Diary Prequel Package — page 390

meeting in Geneva today which is going to discuss this. I am intensively briefing Sylvia Burwell who will be speaking with the UK minister of policy. His name is....... How this turns out remains to be seen. More later. The day gets even more interesting. There was supposed to have been a meeting at Sylvia Burwell's office with Ron Klain, myself, Tom Frieden, and the HHS team. It was supposed to be aimed at briefing Ron about our activities. However, the President called an emergency meeting in the Roosevelt Room in the White House with OSTP to brief him regarding their mandate of applying rigorous science and technology to the Ebola response effort. Sylvia was supposed to represent HHS at the meeting. However, because she was committed to meeting with Ron, she asked me to represent her at the meeting. Her concern and the concern of all of us is that OSTP, particularly John Holdren, who has very little appreciation of biology in the health sciences, might get in the way and complicate what we at HHS and others are doing in the Ebola response. Eric Lander is a member of PCAST group at OSTP and although Eric is a great friend, he sometimes gets overambitious about what he thinks can and cannot be done. My job was to go to the White House and make sure that OSTP does not get out of their lane and into our lane. It was an extraordinary visit at the White House that took place at 1:45 PM in the Roosevelt Room. As soon as I walked in Denis McDonough, Chief of Staff to the POTUS, greeted me at the West Wing lobby and told me how excited the White House was about what an extraordinary job I was doing with the press by putting a calm, reassuring, and intelligent face on the response to the Ebola epidemic. The same thing holds true when I entered the Roosevelt Room Lisa Monaco, Homeland Security Advisor, as well as Cecelia Munoz, domestic policy advisor were extraordinarily laudatory to me about my performance in explaining to the American public the details of the Ebola response. Gathered in the room for the meeting were all the PCAST individuals as well as OSTP. I am including below printouts of PDF on the attendees and the purpose of the meeting. The President referred to me frequently during the meeting, asking questions about what I think should be done regarding the response. Denis McDonough was acutely aware of our concern that PCAST/OSTP might "get in the CDC/NIH/HHS lane" and cause more problems than they solve. He checked with me after the meeting to make sure that I was OK with the discussion that PCAST and OSTP would help with non USG issues like getting pharmaceutical companies to help with vaccine production if it is shown to be effective and to lend some outside science and technology (S & T) to the mix as long as they do not make stupid suggestions about how to do public health and research. The POTUS also asked me on the side if I was "OK with how the meeting went". All in all it was a great meeting. Then a dark cloud came over the day.