Friday, July 30, 2021

Global USA There is growing frustration fall apart of Jeff with the CDC and particularly with Rochelle. I love her but she does not seem to have control over organization. We were being briefed the other night about what we were going to be saying about boosters and about the effect of the delta variant. In the middle of the conversation we found out that an MMWR was already written that could possibly be in conflict with what we were discussing. (see above). Now we have a situation where a slide set that was for internal discussion within the CDC was leaked by the CDC to the Washington Post including a discussion of things that we had not vetted out with the Medical Group. Jeff was extremely concerned that we are now on the defense trying to explain or defend things in an internal document that is now public. He called a special zoom meeting with himself , me , and Rochelle to try and sort this out. It became clear during the discussion that Rochelle herself was somewhat unaware of what her own CDC people were doing. I felt very bad for her because she is clearly very competent. we will have another zoom meeting later today since Jeff tasked me to review the papers upon which the CDC conclusion that the delta variant causes more severe disease was based. I will have myself, Andrea Lerner, Cliff lane, and Dean Follmann review the papers. After review by my “team” we found that the Singapore data was very weak but that the Scotland and Canada data suggest that there is an increase in severity with the delta variant. I communicated this both to Jeff and to Rochelle. I had a very interesting conversation with the Prime Minister of Israel, Naftali Bennett, who requested a zoom call with me. Based on the diminishing efficacy of the Pfizer vaccine in Israel, the Prime Minister together with his health ministers have decided that they will give a third booster shot to individuals older than 60 years old. They are already giving a booster to people who are immunosuppressed. the Prime Minister wanted to get my opinion and ultimate support of what he is doing. with my permission he taped our discussion so that he could put it on his Instagram to show to the people of Israel. I pointed out to him that there will be some concern that he is boosting people in his own population while much of the world has not yet received their first dose. He understands that but pointed out to me that is real is a country of almost 9 million people and they have just enough doses to take care of their own people , and unlike the United states, they do not have the resources to supply the rest of the world. He asked for my cell phone number so that he might intermittently call me for advice. With the approval of the State Department I gave it to him. It seems that we have developed a very good rapport on the basis of this first meeting. It turns out that the Prime Minister is an extremely interesting man who was a combat commander (Major) in the Israeli Defense Forces in a Special Forces unit. He led many Special Forces operations. In addition, he has spent many years in the United States and has made millions of dollars as a software entrepreneur. PRESS: Global National TV – Canada; Spectrum News TV – California; NPR – “All Things Considered” with Ailsa Chang