Monday, March 29, 2010

Continue with the Monday evening weekly meetings with Heidi Avery at the WH Sit. Room. Usual suspects. Still Heidi pushing and everyone but me pushing back. Peggy Hamburg seems her usual spacey self often not even having read the documents that Heidi distributes for comment. Jesse Goodman (wonderful guy) continues to be reserved and cautious in typical FDA fashion, but cannot articulate well. Nicki Lurie is a good person, but over her head. In fairness to her, she is caught between a rock and a hard place in trying not to let this get ahead of the Secretary who in my mind is distracted or does not really care about this. Nicki keeps pushing back on Heidi’s “transforming initiative”. Zeke Emanuel comes to most of the meetings and is with Heidi and me in wanting to push this. In typical Zeke fashion, he is brilliant, but shoots often from the hip. Mike Kurilla is doing a great job with me and probably understands the proposed process better than anyone in the room. Andy Weber of DoD (assistant Secretary) is a good guy, but he is just trying to keep the DoD in the “game”