Wednesday, April 18, 2012

Went to Palo Alto to give the Thomas C. Merigan Lecture at Stanford. Great day. Lectured on “Ending the AIDS Pandemic” and had several long Qs and As sessions with students, fellows and faculty. I thoroughly enjoyed it. Got me out of the craziness of the Washington scene with H5N1 (see below). Of note, Stan Falkow wrote me a terrific note of how amazing I was with the fellows and students. It was important coming from him since he had been one of the people who were against me 10 years ago when we began the $1.5 billion biodefense program. He wrote me an e-mail after the Merigan Lecture and said that he knew that I loved my job as NIAID Director, but I am truly a great “professor” and teacher in the classic sense. Several students and faculty told me it was the best lecture that they had ever heard there and the best interaction with students/faculty. Also, had dinner with Ali the night before at “Cuccina Italiana” in Palo Alto. It was great seeing her. She is amazing – getting great grades in Computer Science and rowing stroke on the II Varsity 8 boat. She is a walk on to the Stanford nationally ranked Division I crew team and last year started on the Varsity 4 and now she is stroke on the II Varsity 8. Last year and this year she was given a $24,000 athletic scholarship. April 13-23, 2013 - For the past several weeks there has been intense activity regarding the situation with H5N1. General press not really involved, but Helen Branswell (Canadian Press) and Laurie Garrett as well as some bloggers are stoking the flames and coming up with mischief. USG (NIH/HHS/Amy Patterson) have put together a letter point-by-point countering the crazy accusations in Mike Osterholm’s letter. Big discussion at HHS/NSS about whether to have Sec. Sebelius officially accept the NSABB recommendations about publishing the 2 papers. Out of respect for the Dutch, State Department wants to wait until the April 23-24 meeting of the Dutch for the announcement. Real circus → White House (Heidi Avery) want us to release the acceptance now; Dutch are now saying that they may not allow Fouchier to resubmit the revised manuscript to Science without an export control license; Fouchier says that this is basic research that is not controlled by export control and so threatens to release it to Science anyway. He can theoretically face a fine and 6 years in jail. HHS releases Secretary Sebelius’s acceptance on Friday afternoon, April 20; however, in order to halfway not offend the Dutch, they have Francis Collins announce on the NIH Website that the Secretary has accepted the recommendations of the NSABB to publish without her actually saying it. Meanwhile, the bloggers (Helen Branswell and others) are accusing the USG of releasing it on a slow news time (Friday afternoon). I know that this is clearly not the case since they have been trying to get it out for days, but the bureaucracy has held it up. I have a Senate Hearing coming up on April 26 where much of this will get hashed out. I am getting extremely stressed by all of this since the really bad outcome would be if biomedical research on dual use issues will be severely impeded by somewhat hysterical responses to things that really are non-issues. Most of the people (scientists or not) really do not understand the issues of ferret experiments and their limitations and the extremely unlikely possibility of a bioterror attack with flu compared to the importance of doing and communicating science to prepare against the natural emergence of pandemic influenza. Just to reiterate, there have been so many aspects of this “perfect storm” surrounding the manuscripts: 1) Ron Fouchier’s original over-selling the scary nature of this “I have here one of the most dangerous viruses in the world” likely and innocently trying to push his research and the paper. 2) The NSABB amazingly mis-reading the papers to believe that the aerosol-transmitted virus actually killed the animals upon aerosol transmission instead of only after intra-tracheal insertion of 1 million IDs. 3) The demagoguery of Mike Osterholm and his probable bi-polar hysteria leading the uninformed NSABB members. 4) The relative lack of influenza expertise of the NSABB members. 5) The scientific “hubris” of the influenza community, i.e. Peter Palese who believes (correctly) and says (unfortunately) that the non-influenza people are clueless. 6) The relative weakness of Paul Keim (good guy) as a Chairperson. 7) The opportunistic news people (Branswell – Canadian Press and Phil Boffey – NY Times). 8) The occasional incompetency of Amy Patterson in dealing with the NSABB even though everyone in the USG thinks that she is doing a great job. 9) The “bioterror-industrial complex” who sees bioterrorists everywhere and whose jobs depend on the fear of bioterror (Thomas Ingelsby – think tank; Tara O’Toole – DHS; multiple Beltway bandit companies, etc.).