Friday, October 4, 2002

Engaged with Julie Gerberding, Jerry Hauer, Kevin Keane in a briefing of State and local Public Health officials on the likely roll out plan of smallpox vaccination in3 stages (500,000 smallpox response teams and emergency personnel, then 10,000,000 health care workers, primary care people, police and fireman, etc. followed by making vaccine available to general public after the Acambis product is licensed in early 2004. This was followed by a press conference, which did not go well since Jerry Hauer said that we were not going to make any “announcements”. Note that there have been many leaks about the 3 stage plan and the press was clearly annoyed that the press conference started with a statement that we were not going to tell them anything important. However, Julie proceeded to get up and say that we recommended the above plan. She left the stage for a few minutes and I corrected her (politely) by saying that we are not “recommending” anything, we are merely giving a likely option. The Secretary recommends something to the President and that is confidential. The reason for this is that we do not want to put the President in the position of possibly going against his top health advisors, i.e. boxing in the President. Julie returned and confirmed my correction. The press rightfully thought that we were sloppy (not me, but DHHS). We called the main players – Larry Altman, Laura Mackler of AP, Ceci Connolly of Washington Post and Sheryl Stolberg of NY Times to clarify the situation. All of this is happening because the WH is taking so long to come out with a policy and we are compromised because if we do not say that we favor a certain plan, then it looks like we do not know what we are doing. How can we not favor a certain plan if we have been working on this problem for months???