By Judi McLeod ——Bio and Archives--April 1, 2020
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“Flying economy class, as she always does to save money for PEPFAR, she returned to Washington to take on the position of coronavirus response coordinator at the White House.(WaPo) “After years of looming large in the relatively insular world of international AIDS work, Birx is now on the global stage in an unprecedented way — joining the White House for its daily briefings, urging millennials to take precautions, explaining what she has figured out about different respirator masks. Each time she takes the stage alongside President Trump, she’s alternately pilloried and praised on social media for hanging tough through his freewheeling, fact-flouting remarks.”
“During her immunology fellowship at the National Institutes of Health in the early 1980s, she met Anthony Fauci, now the head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and the other star physician on the podium during the White House’s briefings on the outbreak. (WaPo) “In 1996, lifesaving medications called antiretrovirals changed the face of HIV in the United States. At the time, ARVs were still deemed, by the United States and other wealthy nations, too expensive and too complex to deliver in low-income countries, particularly in eastern and southern Africa, areas that were and are home to the majority of the global population of people living with HIV. That changed in 2003, when George W. Bush surprised all but a handful of insiders by announcing PEPFAR, the largest disease-specific foreign-aid program in American history. “Since 2014, Birx has been running the entire program, making her one of two Obama-era appointees to retain their position, as several stories have noted in recent weeks. “In February, a report from the State Department’s Office of the Inspector General reviewed PEPFAR’s management processes and found that the majority of field staff didn’t feel they had much of a say in their annual plans. “In the last 2 years, there has been no negotiation [by headquarters] with the country [team working on PEPFAR],” one interviewee told the inspectors, adding that the office of the global AIDS coordinator “has set the targets using ... estimates. It is ‘take it or leave it.’ ” “Other employees said PEPFAR management was “dictatorial,” “directive” and “autocratic”.”
“Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, had mentioned before the possibility of more than 100,000 deaths from COVID-19, the disease caused by the new coronavirus. "But the number now is the government’s formal projections. “The computer models suggest the number of deaths will peak over the next two weeks, then begin to slowly decline. But deaths will continue into June. “I want every American to be prepared for the hard days that lie ahead,” Trump said, adding: “We’re going to go through a very tough two weeks. And then hopefully, as the experts are predicting, as I think a lot of us are predicting, after having studied it so hard, you’re going to start seeing some real light at the end of the tunnel. But, this is going to be a very, very painful two weeks. “They’re shocking numbers,” the president later said. “Even at the low end, they’re shocking.” “The president noted models showing that if officials took no mitigation actions, COVID-19 would have killed 2.2 million Americans.”
"We will achieve new breakthroughs in science and medicine, finding new cures for childhood cancer and ending the AIDS epidemic in America in less than 10 years, we've already started. It should have been started in the last administration. Incredible, it should have been started earlier, but we started -- in less than 10 years, the AIDS epidemic will be eradicated, will be gone."It’s surely an irony that When President Trump turned to health experts to advise him how to grapple with the spread of COVID-19, he ended up with two Obama holdovers. Meanwhile, the nation and watching world must depend on a vague Mitigation Graph touted by a global AIDS ambassador, whose attitude is a “take it or leave it” one. Prayer never more urgently needed.
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