Monday, August 23, 2021

Global USA BLA granted for Pfizer by the FDA!! I just did a site visit to the Department of State facility that does the screening for diplomatic pouches and mail. This is the facility that has been screening my mail ever since I had the anthrax scare with the power in one of my letters literally one year ago four days from now. Brett Rowland arrange for me to go there to thank the people in the facility and to encourage them in their work. They were very grateful but I took the time to visit them and there was the usual selfies galore. Another important issue today was that we were told by Larry Tabak at the state department wanted us to remove any names of people in Afghanistan that we are interacting with through grants or contracts from our public facing databases and websites. The reason for this is that we are concerned that the Taliban will use the websites to identify people in Afghanistan with connections to the United states and would then assassinate them. It is very clear that things are not going well following the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Afghanistan. The Taliban has easily taken over the country and now we are having trouble getting Americans as well as Afghanistan allies such as interpreters out of Kabul safely. It's a very bad time for the Biden administration since they are being severely criticized for not having the right intelligence capability to indicate to them that the Taliban would take over so quickly without allowing time for us to withdraw our own personnel in an orderly fashion. What we did was withdraw the military first thinking that we would have ample time to withdraw diplomats and other personnel safely . Obviously this is not the case and it is still a very tenuous situation in Afghanistan. PRESS: Podcast 70 Over 70; NPR “All Things Considered” with Mary Louise Kelly; Podcast “A Starting Point” with Mark Kassen and Chris Evans; PBS ”NewsHour” with Judy Woodruff; MSNBC “Peacock” with Mehdi Hasan;