Tony's Diary Package — page 987

still maintaining solid scientific principles. The problem is she relies too heavily on the entrenched people at CDC who are smart and will meaning but who have no oversight or quality control from the outside. This allows them to proceed with somewhat antiquated if not ossified ideas. As the discussion went the options were to fire Secretary Becerra; however, this would be very difficult since it would be tough to get a Senate confirmation for a secretary within a relatively acceptable period of time. The other option is to fire Rochelle, but now is not the time to do that and it would be against my recommendation. One of the points that Jeff made is that they are considering in a humane way to ask Rochelle to step down at the end of the year before the beginning of the second-half of the first term. Despite my trying to protect Rochelle there is a very good chance that that will happen. Kevin O'Connor continues to call me 2x/day. The president continues to improve and is completed his 4th day on Paxlovid. .He was out for four hours today by the pool doing reading work. The next big question is whether to give him eight days or 10 days instead of five days of pax livid. That would be a problem since it would be against FDA authorization and the public would cry out that we had treating him differently than other people. the concern on the part of the White House is that if he rebounds after he is negative for several days, he will likely be out talking and mingling with people. If he infects someone following an inadvertent rebound, he will be blamed for infecting other people. My suggestion would be to treat him for five days have him stay in the White House virtually for an additional five days testing him everyday if he turns negative as soon as he turns negative send him out even if it's before the 10 day. And have him wear a mask in order to avoid him inadvertently infecting people if he rebounds, I would just test him every morning before he gets up and goes out to meet with people. If he is negative he will be OK, if he is positive continued isolating. Emergency phone call among HHS people (Becerra, Dawn et al) regarding convincing POTUS (and Ron) to declare a Public Health Emergency (PHE) for MPX. Becerra says that POTUS will rely heavily on my opinion. Problem is that they are concerned that if you declare a PHE for monkey pox then why not declare it for gun violence or for reproductive rights. That sounds very much like the negativistic attitude of RON.