Tony's Diary Package — page 989

people. My suggestion would be to treat him for five days, have him stay in the White House virtually up to 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 period. And have him wear a mask in order to avoid him inadvertently infecting people if he rebounds, I would be OK, if he is positive continued isolating. Had long conversation with Ashish who was asking my advice. He started off the conversation by saying that the White House continues to have a lot of problems with Rochelle, the latest of which was the apportionment of vaccine doses. (See discussion above about strong consideration of asking her to step down). Ashish said that Ron wants my take on the situation with Rochelle/CDC and the distribution of vaccine doses. She wants to divide the vaccines for monkey pox according to the formula of 25% according to cases and 75% according to risk. This is something that we had discussed yesterday in a call with the secretary. During that call I promised that I would back Rochelle's proposal because of the fact that if they do not distribute more, namely 75%, according to risk, when we have outbreaks related to "Southern Decadence" and other gay pride functions we will not have vaccine in place to counter it. However Ron Klain is adamant that he does not want vaccines shipped to locations in which there are few cases and when they do not get cases or they do not administer vaccine to their case countthat the vaccine goes to waste (you cannot reship vaccine). I made the following point to the secretary yesterday and I repeated it word for word to Ron today. I would be supportive of a 25% for cases and 75% for risk distribution only if the jurisdictions that received the 75% for risk are given the vaccines in small apportionments. For example if they were scheduled to get 400 vaccines, you would give them 100 and tell them that if they don't use that 100 expeditiously the next shipment of 100 would not be given to them but would be given to a jurisdiction that has a high number of cases. I explained this to Ron when he called me today and told him that that would be my position. He said that Ron is very interested in what I would do and that this would hold a great deal of weight in the discussions that we will have tomorrow, which is Monday. Had a long conversation with Jeff about the above issue concerning firing someone at HHS/CDC. Similar to the situation that I faced years ago with Secretary Burwell wanting to fire Tom Frieden because of poor performance with Ebola where I defended Tom, I found myself defending Rochelle. Rochelle is a wonderful person, but she does not have control over her agency and she has to learn to balance the politically expedient thing while 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