Wednesday, March 28, 2012

Senate Appropriations Subcommittee Hearing for NIH. Francis Collins, me, Varmus, Griffin, Insel, Hodes. Too bad that these hearing are only a total of 2 hours when we used to have 2 hours for NIAID alone. I got questions on the H5N1 issue. Mar. 29-30, 2012 – Intense meeting for 1 ½ days of the NSABB to re-visit the decision regarding publication of the 2 manuscripts – Fouchier (Science) and Kawaoka (Nature). It was clear that the driving forces to still block full publication were Mike Osterholm and David Relman. Surprisingly, Arturo Casadevall was also adamant. I spent the entire 2 days in the room and gave rationale argument why the manuscripts should be published without my being too aggressive. At the end of the meeting it was voted 18 – 0 to publish the Kawaoka manuscript and 12 – 6 to publish the Fouchier manuscript. Thus, the NSABB reversed themselves. Several factors went into this. First was (although they were reluctant to admit it) was the fact that although the Fouchier manuscript was not clearly written and Ron himself had given the impression that these were really dangerous results, the fact is the NSABB completely misinterpreted the transmission experiments (see above regarding Geneva meeting of Feb. 16-17). They had thought that the animals that had been infected by aerosol had actually died when they did not. They only died when 1 million IDs were inserted directly into the trachea of the ferrets. In addition, some epidemiology data were presented that showed that in the wild in Chickens and even in some infections in people (in Egypt), the virus was assimilating some of the mutations described and engineered by Fouchier and Kawaoka. An interesting note: in typical bullshit fashion that I have seen before, Mike Imperiale and Lynn Enquist (NSABB members told May Patterson that they wanted me to declare right before the 2nd day that since I was a funder of the research that I had a conflict of interest in the discussions even though I had every right to be there since I am an ex officio member of the Board. They actually felt that I might not give grants to people who were funded by NIAID and who voted to not publish the manuscripts……..absolutely amazing bullshit! In any event, I merely said at the beginning of the second day that as everyone knows I am the funder of the research, but that I respect greatly the members of the board and their opinions and this was “nothing personal, but strictly business”. You could tell that the good people on the Board had no idea why I was saying this, but it apparently satisfied the “cowards” on the Board. If they are not strong enough to stand up for what they feel, they should not be on a USG Advisory Board. It will be interesting to see what the press such as Laurie Garrett who was blogging like crazy regarding how “courageous” the board was in standing up to the self-interest of the influenza research community when, in fact< she had no idea what the data showed – typical Laurie Garrett. Also, I wonder what Phil Boffey is thinking. He was skeptical of me on our phone conversations when I said that he went too far with his alarmist Editorial in the NY Times on “Engineered Doomsday”. He sort of rebuked me saying that the NSABB was a Board of “Top Scientists” and how could I be so at odds with them. I could not tell him at the time that they had completely mis-read the manuscript. Interesting and unprecedented situation. Also, on the first day of the meeting (March 29), the USG (mainly NSS) came out with the official DURC Policy that guides how we should approach DURC.