Sunday, July 26, 2020

5th Day in a row for 1000 deaths/day. Brett Giroir on Tapper (State of the Union) talking bullshit about testing with Jake pressing him. I gave Jake some questions to ask him. Mark Meadows on This Week with George Stephanopoulos saying that public health measures are not working and we will have to rely on interventions such as vaccines and therapeutics. This is his way of backing out of a failure and trying to get an “October Surprise”. Heads up for him trying to push an early approval of vaccine or even influencing the decision about convalescent sera, which actually do not look too good right now. Spent better part of yesterday and this AM working out the tension between the COVPN sites, Larry Corey and Moderna. Larry acting out since he is angry that Moderna and perhaps AstraZeneca are going with CROs instead of the COVPN sites. Larry understandably feels left out and disrespected. He has a point but he is poisoning the relationship with the companies, which is a bad idea since like it or not, we (Operation Warp Speed – OWS) allowed the company instead of NIH to hold the IND and so it is their trial. Larry hostility spilled over to the site PIs and they leaked to the press disparaging things about Moderna, which set off a media pickup, etc. I called Larry, then set up a Zoom yesterday with Moncef Slaoui, Matt Herpburn, John Macola to figure out how to fix this. I volunteered to convince Larry that he is inadvertently becoming the “problem”. Zoom call today with Larry and the above 4 to come to some sort of understanding: Larry and COVPNs would not be left out of the action, but Larry must stop criticizing the Company. Tomorrow we have Zoom with all of us + the COVPN PIs. Jake Tapper woke me up at 11:23 AM (I went to bed early) furius at POTUS for tweeting about the fact that Jake severly questioned Brett Giroir on SOTU CNN show today. Jake was really pissed at the craziness of it all.