FAUCI DIARY ARCHIVE — Friday, April 10, 2015
https://faucisdiary.com/diary/2015-04-10

Text below is verbatim from the released PDFs, with the original line breaks.
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DIARY ENTRY — Friday, April 10, 2015
Source: Diary Prequel, p. 447 of 2026.07.27_Diary-Prequel-.pdf
Words: 302
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Jack Whitescarver and Wendy Wertheimer sent in to Francis Collins
their letter of resignation from the OAR. Jack is 78 and wanted to stay until he reached
80. However, he and Francis have not been getting along since Francis feels that Jack
has been too slow and non-specific in shifting the AIDS money to focus on the high
priority areas such as vaccine, prevention, cure and co-morbidities. The relationship has
soured and so Jack feels that it is time to go. I, myself, love Jack, but am not satisfied
with how they are handling the re-distribution of the AIDS money. Clearly there is too
much AIDS money in NIDA and in NCI that is not being used for AIDS projects and to
call it AIDS-related is a stretch. We had a meeting in my library today with Larry
Tabak, Wendy W. and Jack to discuss this issue. I got pissed off at Wendy since she
essentially accused me of saying (which I did not) that behavioral research grants were
not good science. That is not what I said. I said that we were doing proportionately too
much behavioral research out of NIDA and that the Congress (Rep Andy Harris R-MD et
al) are trying to decrease the AIDS budget (see above) and we had better be spending it
all on research that is high priority such as vaccine and cure; otherwise, they will have an
excuse to cut the budget. Larry Tabak is totally in my corner and even Jack admitted
that he agreed. However, the behavioralist community keeps pushing to do a lot of
behavioral research. Clearly, the studies might be sound, but they do not contribute to
the end of the pandemic. You can study behavior when it comes to AIDS; however, it
has been very difficult to “change” behavior.