Saturday, April 24, 2021

Global – 145,200,000/3,100,000; USA – 31,800,000/568,200 Real crazy anti-Fauci stuff going on. Two authors named Steve Deace and Todd Erzen wrote a book about me entitled “Faucian Bargain” - The most powerful and dangerous bureaucrat in American history. It is a cheap paperback of 179 pages which I will not even read but it contains the same sort of nonsense that the other conspiracy theorists have been saying about me. It is really getting worse and worse in the number of crazy people who are buying into this conspiracy theory and so now we have the book by Robert F Kennedy junior and this book by these two guys as well as a number of right wing columnists such as Josh Rogin , as well as multiple commentators on Fox News who spend much of their time making me out to be the worst villain in the world and or trying to discredit me. Had important meeting with Jeff Zients, David Kessler, Francis Collins, Car Dieffenbach, Natalie Quillian, Dina Halme, Lauren …. To discuss the $3.15 billion for the COVID-19 antiviral program. There was considerable concern on our part that we would not be getting the full amount of money for this very important program to develop antiviral drugs for COVID-19. Omb has indicated that they may use some of that money for the purchase of booster doses for the vaccine program. We called this meeting together in order to get Jeff to support the fact that this is an incredibly important program for the current and future pandemics. Carl describe the program very well and I believe that we have convinced Jeff to strongly support us. See below power for a detailed description with slides: We still are doing pretty well against the current variants with regard to our vaccines; Eric Topol’s take on Variants: India is exploding with cases with the new variant B.1.617 (see below): We have a serious problem of optics regarding our not sending to needy countries any of the AZ doses of vaccine at the same time as we have a greatest supply than demand right now. There is growing sentiment throughout the developing world at the United states is being unethical and amoral in not giving away doses of vaccine from AZ that we know we will never use. This is particularly the case with India that is really exploding with infections. The are now having >300,000 infections per day. One can say that you cannot do this since AZ has only been approved under an EUA. However, there are certainly ways that we can get around this. The bottom line is that we are looking very bad in the eyes of the low and middle income countries. I will continue to bring this up to Jeff Zients and other leadership. In fairness to our position, we do not really have a lot of doses of AZ vaccine hang around unused. Novovax does not come online until around June, and so the argument that we want to secure enough doses for ourselves including boosters can be defensible. Unquestionably, this is a very difficult situation. Amazing, but Vivek called me right after I wrote this with the same feeling as expressed above. We tried to get a meeting with Vivek, me, Rochelle, and Jeff to discuss how we are going to handle the situation with regard to India , particularly on the Sunday TV shows that Vivek and I will be on tomorrow. Unfortunately, Jeff could not squeeze in a meeting. PRESS: Huffington Post: Anthony Fauci Delivers Short, Sharp Shutdown Of GOP Senator’s Vaccine Doubt Bluster