Tony's Diary Package — page 32

PRESS: CNN New Day with John Berman and Alisyn Camerota; FOX News; CNBC Squawk Box; Feb. 27, 2020 - 82,446/2808. Very interesting things evolving. Got phone call from Azar this AM (while in Building 31 cafeteria). Azar is frustrated with the operational incompetence of the CDC and asked me to start thinking abou a possible replacement for Redfield at CDC in case Azar needs to replace him. He prefers a woman, and someone who is not an obvious anti-Trump person. Azar admits that regardless of all the PR, the fact is that Pence is now in charge. Also, Azar told me that Pence ordered the lockdown of all press by everyone including Azar. Azar is trying to turn this around since it is obviously a bad idea. Got phone call fom Tom Bossert (former Deputy National Security Advisor to Bush and National Security Advisor to Trump until John Bolton forced him out). Tom saw the press briefing on TV last night and was appalled by the denialism of the problem by Trump. He wanted to know if I was trying to bring in some reality testing. I told him that this was difficult. I emphasized that we should be testing thousands of people and not just a few hundred. With the 1st community case in CA, it is clear that there are other infected people out there in the USA. Also, there is a 2nd community case in California. Turned into an amazing day. Chris Cuomo calls me up and says that he wants me on his show since he is going to rip apart the CDC for not having enough tests available to screen for community spread cases (i.e. no known geographic connection). He says that people from NYC and elsewhere are calling us saying that they have suspicious cases and they cannot get test kits from CDC. Actually, this is for at least 2 reasons: 1) the CDC has not worked out the glitches in their kits and the criteria for testing a PUI (person under investigation) included their having an epidemiologic connection to a case. This is crazy since by definition, a community-based case (which we are trying to screen for) does not have any recognizable epi link. I realize that we have to fix the CDC problem and I call Brian Harrison and we both walk into Azar's office and explain that we need to get CDC, FDA together to loosen the regulatort constraints on getting tests out. It was my pushing that did it. They come up with a solution of regulatory relaxation of QC. Stock Market crashing! Also the issue of "muzzling Fauci" is going wild. See above: It started when the VP took over the Task Force and his Chief of Staff (Mark Short) and his comms person Katie Miller wanted to re-assess the communications. This was really triggered by the Nancy Messonnier's statement. I had agreed to a number of TV hits and we got word from the VP office to Bill Hall that we need to stand down on all media for the time being so that we can re-submit clearances. This got interpreted that Fauci was being muzzled and triggered an amazing twitter storm that was widely and virally tweated to not suppress the "great Fauci". I was getting hundreds and hundreds of emails of support. There is even a #freeFauci out there.