Thursday, January 10, 2013

Did CNN Situation Room with Wolf Blitzer regarding the Flu outbreak. I made casual statement in response to a question by Wolf that the outbreak had passed the epidemic threshold (which was true (7.3% with threshold at 7.2%). Anderson Cooper later on in his CNN show “Anderson Cooper 360” made announcement that NIH Official Dr. Anthony Fauci has now declared the influenza outbreak “an epidemic”. The CDC was coming out with their weekly report with a big press briefing the following day (tomorrow) and this must have gotten them pissed with their usual jealousy of my being on TV and the media in issues that they think they own. Jan. 11, 2103 – Did morning CNN and Soledad O’Brien on CNN and further discussed the flu situation. Much, much press interest. As expected, Bill Hall (HHS Press office) wrote a note to Courtney Billet, Greg Folkers and John Burklow saying that from now on the CDC should handle press on the flu and I should only do local media and national media only when they want to talk about research associated with flu like universal flu vaccine. This has shades of Jenny Backus. Almost certainly a result of a complaint from CDC. We (NIH/NIAID) are trying not to clash with them, but this is really insulting and we will have to see how this plays out and how we should push back on this.