Sunday, November 13, 2022

Mark Dybul texted me to alert me that Mike Gerson was fading quickly and was in Georgetown Hospital waiting for Hospice. Bles Building, 4th Floor, Room 24. It was very sad to see. Mike was in dire straits literally on his last few hours to few days. He recognized me and was obviously very glad to see me. We had a brief conversation I told them how important he was to me and to the rest of the world and he said that he truly appreciated that. A truly great man will soon leave us. Was briefed today by the Moderna team led by Steve Hoge on the latest data of their bivalent BA4/5 boost. The data look really very good and it is clear that the updated booster performs very well and better than the ancestral booster across the board in inducing antibodies against BA 4/5 and all of the sub variants of omicron including BQ.1.1. This is very good news for the upcoming winter. However, there is still very little uptake of this updated booster by the general public. There is this complacency that the pandemic is over and the confusion about why we need to continually get updated boosts because of the combination of appearance of new variants together with the lack of durability of response to either vaccine or infection. Catch up on prior important information. From May, 2020: All of Jacob Wohl’s Spectacularly Failed Smear Attempts By Bridget Read Jacob Wohl. Photo: John Middlebrook/CSM/Shutterstock In my phone call with Ashish today, I emphasized that they need to dial this back since the naysayers (John Moore, Paul Offit, et al) will blast us for making statements without clinical data. I did the Oxford Union Fireside Chat via zoom– very enjoyable. PRESS: McClatchy TV “Exit Interview”; NEJM Podcast associated with my upcoming “exit commentary” in NEJM; My comment in Washington Post article by Dan Diamond today: “The supplemental requests that we keep putting in … just because they don’t go anywhere, doesn’t mean the need for them disappears,” Anthony S. Fauci, the government’s top infectious-disease expert, said in an interview last week.; Regional Media – “Make It Make Sense” with Monique Pressley; Rolling Out with Rashad Milligan; Philadelphia Tribune (print) with Alec Larson