I've already gotten your grudging acknowledgement that Dr. Fauci kicked the government approval process for Moderna's vaccine into high gear just TWO DAYS after China released COVID's genetic sequence and Moderna had created a vaccine design by authorizing the NIH/NIAID Phase 1 study...proving his attention to an emerging crisis and his vitally needed out-in-front leadership.
That wasn't enough for you, so here's another example of Dr. Fauci's leadership, when the admin around him looked like "Keystone Kops" in the face of a crisis...
I took the time to copy the following excerpt from Walter Isaacson's book "Code Breaker", which provides a look behind the scenes in the early days of the emerging COVID pandemic...days in which Trump and his administration failed this country miserably...and shows again how Dr. Fauci needed to use his position to break a needless logjam and make critical progress in fighting COVID.
Before reading it...note the following timeline that dovetails with what Trump and his admin were doing...
>1/11/20....China releases COVID genetic sequence
>1/13/20....Moderna designs its mRNA-1273 vaccine...Dr. Fauci authorizes NIAID/NIH Phase 1 Study for mRNA-1273
>1/15/20....CDC conducts conference call on COVID with local/state health officials
>1/18/20....HHS Sec'y Alex Azar briefs Trump on COVID
>1/22/20....Trump says COVID is "Totally under control"
>1/27/20.....White House aides meet, re: COVID...decide a pandemic could cost election for Trump
>1/29/20....Peter Navarro memo...COVID could cause widespread deaths and economic destruction
>2/28/20....Trump calls COVID a Democratic "Hoax"..
Also, don't forget how often Trump said he didn't want to talk about "Testing" as you read this...
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A section from Walter Isaacson’s book “Code Breaker”…
Testing
The first official guidance to local health officials in the U.S. about testing for the new coronavirus came in a conference call on January 15, 2020, led by Stephen Lindstrom, a microbiologist at the Centers for Disease Control (CDC). The CDC had developed a test for the new coronavirus, he said, but it could not make it available to state health departments until the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved it. That should be soon, Lindstrom promised, but until then, doctors would have to send samples to the CDC in Atlanta for testing.
The next day, a Seattle doctor sent the CDC a nose-swab sample from a thirty-five-year-old man who had returned from a visit to Wuhan and come down with flu-like symptoms. He became the first person in the U.S. to test positive.
On January 31, Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar, whose department oversees the FDA, declared a public health emergency. The declaration gave the FDA the right to speed up approvals for coronavirus tests. But it had a weird unintended consequence. In normal circumstances, hospitals and university labs can devise their own tests to use at their facilities, as long as they do not market them. But a declaration of a public health emergency imposes the requirement that such tests not be used until they get an “emergency use authorization.” The intent is to avoid the use of unproven tests during a health crisis. As a result, Azar’s declaration triggered new restrictions on academic labs and hospitals. That would have been fine if the CDC’s test was widely available. But the FDA had still not approved it.
That approval finally came on February 4, and the next day the CDC began sending test kits to state and local labs. The way the test works, or was supposed to work, is that a long swab is inserted into the back of a patient’s nasal passage. The lab uses some of the chemical mixtures in the kit to extract any RNA that is in the mucus. The RNA is then “reverse-transcribed” to turn it into DNA. The DNA strands are amplified into millions of copies using a well-known process called a polymerase chain reaction (PCR), which most college biology students learn how to do.
The PCR process was invented in 1983 by Kary Mullis, a chemist at a biotech company. Driving in his car one night, Mullis crafted a way to tag a sequence of DNA and use enzymes to duplicate it through repeated cycles of heating and cooling known as thermocycling. “Beginning with a single molecule of the DNA, the PCR can generate 100 billion similar molecules in an afternoon,” he wrote. These days the process is usually done using a machine the size of a microwave that raises and lowers the temperature of the mixture. If the genetic material of the coronavirus is present in the mucus, the PCR process amplifies it so that it can be detected.
When state health officials received the test kits from the CDC they set about verifying that they worked by trying them on patient samples that were already known to be positive or negative. “Early on Feb. 8, one of the first CDC test kits arrived in a Federal Express package at a public health laboratory on the east side of Manhattan, the Washington Post reported. “When they ran the tests on samples known to contain the virus, they got a positive result. That was good. Unfortunately, when they ran the test on purified water, they also got a positive result. One of the chemical compounds in the CDC test kits was defective. It had been contaminated during the manufacturing process. “Oh, shit,” said Jennifer Rakeman, an assistant commissioner of the city’s health department. “What are we going to do now?”
Adding to the disgrace was the fact that the World Health Organization had delivered 250,000 diagnostic tests that worked just fine to countries around the world. The U.S. could have gotten some of those tests or replicated them, but it had refused.
A university steps in….
The University of Washington, at the epicenter of one of the first COVID outbreaks in the U.S., was the first to rush into this minefield. At the beginning of January, after seeing the reports from China, Alex Greninger, a round-faced young assistant director of the virology lab at the university’s medical center, talked to his boss, Keith Jerome, about developing their own test.. “We’re probably going to be wasting some money on this,” Jerome said. “It’s probably not going to come over here. But you’ve got to be ready.”
Within two weeks, Greninger had a working test, which under normal regulations, they could use in their own hospital system. But then HHS Secretary Azar issued his emergency declaration, which made regulations more strict. So Greninger submitted a formal application to the FDA for an “Emergency Use Authorization.” It took him close to one hundred hours to fill out all of the forms. Then came an astonishing bureaucratic snafu. He got a response from the FDA on February 20 informing him that, in addition to sending his application electronically, he had to mail in a printed copy along with a copy burned onto a compact disc (remember what those were?) to FDA headquarters in Maryland. In an email he wrote to a friend that day describing the FDA’s bizarre approach, Greninger vented, “Repeat after me, emergency.”
A few days later, the FDA responded by requiring him to do more trials to see if the test he was using inadvertently detected the MERS and SARS viruses, even though they had been dormant for years and he had no samples of those viruses to test. When he called the CDC to see if he could get a sample of the old SARS virus, it refused. “That’s when I thought, ‘Huh, maybe the FDA and the CDC haven’t talked about this at all,” Greninger told reporter Julia Ioffe. “I realized, Oh wow, this is going to take a while.”
Others had similar problems. The Mayo Clinic had created a crisis team to deal with the pandemic. Of its fifteen members, five were tasked to deal full time with the FDA’s paperwork requirements. By late February, there were dozens of hospitals and academic labs, including at Stanford and the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, that had developed testing capabilities, but none had managed to win FDA authorization.
At that point Anthony Fauci, the National Institutes of Health infectious disease chief who had become a national superstar, stepped in. On February 27, he spoke to HHS Secretary Azar’s chief of staff, Brian Harrison, and urged that the FDA allow universities, hospitals, and private testing services to start using their own tests while waiting for Emergency Use Authorizations. Harrison held a conference call with the relevant agencies and told them, using strong language, that before the end of the meeting they had to come up with such a plan.
The FDA finally relented on Saturday, February 29, and announced that it would allow non-government labs to use their own tests as they waited to get Emergency Use Authorizations. That Monday, Greninger’s lab tested thirty patients. Within a few weeks, it would be testing more than 2,500 a day.
Eric Lander’s Broad Institute also jumped into the fray. Deborah Hung, the codirector of the Broad’s infectious diseases program, also worked as a physician at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston. On the evening of March 9, when confirmed cases of COVID in the state had risen to forty-one, it struck her how bad the virus was going to be. She called her colleague Stacey Gabriel, the director of the Broad Institute’s genomics sequencing facility, which is a few blocks from the Broad Headquarters in a former warehouse that stored beer and popcorn for Fenway Park. Could she turn the lab into a facility for testing the coronavirus? Gabriel said yes, then called Lander to see if that was okay. Lander was, as always, eager to deploy science in the public interest and rightly proud of the teammates he had assembled who shared that instinct. “The call was kind of irrelevant,” Lander says. “I of course said yes, but she was going to do it anyway, as well she should.” The lab went into full operation on March 24, receiving samples from hospitals across the Boston area. With the failure of the Trump administration to carry out widespread testing, university research labs began taking on a role that has normally been performed by the government.
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Thank heaven we have highly competent "Pros", like Dr. Fauci, calling the shots when they're needed.
Edit: Corrected spelling of Eric (not Erin) Lander