Wednesday, April 15, 2015

Testified at a House Appropriations Subcommittee Hearing at 10:00 AM in Room 2358B of the Rayburn Building. Topic was Ebola response. I represented NIH. Also testifying was Nicki Lurie (ASPR), Tom Frieden and Robin Robinson (BARDA). I did well, but Nicki and Tom caught some criticism for the fact that the ETUs that they recommended got built and only 2 of 11 actually admitted a patient and of the 2 that admitted patients, only 25 patients were seen. Criticism was the lack of flexibility to stop the building when it became clear that the epidemic was decreasing rapidly as they were building the ETUs. Committee nevertheless complimented us on the Ebola response. Rep. Harris (R-MD) was a bit snarky with Tom Frieden saying that his daughter is an ICU nurse at Hopkins and she does not know how to don PPE and that reflects a lack of planning on the part of the USG. He is misguided. Had disturbing meeting with Francis Collins, Larry Tabak, Jim Anderson, and Kathy Hudson in Building 1, Room 116 concerning the re-prioritization of the AIDS budget through OAR. It is now clear that Francis not only wants to assure that the highest priority AID research is done with AIDS dollars, he actually wants to decrease the amount of money going for AIDS research and redirect it to non-AIDS, i.e. decrease the AIDS allocation. He is using the review of the AIDS portfolio as an excuse for this. I warned him that this is not a good idea and will be met with pushback from the community. I also believe that Francis might be trying to ingratiate himself with the GOP since he may be covering his bets in case a Republican becomes POTUS and he wants to keep his job as NIH Director. Just a thought.