Friday, November 4, 2011

I cancelled most of my AM calendar to attend meeting at 8:00 AM in Eric’s OGAC (Office of Global AIDS Coordinator) office at 2100 Pennsylvania Ave, N.W. (suite 200). At meeting was the 4 of us. After about 90 minutes I got everyone to accept the “Fauci hybrid plan”. Raj agreed (as I suggested last evening) that he come up with about a few hundred million in efficiencies from USAID. Eric will try to find more efficiencies from the PEPFAR “Pipeline”, all to beef up the demonstration project and perhaps include another country such as Nigeria. However, we will all need to see if our respective demonstration projects could effectively absorb an additional few hundred million $. We will work on this over the weekend. More to come. Also today met with Dr. Abdelali Haoudi, VP for Research of the Qatar Foundation at the recommendation of Rick Klausner with whom I had dinner on Nov. 1. Great meeting with Abdelali. Introduced him to JJ McGowan, Kathy Zoon and Marv Kalt to help him with using the NIAID model to get his Qatar intramural and extramural program set up. I think that we could turn out to be friends. Nov. 5-6, 2011 – Continued strain between USAID (Raj) and PEPFAR (Eric and Charles) in that Raj just does not want to give in about pushing for “doing things differently”. Nov. 5-6 is the weekend and Department of State (Lorrie McHugh – communications) as well as Cheryl Mills are lining up people (activists, etc.) to write blogs in anticipation of Sec. Clinton’s Speech at NIH. Her speech (which I have been deeply involved in writing follows the PEPFAR model, not the USAID model. They have asked me to do an editorial for the NY Times giving the scientific basis HRC’s speech. I worked all weekend and got a great piece which I have circulated to Cheryl Mills, Burklow (NIH), HHS, etc.