Wednesday, December 2, 2020

Global – 63,400,000/1,500,000; USA – 13,600,000/270,000 Situation remains tenuous. Note from Deb Birx associated with her daily slide set: The situation we find ourselves is deteriorating beyond words. Please help me convey to senior leaders that is the worse combination of factors that we have seen since the beginning of the pandemic. Combining the Spring and Summer surge into a winter surge is what is deeply concerning. Despite my warnings there are OVP staff that undermine this message everyday and have greater access to the VP. I know its hard to see it coming, I know its hard to fathom, but it is coming even independent of the Thanksgiving potential due to the movement into populous states and nearly 50% of the country still believes this is being over blown, that it’s a hoax, that masks don’t work and I think the most damaging there is a set curve independent of mitigation – ie it doesn’t matter what you do it will look the same. Yes there is an epidemic curve to both mitigated and unmitigated surges BUT the peak is higher and the duration of the surge is 2X longer without mitigation. Yes when hospitals get overwhelmed people do take more precautions and flatten the curve but that results in nearly 2X the fatalities as a mitigated response. Inadequately mitigated is nearly 2X the area under the curve as mitigated – 2X the hospitalizations and potentially 2X the deaths. Finally unlike the spring the asymptomatic group under 35 will not mitigate in the same way and will continue to drive infections and that is why more precautions must be implemented now – both state level mitigation policies and personal mitigation efforts. Deb 2600+ Deaths today. Worse since the NYC surge in early Spring • Call from Mark Meadows saying that it was OK to do press conference with Gov. Cuomo. Also, he really wanted a reality check on the fact that the MHRA of the UK has given their equivalent of an EUA to the Pfizer vaccine. He wanted to know if our FDA was dragging their feet. I totally supported the FDA, Peter Marks, and Steve Hahn and said that the UK were “hot-dogging” it and that even the EMA were blasting the UK for hot dogging. It seemed that Mark was on the brink of firing Hahn. Hope I blocked that • Got call from Jeff Zients in preparation of my briefing the Biden “landing team” tomorrow. Jeff wanted to alert me that Biden will be calling me right after the briefing. • Received the Eleanor Roosevelt Prize for Global Human Rights Advancement from the American Bar Association Center for Human Rights • PEOPLE Magazine names me 2020 Person of the Year together with George Clooney, Selena Gomez and Regina King PRESS: CNN: Elton John honors Anthony Fauci on World AIDS Day; CNN Heroes with Anderson Cooper; KTVQ TV – Billings, MT; ABC News PRIME (Online); Fox TV News; Frank Bruni writes in the NY Times: Anthony Fauci is the steely superhero of my deep state, and he’s flanked and fortified by all the government health officials who also pushed back against the quackery of Scott Atlas, the Trump-flattering pandemic adviser who resigned on Monday