Monday, June 7, 2021

Global – 173,000,000/3,700,000; USA – 33,200,000/594,800 • Eventful day - I went to New York today with first lady doctor Jill Biden for two reasons: 1st )to visit the Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem in order to thank them for setting up a vaccine clinic and to encourage them to continue to advocate for young people to get vaccinated. I flew up with the first lady on one of the Air Force planes assigned to the White House and had a great conversation with her on the plane up as well as on the plane down. She is an amazingly natural and one person with whom I believe we have now started a good friendship. The people at the Abyssinian church or extremely kind to me in saying how much they appreciated that I was there and all of them wanting to take selfies with me. We stayed at the Bowery hotel at the interface between Chinatown and the Bowery. i was surprised that we picked the hotel Since where we want to go for the TV hit the following morning was way Uptown. Brett Rowland and I had a great Italian dinner at the Primi restaurant in the Bowery. The following day the first lady and I appeared together on the Kelly Ripa and Ryan Seacrest Show (KABC). It was very lighthearted and enjoyable. Another very important aspect of the day is that as I was getting ready to take off with the motorcade from the White House on the way to Andrews Air Force Base, the president came walking down the back alley , the Secret Service called me out of the car , and the president put both his hands on both my shoulders and said “I just want to tell you that I am behind you 1000%”; and he repeated again “I am behind you 1000%.” He said “those people are crazy they have no idea what they're talking about and just don't pay any attention to them.” • Back to the dark side. Scott Gottlieb had appeared on Face the Nation and mentioned in an attempt to help me then I had actually gone to Europe in Jan/Feb. 2020 to brief health ministers about the possibility that the virus could have been constructed an escape from the laboratory. He did this to indicate that I was not hiding anything because I already knew that this was a possibility and so I didn't change my mind currently by saying that a lab leak is a possibility since I was talking about it openly back then. As it turns out, he was a little bit mixed up because on January 31st, 2020 I received a call from Jeremy Farrar who conferenced in Christian Andersen to tell me that Ed Holmes and Christian had seen a copy of the sequence of the virus and felt that there was a possibility that because of the unusual furin cleavage site that this could possibly have been a constructed virus. as indicated in my notes of January 31st and February 1st , 2020, since I am not an evolutionary biologist I called together by phone a group knowledgeable scientist together with Francis Collins and a few other people to discuss this. After a considerable amount of discussion about half of the people felt that this was possibly a constructed virus and the other half were convinced that this was a natural occurrence. A few weeks later Christian Andersen got together with Bob Garry and Andrew Rambaut to examine this more carefully and they came to the conclusion that they were convinced that this. was a natural occurrence and a jump from the animal reservoir. They published their data in a preprint server in February followed by a nature paper in March of 2020 . That is the reason why it appears that a I briefed people which I did not . I was briefed by them . Scott had said that I had briefed a group of international health people he seemed to have gotten some of the story wrong , but overall he was correct. Cases continue to come down: