Wednesday, November 9, 2011

Still no information on why the WH ordered me to recall my Op-Ed. Have e-mailed Gayle Smith (NSS). I will explain situation to her tomorrow and see if she has any insight. Meeting did not occur at 8:30 AM because of scheduling issues. Will try to do a call tomorrow Nov.10, 2011 – Got some insight from Gayle, but am afraid she is not telling me everything. She claims that she heard discussion about my Op-Ed at the WH, but not by WHCOMS. Issue was whether it was a good idea to put it out right after HRC’s speech since it already got great PR and so why waste a Fauci Op-ED. Perhaps better to wait until the POTUS does World AIDS Day. This could be true, but who knows? Gayle did say that the OMB people might have been concerned by the couple of words that said we need significant increases in resources, including from other donor countries. This implies needing more USG resources, which would obviously bother OMB. However, I could easily have changed this to say we need significant new resources FROM other donor countries. In any event, Gayle assured me that the Op-Ed was not “off message” in the substance of its content. We will hold onto it for now. Having said this, here is another example of the ridiculous need to control the “message” on the part of this White House. Back to the Raj Shah intrigue. On Raj’s suggestion, Yesterday’s scheduled meeting now a phone call among me, Eric, Raj, Tom Frieden. Raj wanted to again bring up the possibility of doing something ”big” since he feels that the POTUS will not have another opportunity. After much discussion we explained to Raj again that “Blue Sky”, i.e. $2.5 billion will never get by OMB or the Congress and even so, the best way forward according to the models is not to just pick out a few countries and full-court-press. Raj goes along and we think it is over. Apparently, immediately after the call, Raj calls Rick Klausner asking him to convince me to not give in and adopt his plan. Rick calls me on my way to The Inn at Little Washington for my delayed 70th birthday present from Denise from last December. We are in the limo (rented by Denise) and Rick tries to convince me to re-convene the group. He says that Raj feels that I am the only one who could do this. Raj just does not want to give up. However, out of want to go the extra mile, I will call up Eric and Tom.