Tony's Diary Package — page 985

July 23, 2022 Yesterday I spoke with dawn O'Connell and told her that I would be very much in favor of the secretary declaring a public health emergency for monkeypox. She is now running it up the chain to see what others think about that.. I had my usual call this morning with Kevin O'Connor, the president's physician. It was a disturbing call because Kevin told me that Ashish is really trying to manipulate what Kevin says regarding the health of the president and Kevin is starting to get very aggravated by this. For example, Ashish did not want Kevin to mention that the president's temperature was 99.4F because then that would be a topic for the news discussion. That is completely ridiculous because it is totally expected that someone with a URI would have a mild temperature responsive to Tylenol. In addition, Ashish did not like the use of the word "malaise" which was the exact word the president used to describe how he felt. Ashish was afraid that that word would bring up recall of president Jimmy Carter and the negative response that the country had to his describing "malaise" in the country. And then finally in today's report Kevin wanted to put in a new symptom that the president complained of which was muscle aches, an entirely understandable symptom that has nothing to do with progression of disease. They insisted that he not add that. Kevin pushed back and said that he would not sign off on anything if they force him to hold back on what the true symptoms are.