Tony's Diary Package — page 889

I continue to give regular interviews about every couple of months with Sheri Fink who is doing a book on COVID-19. I am trying to stay out of any Trump versus Fauci discussion and focus more on the evolution of the outbreak. Matthew Memoli is turning into a real problem. He has written an email dated July 30th to me to Hugh Auchincloss and to Cliff Lane. The long and short of it is that he feels that vaccinating people is a bad idea even though he is the major proponent of challenge studies for vaccines. He believes that by vaccinating people we will be selecting for variants which in the long run will be detrimental to the population. This is a little bit more sophisticated effort than that of Scott Atlas. He has gone further than that, however. He has released the email to congressional committees and to the press and now without a doubt he is going to be talking about the fact that even though he is a clinical center employee he will refuse to follow the vaccine mandate that soon will be implemented at the NIH. In addition, he likely will go on the media spouting this extraordinary philosophy of his. I have made it clear to everyone that we should not interfere in any way with what he is doing because without a doubt he will say that we are trying to muzzle him and that will create more of a problem than the incredible nonsense that he is spewing. It looks like we will just have to buckle down and let him proceed with his craziness and hopefully he will not do a lot of damage to our attempts to get people vaccinated. It is inconceivable to me that he actually feels that it is OK to let everybody get infected just so that we can get immunity where the virus is not selected for by vaccine induced immunity. Letting people get infected has led to 680,000 deaths in the USA thus far. How can he miss the fact that the virus circulating within people who don't get an adequate immune response will lead to variants just as easily as vaccine immunity-induced mutations. He just makes no sense at all. Matt Memoli has now gone completely rogue. He is turning into a complete Scott Atlas (see above). Not only does he think that we should not be vaccinating people, he believes that mandating is unethical because it's going to make matters worse vis-à-vis the immune response. I thought nothing could be worse than that, but now he's done something unbelievable. He has taken a speech or an interview that I gave saying that although children statistically do much, much better than adults which regard to developing severe disease there are still (given the delta variant) a significant number of children who get sick and hospitalized and in fact there are more deaths among children from COVID-19 and there are after flu. He comes out now with an email to me saying that this is untrue and that there are more deaths by far with flu rather than COVID19. In fact, he wants me to publicly retract my statement!!!! However, what he is doing is that he is looking at "estimated burden of flu" which is calculated with a model at the end of the year which is usually three times the amount of the "reported cases". I was referring to the reported cases which are much less. And so, he seems to be out to make me look bad for reasons that I don't understand except that he is a complete contrarian. He's an infectious disease person who doesn't want to vaccinate people, who thinks mandates are unethical, and who is now telling me that I need to retract statements that I've made. He's a junior member of the institute and he is telling the institute director that I need to retract the statement based on information that he thinks is incorrect, but is correct. Unbelievable what I have to deal with! We have decided that we are not going to do anything with him; w are not going to approach him; we are not going to