does not get vaccinated he is going to get fired unless he has a religious exemption. If it turns out that he winds up getting fired, he will almost certainly say that it is retaliation. PRESS: Hugh Hewitt radio interview; NPR Radio "Here and Now" with Tonya Mosley; MSNBC - "Reports" with Andrea Mitchell; KLZ Israeli Radio;
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Sept. 30, 2021 - Global - 233,100,000/4,800,000; USA - 43,300,000/694,700 Cases continue to gradually come down as do hospitalizations. Deaths, however, are still increasing as a late indicator and lagging. Just had a great conversation with Shane Crotty of the La Jolla Institute of Immunology. I spoke to Shane because I wanted to find out his perspective on the immunological justification for booster shots to the mRNA vaccines. Shane is a brilliant immunologist and gave me some terrific insights. He feels , similar to Bob Seder, that the antibody levels are very important in preventing initial entry of the virus and seeding of the virus in the upper respiratory tract. The higher levels of antibody the more protection you have. They also taper off reasonably quickly leading to rather quick (months) waning of immunity to infection. However, he points out that B cell memory and particularly CD8 and CD4 positive T cells are absolutely critical in preventing significant disease in the lungs. These are longer duration than serum antibody. This explains why protection against severe disease (lung involvement) seems to last long and wane less than protection against infection (antibody that wanes quickly). The thing he pointed out that is interesting and important is that there is a reasonably longer period of time for people to develop pulmonary involvement and severe disease since the T cells have enough time to protect the lung. When they fail then you get lung involvement and this usually takes some time which explains the unusual finding of why it takes so long from the time a person gets infected to the time they actually wind up in the hospital on a ventilator which is usually about 21 days. This is quite different from other acute viral infections in which the lung is quickly attacked and people wind up in the hospital within a couple of days. In addition, he spoke of the long durability of the T cell memory and B cell memory response indicating that protection against severe disease will actually last for a longer period of time whereas protection against infection tends to veer off pretty quickly. It is right in line with what his pathogenic explanation is as described above. He does feel that giving a third shot boost is a good idea and that it likely will give a much longer protection against both infection and likely would enhance the durability of the protection against severe disease in the lungs. We also discussed the situation of why in late disease you have an aberrant inflammatory and immunological response. He believes it's a combination of innate immunity mediated predominantly by monocytes and polys together with robust T cell Fast Company magazine activity attempting to control virus which has made its way from the upper airway to the lung. Sometimes this attempt to control the virus leads to so many inflammatory mediators combining innate with adaptive immune responses that the effects is a profound pathogenic response that may or may not be suppressed by anti-inflammatories and immune suppressors. A group of non USA scientists and others Whom I have never heard of Are trying to get rid of Peter Daszak at ecohealth . See PDF of letter immediately below : Letter to Nancye Green.pdf I do not know who these people are but something strange is going on here. I met with Leslie Dach at my home this evening to discuss the situation of attacks upon me by far-right elements. I gave to Leslie some reprints of papers that strongly favor the natural origin of COVID. We discussed strategies of how to stay ahead of this insidious campaign to discredit me. We feel that the best approach would be to lay low and not give it any more legs than it has. In addition, Leslie spoke to me about how pleased he was about how I have mentored Rochelle Walensky. He also expressed concern about her lack of leadership capabilities and her total dependence upon professionals at CDC who Leslie feels are antiquated in their thinking and in many respects are often incorrect. He referred to the experience he had with them when he was special advisor to Sylvia Burwell when Sylvia was Secretary of HHS. Leslie understandably has very little respect for the CDC and in fact wants me to help to get Rochelle to start thinking for herself instead of depending so heavily upon her CDC team. Leslie also expressed some concern about the lack of involvement of Secretary Becerra in the entire COVID effort. PRESS: Interview with Fast Company magazine
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Oct. 1, 2021 - GLOBAL USA We have reached 700,000 deaths in the USA!! Big anti-viral drug advance. Merck (Ridgeback) drug - Molnuvirapir (an RNA-dependent RNA polymerase inhibitor by inducing mistakes in the virus replication. The CEO of Merck Ron Davis briefed us last about the results. They were striking. In a study looking at people with documented mild to moderate infection not requiring hospitalization at the time within five days of diagnosis were given either placebo or drug. In the placebo group there were 53 hospitalizations in the drug group there were 28 hospitalizations with a 7.3% hospitalization in the drug group and 14.1% hospitalization in the placebo group. This led to a 50% efficacy with a P value of 0.001. There were eight deaths in the placebo group and zero deaths in the treatment group. This is really a major breakthrough in that it is another antiviral drug together with remdesivir that is keeping people out of the hospital. I am sure there will be more on this later. The United states has already committed to buy 1.7 million doses for a price of $700 per dose Gave the 2021 Beatty Lecture of McGill University, "COVID-19: Lessons Leaned and Remaining Challenges", October 1, 2021, Montreal, Quebec, Canada (Virtual). It was widely viewed throughout Canada and according to the organizers throughout the rest of the world. This was followed by a Q&A which was very stimulating and a fireside chat with some of the students at McGill. A thoroughly enjoyable experience. It was associated with my receiving an honorary doctorate from McGill Win over Jeff Zients's house last night with his White House team for a pizza and beer party . I could only stay there for about 1/2 an hour because I had to leave for another dinner over the home of Jeffrey Blount and Jeanne Meserve. I was impressed by the camaraderie among jeff's team many people of whom I had never met since I only meet daily by zoom with the core Medical Group. Jeff was extremely kind in calling attention to my presence at the reception since I had to leave after 30 minutes. Eceryone gave me a round of applause. Chris was with me and I introduced her to all the people that I deal with among that larger group. After the reception, Andre our security person for the evening drove us the block and a half to Jeffrey and Jeanne's home where we had an interesting dinner and a conversation about race in America. Jeffrey is an African American man and Jeanne is white PRESS: Usual WH press briefing; CNBC "Closing Bell"
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Oct. 2, 2021 - I had written an email to Robert Davis the CEO of Merck indicating to him that I was concerned that in the press release for their drug Molnupiravir they did not mention that the original basic research was funded by NIH at Emory. Rob called me today (Saturday) and apologized for that slight and promised that in future press releases they would include the collaboration and contribution of NIAID /NIH.
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October 3, 2021 - Got a really nice note (see below) yesterday from Barney Graham thanking him for my support of him over the 21 years that he has been at the NIAID vaccine Research Center. of note he has won a number of prizes already for his work on developing the optimum immunogen for the COVID-19 vaccine . He has one the Albany prize as well as a number of other prizes. In addition , drew Weissman , my former fellow, has already won a number of prizes including the Lasker award. It will be interesting to see who wins the Nobel Prize this coming Monday. Thank you note_Fauci .pdf d0ut > -Fenson@dhsc.gov.uk While all of this is happening , I must comment that the country is headed to or might already be in a constitutional crisis with the far right clearly indicating that they're going to try and disrupt elections and essentially destroy the democracy. The attacks on me I believe are all a tangential part of that process . I speak of the big lie of which I unfortunately have been drawn into being a target of the far right because I represent something that is antithetical to them , namely, the truth. It is stunning how much time is consumed on warding off the egregious lies about the NIID grant that funded hey small project in the Wuhan institute of virology. They claim that we created the COVID virus. Among the scientist who fall into this trap are the usual suspects of Richard Ebright and David Relmann . However , Jesse bloom has really surprised me claiming that a lab leak is highly probable when there is absolutely no evidence whatsoever that a lab leak has occurred the only issue is that it occurred in a city that happened to have a laboratory that studies bats. Amazing that he has come to this conclusion. PRESS: ABC "This Week" with Jonathan Karl; CNN "State of the Union" with Dana Bash; CBS "Face the Nation" with Margaret Brennan