Friday, November 12, 2004

Meeting in Roosevelt Room of WH to discuss the plans for influenza preparedness and for pandemic flu plans. Major points are what we have been discussing for the past few weeks about providing incentives for PHARMA to get involved and stay in flu vaccine field. We (DHHS team) are proposing back end guaranteed purchases for overflow doses; liability protection, tax breaks, research to develop cell culture based and recombinant DNA approaches to replace egg-based approaches; advanced purchase and stockpiling of vaccine for children. TGT presented and I filled in. Present were: Karl Rove, Josh Bolton, Margaret Spellings, Kristen Silverberg, Alex Azar, Scott Whitaker, Grant Dixton, David Leitch, Harriet Miers, Alan Gilbert, Carol Kuntz and others.