Wednesday, September 29, 2021

Global – 232,600,000/4,800,000; USA - 43,200,000/691,500 Had a very tough and ridiculous interview with Hugh Hewitt. Hugh, who usually is a reasonable, albeit very conservative person, was extremely aggressive with me in an interview in which he kept insisting that people are not getting vaccinated because I am telling them to get vaccinated and strongly suggested that I step down and retire since I am the obstacle to people getting vaccinated. He quoted a survey saying that middle to right people want me to retire and are not getting vaccinated because I'm the messenger telling them to get vaccinated. Truly an incredible train of thought on his part. He said we need fresh faces telling people to get vaccinated and if we had fresh faces then people would get vaccinated. I countered by saying we do have fresh faces in the form of Rochelle Walensky and Vivek Murthy. And so does he consider that although all three of us are saying to get vaccinated including two new fresh faces that people are not getting vaccinated merely because I'm one of the three people telling them to get vaccinated?? I have never heard of a more distorted train of thought. This conversation triggered in me some serious thinking about several things including when I actually would want to retire from the untenable situation that I am in of having 10s of millions of people hate me because I stand for the truth. Also, this nonsense about conflating the discussion about gain of function with the lab lead theory is preposterous and totally distracting and draining of everyone’s energy. Richard Ebright with his gain of function obsession is a total asshole who is pushing this theory because he “wants to be somebody”. I am terribly disappointed with Jesse Bloom and David Relman for doing somewhat of the same thing. they have been pushing to stop any gain of function research for a long time and I believe that in some respects they are pushing for an even hoping that this was a lab leak , which the molecular analysis of the viruses that we used in the lab compared to the virus SARS-CoV-2 clearly indicate that it is molecularly impossible for the viruses under the auspices of the NIH grant to have been manipulated into or evolved into SARS-Cov-2. The opposition to me is part of the “big lie” – “Lock her up”; Trump won the election; January 6th was really a friendly visit to the Capitol; “the China virus” and Trump was correct, “Fire Fauci” since he was wrong all along and so let's discredit him, and so on. Quite frankly , I am finally coming to the realization that our democracy is truly threatened and that it is possible, even likely, that our democracy will crumble with the 2024 election. If trump wins , we are finished . If trump loses, his far right lunatics will likely try again to overthrow the election. And with the attempts to have state legislators (Republican) validate the electoral votes, I am really afraid that they might be successful. Having said all of this, there is no way that I am going to retire before this outbreak is under control. I continue to give regular interviews about every couple of months with Sheri Fink who is doing a book on COVID-19. I am trying to stay out of any Trump versus Fauci discussion and focus more on the evolution of the outbreak. Matthew Memoli is turning into a real problem. He has written an email dated July 30th to me to Hugh Auchincloss and to Cliff Lane. The long and short of it is that he feels that vaccinating people is a bad idea even though he is the major proponent of challenge studies for vaccines. He believes that by vaccinating people we will be selecting for variants which in the long run will be detrimental to the population. This is a little bit more sophisticated effort than that of Scott Atlas. He has gone further than that, however. He has released the email to congressional committees and to the press and now without a doubt he is going to be talking about the fact that even though he is a clinical center employee he will refuse to follow the vaccine mandate that soon will be implemented at the NIH. In addition, he likely will go on the media spouting this extraordinary philosophy of his. I have made it clear to everyone that we should not interfere in any way with what he is doing because without a doubt he will say that we are trying to muzzle him and that will create more of a problem than the incredible nonsense that he is spewing. It looks like we will just have to buckle down and let him proceed with his craziness and hopefully he will not do a lot of damage to our attempts to get people vaccinated. It is inconceivable to me that he actually feels that it is OK to let everybody get infected just so that we can get immunity where the virus is not selected for by vaccine induced immunity. Letting people get infected has led to 680,000 deaths in the USA thus far. How can he miss the fact that the virus circulating within people who don't get an adequate immune response will lead to variants just as easily as vaccine immunity-induced mutations. He just makes no sense at all. Matt Memoli has now gone completely rogue. He is turning into a complete Scott Atlas (see above). Not only does he think that we should not be vaccinating people, he believes that mandating is unethical because it's going to make matters worse vis-à-vis the immune response. I thought nothing could be worse than that, but now he's done something unbelievable. He has taken a speech or an interview that I gave saying that although children statistically do much, much better than adults which regard to developing severe disease there are still (given the delta variant) a significant number of children who get sick and hospitalized and in fact there are more deaths among children from COVID-19 and there are after flu. He comes out now with an email to me saying that this is untrue and that there are more deaths by far with flu rather than COVID- 19. In fact, he wants me to publicly retract my statement!!!! However, what he is doing is that he is looking at “estimated burden of flu” which is calculated with a model at the end of the year which is usually three times the amount of the “reported cases”. I was referring to the reported cases which are much less. And so, he seems to be out to make me look bad for reasons that I don't understand except that he is a complete contrarian. He's an infectious disease person who doesn't want to vaccinate people, who thinks mandates are unethical, and who is now telling me that I need to retract statements that I've made. He's a junior member of the institute and he is telling the institute director that I need to retract the statement based on information that he thinks is incorrect, but is correct. Unbelievable what I have to deal with! We have decided that we are not going to do anything with him; w are not going to approach him; we are not going to even talk to him about this since I know from my experience that if we do anything, he will say that we were trying to muzzle him. As far as I am concerned he could say whatever he wants to say, as crazy as it is, whatever he wants to say. Also he said that he is refusing to get vaccinated The problem with this is that the new rule from the federal government is that if he does not get vaccinated he is going to get fired unless he has a religious exemption. If it turns out that he winds up getting fired, he will almost certainly say that it is retaliation. PRESS: Hugh Hewitt radio interview; NPR Radio “Here and Now” with Tonya Mosley; MSNBC – “Reports” with Andrea Mitchell; KLZ Israeli Radio;