Diary Prequel Package — page 397

Larry Kerr, among others. The discussions centered around modifying the guidelines for monitoring and movement of returning health care providers who have served in West African countries. The CDC continues to be shakey. They in my mind are not definitive or clear enough with their guidelines. However, at the meeting,we at least decided that we would have to scale up from passive monitoring to active monitor and in many cases ultimately to direct monitoring. The definitions of these are as follows: passive monitoring - you take your temperature and evaluate your symptoms and do not tell anyone unless there is a problem; active monitoring - you do the same as passive but you tell someone; direct active monitoring is when you have someone else visit you at least once a day and folow-up with a phone call, take your temperature evaluate your symptoms and make a determination has to the degree of restriction that you might have on a daily basis. In this way, you have a repetitive clinical judgment concering restriction as opposed to a broad sweeping quarantine for evryone. We all decided that we need to point out that healthcare workers are heroes and that if we in fact quarantine them indiscriminately regardless of their stratification of risk that we would clearly disincentivize them for wanting to volunteer as well as stigmatize them, which is already occurring anyway. The White House has decided that I will be the face of the administration in explaining this to the public and have now put me out today (Sunday) on all five major Sunday morning shows. This includes ABC This Week (Martha Raddatz), CBS Face the Nation (Charlie Rose), Fox News with Chris Wallace, CNN State of the Union with Candy Crowley, and Meet the Press ( Chuck Todd). It is interesting and ironic after all of the aggravation I have received from media people that I am now their hero and they want me out there. This includes Jen Palmieri the head of White House communications, Andrea Purse the director of media broadcast of the White House, and this gets translated now down to the HHS level. There is still a lingering distrust by the public in the government largely because of the missteps and lack of firm, definitive, clear, concise and understandable guidelines of the CDC. I feel very badly for Tom Frieden since he is an extraordinarily fine person and an outstanding public health official. However I believe that his staff does not serve him well and the White House and HHS are now giving me the extra burden of having to check their documents which makes it very difficult since I have a lot of work to do and I am getting quite exhausted by all of this. Oct. 26, 2014 - Today I did all five of the Sunday morning TV shows. As indicated above this is referred to as the "Full Ginsburg" related to the fact Ginsburg, the lawyer/family friend for Monica Lewinsky at the time that she blew the whistle on President Clinton related to the now famous sex scandal appeared on all 5 Sunday TV shows. I did this last week. Since I had done a "Full Ginsburg" last week several of the producers of the TV shows told me that this is the first time in their memory that any individual has done all five TV shows for two weeks in a row. And so they are now referring to this as a "Full Fauci". The shows went very well; however, it became clear that I was at odds with what Gov. Christie and Gov. Cuomo had done two days ago by initiating a full quarantine for flights into New Jersey and New York. On each of the shows I articulated two fundamental principles: 1) the safety of the American people comes first and is the major goal; 2) all of our policy decisions relating monitoring