Tony's Diary Package — page 828

ff There are a lot of important things going on that I do not have a chance to comment on in my daily diary. Some of these are the continual conversations that I have been having with Jeff about who should be the FDA Commissioner. Jeff and Ron Klain continue to run by me names of potential candidates. Today for example, David Kessler came to me with a surprising request that I float his name to Ron as a possible candidate. David is currently the head of the countermeasure acceleration group (CAG) of HHS. He is a former FDA commissioner and would likely do a very good job. I will float his name and see what happens. In another vein, I continue to get harassed by letters from far-right congressmen and senators who are cherry picking my FOIA'd emails and trying to establish that I have lied under oath when I said that the NIH has never done gain of function research at the Wuhan institute of virology. In addition, Tucker Carlson and others at Fox News continue to attack me virtually every night. Carlson saying multiple times that I created the virus. This is an extremely stressful situation but I will have to push on with the job that I have as director of NIAID and as chief medical advisor to President Biden. Another issue that is percolating it's a growing discontent with the CDC and with Rochelle's difficulty in clearly articulating their somewhat shifting positions such as that of masking indoors. I do not believe that it is Rochelle's fault but it is a fundamental lesion in the CDC. One of the problems is the typical CDC mentality that antedated Rochelle. Rochelle and the CDC are hesitant to show anyone data that backs up their policy because it is supposedly "embargoed. The problem is that the embargo relates to the MMWR, which is the CDC's own publication. Therefore it seems that if they wanted to break the embargo they could easily do it. Again, this is a recurrent problem with the CDC keeping data close to their vest and making policy without allowing outside experts to weigh in. It was an evolving situation here. Got a call from Jeff just now reading a sentence from the President's speech that he will give today in which he said that children do get infected, but a serious outcome is "extremely, extremely rare". In my meeting with my office team this morning someone pointed out that in Arkansas on Wednesday there were 24 infections in children; seven of them wound up in the ICU and two of them are on respirators. I had originally told Jeff to get rid of one of the "extremelies" and just say "extremely rare". After hearing about the infections in Arkansas I called back Jeff and told him to get rid of both "extremelies" and just say "rare ". We actually do not know the full impact of this virus on children at this point and so we really need to be careful about what we say and what we allow the POTUS to say. We are on a similar track as UK but a few weeks behind (as is usually the case):