Tony's Diary Package — page 851

the ter determination of the safety and effectiveness of a third dose of the Pfizer and Moderna mRNA vaccines and CDC's Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) issues formal recommendations." Best, Tony Anthony S. Fauci, MD Director National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Building 31, Room 7A-03 31 Center Drive, MSC 2520 National Institutes of Health Bethesda, MD 20892-2520 Phone: (301) 496-2263 FAX: (301) 496-4409 E-mail: afauci@niaid.nih.gov I called Janet Woodcock to encourage her to stick by her guns and do the FDA work quickly but by the books. She is even concerned that some FDA whistleblower will tell the press that FDA is being "pressured". Despite the fact that the leak has made things very complicated , we are putting the finishing touches on our plan for the rollout of the booster statement tomorrow. After that I will brief the president. This should be interesting since he cannot be in a good mood given the total disaster that has gone on with the withdrawal from Afghanistan and the complete takeover by the Taliban. I had an incredible and stressful evening tonight on the phone multiple times with Jeff and Rochelle and then later with John Mascola. Poor Rochelle! She had been telling all along to Jeff that the acip would go along with what we are doing. Jeff wrote a speech for the president that definitively said what we are doing. Now that the leak has occurred the acip is furious that we have already decided what we want to do without even consulting them. Jeff is being very rigid in getting a very clear crisp message of what the plan is and when Rochelle heard that Natalie had asked her to put together a schedule of how to roll out the plan, she panicked since this would actually pushed the acip over the line that they are being treated as a rubber stamp. I called up Jeff and explained to him that we really need to pull back on the schedule issue . After much discussion in which he got very agitated , but maintained his friendship and respect for me we decided to call up Rochelle and Vivek and have a zoom conversation. He was furious with her because he said that she kept on telling him that she had the acip in total alignment with what we're doing and now all of a sudden the acip is a problem. I believe that her job is in danger. I spent a lot of time on the phone trying to get Jeff to appreciate that we have got to stay within the process of how recommendations are made and that we can do that at the same time ultimately