Tuesday, October 23, 2012

Met with Howard Koh (Assist. Sec. for Health) and Deputy Ron Valdesarri in my conference room 7A-24. They wanted to discuss and were actually putting pressure on me/us at NIH to put together a guidelines panel for treatment of HCV. They clearly are getting pressure from constituents. Since we (NIH) have done such a great job on the HIV treatment guidelines for HHS, they wanted us to do the same for HCV. Problem is that if we start doing guidelines for HCV, then other diseases would want us to do guidelines and we should not be in the guidelines business. Howard was friendly and somewhat fawning over me. Ron Valdesarri in my opinion is somewhat of a jerk.