Wednesday, March 31, 2010

Meet with Alan Bernstein (Executive Director of the “Global HIV Vaccine Enterprise” (see above comments about my negative reaction to this unnecessary group). Alan is a good guy, but is heading a superfluous organization. In any event, his multiple layers of “working Groups” has come up with a Strategic plan for the “Enterprise”. Peggy Johnston is all over this and so she shields me from the week-byweek dealings of this organization (I am one of the Founding Council Funders). Meeting in my office with Alan since wants me very much to approve of the plan since NIAID is the major world funder of HIV vaccine research. Meeting In NYC next week of the Enterprise Council and so he is here to pay respects and make sure that I am on board. The Plan is OK, but NIAID will do what we think is best for vaccine development. Later in the day, the HHS Flu team (me, Nicki Lurie, Jesse Goodman, Peggy Hamburg, Tom Frieden, Laura Petrou, Jenny Backus, etc) meets with Sebelius in her private conference room. We present the supposedly penultimate draft of the MCM Review that she ordered and that we have been working on for weeks trying to reconcile it with Heidi’s initiative. Nicki gives a terrible presentation; Sebelius is confused as to the “scope” of the review that she ordered – was it a review only of medical countermeasure (MCM) development or a review of end-to-end process of responsdng to health crises, including flu. I tried to clarify for Nicki, and Sebelius agreed with me. We need to keep it focused. Back to the drawing board on a few issues. One issue is how much money should we ask for in the 2010 flu supplement and the 2011 budget to fulfill some of the gaps identified in the review and in what is proposed by Heidi.