Diary Prequel Package — page 447

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. 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. April 11, 2015 - Went to Reception/dinner at Jamie Gorelick (former assistant attorney general in Clinton Adm) and Rich Waldron's home in Chevy Chase in honor of Roger