Tony's Diary Package — page 858

Global USA grants or contracts from our public facing databases and websites. The reason for this is that we are concerned that the Taliban will use the websites to identify people in Afghanistan with connections to the United states and would then assassinate them. It is very clear that things are not going well following the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Afghanistan. The Taliban has easily taken over the country and now we are having trouble getting Americans as well as Afghanistan allies such as interpreters out of Kabul safely. It's a very bad time for the Biden administration since they are being severely criticized for not having the right intelligence capability to indicate to them that the Taliban would take over so quickly without allowing time for us to withdraw our own personnel in an orderly fashion. What we did was withdraw the military first thinking that we would have ample time to withdraw diplomats and other personnel safely . Obviously this is not the case and it is still a very tenuous situation in Afghanistan. PRESS: Podcast 70 Over 70; NPR "All Things Considered" with Mary Louise Kelly; Podcast "A Starting Point" with Mark Kassen and Chris Evans; PBS "NewsHour" with Judy Woodruff; MSNBC "Peacock" with Mehdi Hasan; August 24, 2021 - Global USA Cases, hospitalizations and deaths (to a lesser extent) continue to soar. More conspiracy theory like letters keep coming in from congressmen and senators trying to link us to the origin of COVID-19. This is an amazing and unbelievable waste of our time and has no bearing whatsoever on what we have actually done with that minor, minor $125,000 grant to the Wuhan institute of virology. It is totally mind boggling how they are distorting the truth to try and distract from the reality of what actually had happened during the Trump administration where he lied and underplayed the outbreak. Strange but not surprising thing happened as a result of several of the shows that I was on over the last 24 hours. On several of the TV shows I was talking mostly about the favorable aspect of the final approval of the BLA for Pfizer. However, in one of the conversations someone asked when I thought we were to get back to normal. I gave the usual caveats but then went on to say if we get as many people vaccinated as we possibly can as quickly as we possibly can we could diminish the number of cases and if we get through the winter which will be complicated by influenza and other respiratory infections, then I believe we could get back to some form of real normality by the spring of 2022. Much to my surprise I got a call this morning from Jeff clearly upset because the news media had jumped on that and said that Biden has been saying we're going to get out of this soon and Fauci who knows what's going on is saying it's going to be into next year. I am getting a little bit concerned, even though I understand Jeff's concern about the distortion of a message for a political purpose, that we may be tailoring a message that is not totally aligned with the truth. In fact, I believe we would be very lucky if we're back to normal by the spring of 2022. I told Jeff that from now on when asked to predict I will just say we don't know. This might actually not go over very well with the press anyway, but that is what I will say. Of note shortly after my call with Jeff, Courtney Rowe called me up in a much more