FAUCI DIARY ARCHIVE — Friday, September 19, 2014
https://faucisdiary.com/diary/2014-09-19

Text below is verbatim from the released PDFs, with the original line breaks.
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DIARY ENTRY — Friday, September 19, 2014
Source: Diary Prequel, pp. 371–372 of 2026.07.27_Diary-Prequel-.pdf
Words: 571
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I continue to do small amount of press (as the press is getting
some fatigue with the same story) with Swedish National TV interview as well as a FOX
news appearance. Of note is the fact that the White House communications people are
acting in a very bizarre way. During the past week I have been receiving requests for
appearances on a variety of TV shows for the upcoming weekend including CNN and
MSNBC on Saturday, September 20, as well as Face the Nation and Fox news on
Sunday, September 21. The White House has refused to say yes or no to clearance and
despite multiple requests on the part of our communications people, namely, Courtney
Billet and Patty Conrad, we have not received a positive or negative reply for clearance.
This has gone on into the late evening of Friday, September 19 despite the fact that the
programmers were waiting for me to be on shows on Saturday. This is an absolute
unacceptable disgrace. The White House because of their inability to decide what should
go out on the weekends and their extraordinary and unexplainable need to control all
messages is putting all of us in the embarrassing position of being unresponsive to
legitimate media requests to discuss things that are not in conflict with anything else the
administration is doing. This is unequivocally the worst administration I have ever dealt
with when it comes to the need to control the media.

This evening I had a very intense and somewhat poignant conversation with Tom Frieden
at 9 PM to 10 PM concerning how we are going to approach the issue of vaccines. Tom
still has considerable concern about a truly randomized controlled trial to determine the
efficacy of the vaccine when the control is not one of the vaccines themselves. He
continues to struggle with the fact that we are not going to be able to get efficacy data
unless we do have a control arm which conflicts with the emotional need to get vaccine to
everyone as soon as possible. The difficulty here is that we might in fact truly need an
effective vaccine if the epidemic continues to expand and reaches the CDC projected
model of 500,000 cases within the next several months. Under those circumstances we
will absolutely need an effective vaccine and if we do not know if it is effective it will be
very difficult to widely distribute it. This is a painful dilemma that hopefully we can work
out.

I have been discussing this by e-mail with Paul Farmer who is currently in Monrovia,
Liberia. Paul is very sensitive to the fact that we need to do research to determine the
efficacy of the vaccine and feels that we can pull this off in Liberia with a properly run
trial. In this regard, the Minister of Health of Liberia has actually requested collaboration
with the NIH in doing research on therapeutics and vaccines. It is going to be a difficult
struggle to reconcile the emotional need of many people (in some respects including Tom
Frieden) to distribute vaccine at the same time that we are not sure if it actually works or
even paradoxically causes harm. I will continue to pursue discussions of clinical trial
designs that might be able to get us where we need to be, i.e. proving efficacy at the same
time as making vaccine available as quickly as possible.