Saturday, August 7, 2021

The surge continues: Governor DeSantis is a complete disgrace. He is blocking the local authorities from mandating masks in various locations including schools. He is doing this while at the same time Florida is virtually on fire with surging cases. Approximately 20% of all the cases in the country right now are in Florida. When you add Florida with Texas you get about 40% of all the cases in the country. At the same time he together with his Greek chorus of Rand Paul and other GOP members of Congress together with all of the stooges at Fox News (Carlson, Hannity, Ingraham), continues to actively criticize me and talk virtually every day about my being wrong on everything I say and then I should be fired. This is an obviously calculated plan of disparaging me and any other scientists (but focusing heavily on me) that speak up against their crazy strategy. I am convinced even more that this is part of the total dystopia going on in certain elements of the country and it is all linked to “The Big Lie” involving the election and the denial of January 6. I really am worried more about the country then about myself since if this goes on I fear that our democracy is in dire danger. We had an important conversation today with Glenda Gray and Linda-Gail Bekker of the Republic of South Africa. The discussion centered around the fact that Glenda and Linda GAIL want to do a randomized placebo-controlled trial using the Moderna M RNA. The purpose of the study is to determine if and how well mRNA vaccine works in persons with HIV. We have a real problem with doing a randomized placebo-controlled trial and so we got on the phone with David Kessler, the people from NIAID including Cliff, John Mascola, Mary Maravich, Carl D., and others. I came up with a solution that everyone liked. That was to do a trial where each arm gets a prime in boost dose of Moderna and then one group gets randomized to placebo and the other group gets randomized to a third dose boost. This will kill two birds with one stone. It will avoid the controversial use of a placebo and at the same time tell you whether the mRNA vaccine works in persons with HIV and whether and whether or not they need a boost for optimal response.