Saturday, August 13, 2022

More drama with regard to the CDC and Rochelle Walenski. After much going back and forth between the CDC and the other docs including me, Vivek, Steve Cha, and to some extent David Kessler, we thought we had gotten them pulled back from making the statement that the vaccines were not effective at all in preventing infection and transmission. The reason this is an issue is that if they came out with that statement, which in fact is not entirely true since there is some degree of modest but declining protection as you would expect, then this would conflict with the statement and effort of recommending that people get the updated bivalent BA.5 vaccine in September. In addition, it would undermine the DoJ’s efforts at mandates for vaccines under certain circumstances. In any event, the CDC agreed to pull back on the statement of absolute lack of efficacy of vaccines against infections and transmission and take a more measured approach of saying that the vaccines provides only modest and waning efficacy against infection and transmission and that is why we should heed the advice of getting the updated booster in Sept. However, although they did this on their website, the MMWR that cam out yesterday had the same original damning language. When Larry Horowitz and Ashish noticed this, Larry went off the wall and in a somewhat agitated manner called me up this AM and said that this is the last straw and he was sure that when Ron Klain gets back from Spain this weekend he would fire Rochelle. Ashish was more measured and seems to have come to the conclusion that sooner or later (maybe not right now) Rochelle would have to go. Let us see what happens…..probably nothing