Tony's Diary Package — page 741

'public 800,000/584,300 the issue. They completely fail to realize that there is already intense attention paid to this issue and the legitimate press including the Washington Post and the Atlantic are asking legitimate questions and wanting to know why we are not responding. We are going to put more pressure on HHS to allow us to be able to develop a statement for the NIH website as well as provide talking points and Qs and As. It is clear that the far right has stirred this up enough that now the legitimate press is beginning to ask questions. • Received this evening at the home (Villa Firenze) of the Italian Ambassador to the USA (Armando Varricchio) the Cavaliere di Gran Croce Ordino al Merito della Repubblica Italiana - Knight Grand Cross of Order of Merit of the Italian Republic conferred (in absentia) by Italian President Sergio Matarella We have a long and difficult conversation with the HHS people over the phone last night. Francis, Larry and I along with others on the NIH team discussed with the HHS team led by the new ASPA Sarah Lovenheim and Ian Sams among others. They were very reluctant to have us put a statement on the NIH director's website concerning the gain of function issue. This is completely ridiculous since if we do not respond to the many misleading statements that are being made then it will look like we're covering things up. The HHS people do not seem to understand that. They also are reluctant for us to directly answer letters of inquiry from the GOP members of Congress who are probing around the Wuhan issue. They are a new group and very inexperienced but they can really mess things up if we don't hold our ground. We finally got them to agree to put Francis's statement on the NIH webpage; however, they're still not allowing us to proactively put out the talking points and will only allow us to do that in specific answer to questions that come in. In another amazing aspect of the discussion they were actually claiming that we should not answer the letters that we get from Congress. More later on this struggle. PRESS: Good Morning America with George Stephanopoulos; White House Press conference (I spoke on variants and vaccines); Axios Online interview; NBC News Snapchat; multiple interviews at the Villa Firenze by the Italian press in association with my "Knighthood". May 19, 2021 - Global - 163,900,000/3,400,000; USA - 32,800,000/584,300 COVID-19 cases in USA <30,000 for 4th day in a row The "buzz" about the origins of the virus continue with multiple inquiries from the press. One of the real problems is that people are conflating whether or not we approved gain of function research for Wuhan and the possibility that the Chinese created SARS-C0V-2 in the laboratory. Whether or not one agrees as to the conduct of gain of function research, when you look at the bat viruses that was studied under the grant and compare the genetic sequences with SARS- CoV-2 it becomes clear that SARS-C0V-2 could not have come from the bat viruses