Diary Prequel Package — page 220

Oct. 10, 2009 - Chris and I had a great dinner in the Placido Domingo room of Café Milano as guests of Kathryn and Wayne Reynolds on the occasional of Derek and Beverly Joubert's visit. They are award-winning film-makers for National Geographic who photograph and film lions, leopards, and cheetahs in the wild. Typical enjoyable Reynolds dinner with many famous guests including: Gen James Jones, Terry McAuliffe, Sam and Jan Donaldson, Tom Daschle, Brendan Sullivan, Fred Hiatt, Tom Friedman, Alexandra Cousteau (Jacques's granddaughter), Oct. 13, 2009 - Still extremely intensive media exposure with national media appearances a few times per week and heating up. Had dinner at Zeke Emanuel's home in DC with Chris. Corby Kummer was there as was Rahm Emanuel and his children. Other government people whose names I unfortunately forget. Oct. 14, 2009 - Flew to NYC to give Parker Memorial Lecture to the Dept. of Microbiology and Immunology at Columbia Medical School. Gave the a4B7 lecture that was very well received. Oct. 16, 2009 - Went to White House for top secret meeting and counterintelligence briefing by FBI and CIA. Apparently, Russians are monitoring the evolution of our Biodefense campus at Fort Detrick. As usual, a lot of soft stuff. I certainly would expect that they would be doing this since they suspect that we are doing offensive bioterrorism as opposed to defensive biodefense. Oct. 18, 2009 - Take off to Paris with Patty Conrad for the 2009 AIDS Vaccine meeting of the IAS and Vaccine Enterprise. Extremely successful meeting in many ways. The RV144 (Thai trial) results were formerly presented coinciding with the online publication of the results in the NEJM. There was significant controversy surrounding the role-out of this vaccine a couple of weeks ago (see above). The complete data showed that the effect was modest, but real. Apart from a few remaining skeptics, the issue now is to learn from this by examining any correlates of immunity. I gave the closing talk on Oct. 22 together with Francois Barre-Sinoussi. My talk was extremely well-received as being visionary. I thoroughly enjoyed preparing and delivering the talk. I discuss the Thai trial, but also the need to pursue low-dose mucosal challenge models in the non-human primate (NHP). Also, I spoke about the importance of studying the early events in HIV infection for insight into the type of immune response that we need to elicit. Also, spoke of the differences in the transmitting versus the chronically replicating virus. Oct. 23 - 25, 2009 - Things really heating up with the press jumping all over the USG for "overpromising" the number of doses of vaccine that would be available. In fact, despite my warnings, BAARDA (Robin Robinson - nice guy, but naïve) believed the pharmaceutical companies that they would have 160 million doses by October 15. In fact they had 11 million and instead of ultimately getting 250 million, we are lucky if we get 140 million. Big gap between supply and demand with long lines for vaccine and widespread flu activity in 46 states. Perfect storm.