Friday, July 22, 2022

Kevin O'Connor called me this morning at 10 48 AM to give me an update on the president's condition. He is quite stable has a slight fever up to 99F that is easily brought down by tylenol. He has a cough which started off as dry but now is a bit “loose” as described by Kevin which means it seems deeper in the chest. However, the president feels well enough to continue to work from the White House although he is a bit fatigued as you might expect. More later. Letter from Kevin O’Connor to the USA – POTUS doing well: The Guardian – Gay community in revolt about monkeypox. Article about Peter Staley: ‘Nobody’s acting like this is an emergency’: Act Up veteran Peter Staley condemns US monkeypox response Wilfred Chan Rochelle has pleaded with me to back the CDC plan of distributing vaccine more on the basis of at risk population then on the actual number of cases since it is anticipated that with a variety of gay pride galas coming up including “Southern Decadence” among others that although there are not a lot of cases in the southern states including Louisiana, there will be soon and although New York City and other large cities but particularly in New York City is hammering the White House about the lines that there are to get vaccine in people who perceive themselves and in fact are practicing risk behavior even though they have not been in direct documented contact with an infected person. The White House is responding to the complaints of the gay community that the response to the monkeypox outbreak has been a terrible disaster (see above with Peter Staley) and they are pushing Rochelle and the secretary to distribute it favoring New York since they have the most cases. Rachel wants me and I agree to back her in making it a 75% on risk and 25% on cases whereas the White House wants the distribution to be 25% on risk and 75% on cases. I believe that this is short sighted because we are quickly going to see areas that do not have a lot of cases now but will very soon not having enough vaccine to prevent the outbreak. I was very forceful in the zoom call with the secretary and the HHS team in saying that I would back Rochelle; however, we must have the flexibility of apportioning doses to the at risk locations in small allocations so that if they don't use them we will not have given them all of their doses at one time and thus cannot recall them to give them to cities and locations that actually have a large number of cases. Once you send doses to a location, by FDA regulations, you can't pull them back and send them somewhere else. And so smaller allocations are the answer. Whether or not Ron Klain will accept this is a big question. He is very interested in the political blowback from New York. This is understandable since he is a politician but he is not looking at it from a purely public health standpoint. I was very forceful with the HHS team when the comms people were suggesting that we explain this gap that we have in availability of vaccines on the lack of funding. I told the secretary on the zoom that I have to be frank with them, but I thought that this would be a total disaster since that is an excuse and not an explanation and the gay community would kill them for making excuses. I mentioned that we had to own the problem and tell them that it would have been nice to have all the doses that everybody needed, but the fact is we don't have all the doses and therefore we will do everything we can to get as many doses to people as we can in an equitable manner. Bottom line is that I told them what I told the Trump administration, and that is the only way to solve a problem is to first own the problem. Was on multiple TV shows (see below). One of the things that came up was why the president's physician, doctor Kevin O'Connor, was not out there describing the president's condition. I answered that I was not in the loop and I did not know why. However it is very clear as mentioned above and as confirmed by Dori Solcido that Ashish really wants the spotlight and wants to be the one talking about the president's condition. I consider that an unforced error because that's what the press is going to focus on that we are hiding something. I do not want to get into that seen Ashish wanting to essentially be on every single possible major TV show, but that's the way it is. Also, the White House was concerned that Kevin mentioned that the president had a temperature of 99.4F. the temp responded very well to Tylenol and I brought up too Dory as to how foolish it is to get upset because Kevin mentioned his temperature. It is the perfectly normal thing to have a low grade temperature with a upper respiratory infection. Even though this White House is a good White House they're concerned about message control is ill advised and they are only making unforced errors. I spoke again tonight (10:00 PM) with Kevin O'Connor and he brought me up to date on the President's condition. He still requires Tylenol to keep his temperature down. He is very comfortable and even played some golf on the putting range in the White House outside because he was getting a little bit cabin fever. According to Kevin he continues to improve, but Kevin is concerned about Paxlovid rebound and is considering giving him eight days of the drug. He wanted my opinion as to whether or not that was a good idea. I am ambivalent about this since there will be a lot of blowback about why he was treated differently than the recommendations. Cliff lane would not treat him for an extra few days but would take the chance that he was going to rebound. I will recheck with Kevin tomorrow. I had a long talk with Raj Panjabi (NSC) who sought my advice about how to deal with the activist group who feel that he is lying to them and that they have lost confidence in his ability to give them straight information. I mentioned to Raj that he needs to be straight with the activists and put himself in their shoes where they are looking at hundreds of millions of dollars invested in a product to be put in this row tegic national stockpile, and now that we need that product it is not available to the gay community. They are outraged and all he and his colleagues are doing is making excuses for it (see above about owning the problem). I made it clear to Raj and cannot have his comms person speak to Peter Staley, David Barr, and James Krellenstein et al. he must do it himself otherwise it would be showing disrespect to the activists. Raj was extremely grateful for my tutoring of him in this regard. PRESS: CBS Livestream Online; NY1 Spectrum News TV with Kevin Frey; Alice Park with Time magazine; ABC World New Tonight; NBC Nightly News with Lester Holt; CNN “The Situation Room” with Wolf Blitzer; FOX News with Brett Baier; MSNBC “The Beat” with Ari Melber; KMOJ FM (Minneapolis) with Freddie Bell; Univision National with Andrea Linares; Telemundo National with unknown