Tuesday, July 12, 2022

Was called to the White House for a meeting with Ron Klain, Ashish Jha, Sec. Becerra, Richelle Walensky and Dawn O’Connell. Ron was really ****** that he is getting a lot of Flack from New York City who feels that they are not getting enough doses of monkey pox vaccine. Ron is upset with the formula of distribution among the states. He feels that doses are being sent to places with few cases and not being used and there are lines of people waiting to get vaccinated in New York City and they are making a big stink about this causing what may turn out to be a political problem for POTUS. I kept quiet through most of the discussion which was pretty tense between secretary Becarra and Ron. However, it became clear to me that the lesion was that the contractor who is shipping the doses from Denmark to the United States do not appear to realize that this is an emergency and they're talking about sending one plane per week with about 140,000 doses per plane. I brought up the point when Ron mentioned that I was being very quiet and he wanted to know my opinion. I said that it is inconceivable to me that we cannot do better than 140,000 doses shipped per week when we have about a million doses in Denmark sitting ready to be shipped. I believe that this is an example of people not pressuring to get things done during an emergency and accepting business as usual. The astounding fact is that they said that the reason they have to rely on the plane flying back from the United States to Denmark to reload with another bunch of vaccines is that they only have limited carriers to put the vials in when they are shipped on the plane. What are they talking about?? One can make carriers with 3D printers. In addition, I don't understand why they can only do 140,000 at a time. After the meeting I emailed Dawn and expressed to her my astonishment that we can't do better than this. She checked and found out that all of a sudden they could now ship 400,000 doses of vaccine per plane instead of 140,000. In addition I encouraged her to work with the Department of Defence to get more planes in the air. This is another example of a serious logistic snafu that could have easily been solved if somebody was just thinking with a clear head. ------------------------------------------------------------ Good coverage of the White House press conference where I emphasize the need to take the current situation seriously without letting it disrupt our lives: Fauci: Take new subvariant seriously, but The Hill - don’t ‘let it disrupt our lives’ by Peter Sullivan - 07/12/22 11:10 AM ET NY Times – Sheryl Stolberg As BA.5 spreads, the White House warns that Covid is not over. : “Variants will continue to emerge if the virus circulates globally and in this country,” Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, Mr. Biden’s chief medical adviser for the pandemic, said at a White House news briefing. “We should not let it disrupt our lives. But we cannot deny that it is a reality that we need to deal with.” PRESS: White House Press Briefing; MSNBC with Chris Lansing; Nexstar with Don Kauffman; Interview with Eileen O’Reilly for Axios; Fox TV with Neil Cavuto;