FAUCI DIARY ARCHIVE — Wednesday, August 11, 2004
https://faucisdiary.com/diary/2004-08-11

Text below is verbatim from the released PDFs, with the original line breaks.
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DIARY ENTRY — Wednesday, August 11, 2004
Source: Diary Prequel, p. 106 of 2026.07.27_Diary-Prequel-.pdf
Words: 208
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Met at EEOB Room 283 with Carol Kuntz and Bruce Miller and
Dorothy…. to discuss tentative plans to determine whether IL-4 gene inserted into
monkeypox would have the same effect as IL-4 inserted into mousepox virus, i.e. it
would suppress the immune response enough to allow lethal disease in the animal. This
relates to concerns that terrorists will genetically engineer variola with IL-4 and so over-
ride vaccination and cidofovir. Carol wanted to know which of several options for
experiments I would favor. A White Paper was drawn up by the Office of Homeland
Secrurity (Ken Bernard) with the various options. Of note, I had previously briefed
Frances Townsend in the White House Situation Room a couple of weeks ago (not
recorded above) on the same topic. I favor Option #3 which is to conduct the research on
IL-4-altered monkeypox in monkeys and do it as classified research. However, we
should announce that we will be conducting such experiments so that people do not get
suspicious that we are totally hiding things. We would keep the design, details and
results classified since if we found out that it did work in monkeys , but did not yet have a
countermeasure for it, then we would expose our vulnerabilities.