Monday, March 30, 2015

getting much better with strength and neuro approaching normal. Still too weak to get out of bed, but can stand for 1 minute. Eating voraciously; maybe too much since he has been having Gatorade, pizza, ham sandwiches and actually vomited. After this he felt fine. Have upgraded his condition from “serious” to “fair”. CT in blood is negative (40 CT) Also, urine, saliva is negative. Interesting issue is that axillary sweat is persistently positive (~32 CT). Cliff and I will meet with the US Ambassador to Guinea at the State department tomorrow to try and work out the issue with performing an RCT vaccine trial in Guinea. Marie-Paule Kieny is truly a fraud and acting purely on political motives. The WHO does not want us or anyone to start an RCT in Sierra Leone with ZMapp until they finish their TKM-EBOV open access trial (treat one ETU) and compare it historically to another ETU. This stance even though the pre-clinical data on ZMapp are infinitely more promising than those from TKM-EBOV. They would rather finish their study and delay the start of a trial with a promising drug just because they “politically” want to be a player. Also, in the vein of everybody wants to be somebody, various groups including Welcome Trust, and even the BMGF want to start the Global Research Collaboration for Infectious Diseases Preparedness (GloPID-R) – a network of funding organizations in the area of infectious Diseases research. Obviously, we are the major player and these other organizations have little to ad, but they want a network that would require us to go to endless meetings and give them a say of what the direction of the research would be. Ugh! Been there, done that with the HIV Vaccine Enterprise, etc.