Tuesday, January 26, 2010

Another meeting with Heidi Avery at the Situation Room in the West Wing of the WH to further discuss the new initiative to counter all public health threats including bioterror, but also all emerging and existing Health threats. Mike Kurilla and I have been fine tuning the NIH component. Present at the meeting was the same group as on January 19, 2010 (see above0 . Also present was the POTUS’s science advisor John Holdren. We now have a 1-pager that Heidi has discussed with the POTUS and that is being considered for a brief comment in the State of the Union (SOTU) Address. Jan. 27-28, 2010 – Went to Boston to be the Bulfinch Visiting Professor at Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School at the invitation of Denny Ausiello (Chair of Medicine). Great visit, particularly interactions with House Staff and Fellows. Gave the Bulfinch Lecture on Pandemic Influenza; extremely well-received by a standing room only crowd. On the trip home when I landed at DCA, I bought a hot dog since In was starving. I immediately ran into Nina Tottenberg and her husband David who god-naturely chastised me for eating the hot dog. With a minute I walked to a newsstand to buy a Washington Post. I ran into Karl Rove who jokingly said he would tell the world that the great Dr. Fauci was caught eating a hot dog. We had a good laugh. On evening of Jan. 27 POTUS mentioned the sentence that I crafted for Heidi in the SOTU Address: “And we are launching a new initiative that will give us the capacity to respond faster and more effectively to bioterrorism or an infectious disease — a plan that will counter threats at home and strengthen public health abroad.” This is the second SOTU Address where my words were included. Other was the PEPFAR and Project BioShield statements in the Jan. 28, 2003 SOTU address by Pres. Bush.