with Paulina Firozi

The White House has been shutting out top infectious-disease expert Anthony Fauci.

But the public drama doesn’t seem to be threatening the behind-the-scenes effort Fauci is overseeing to find a coronavirus vaccine.

As head of the National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Disease, Fauci is closely involved with vaccine development undertaken by biotech company Moderna. The company, one of two with grants from the U.S. government to speed up vaccine development, announced yesterday it is ready to start the final stage of clinical trials by the end of July. 

“No matter how you slice this, this is good news,” Fauci told the Associated Press.

Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, speaks at a Senate hearing on June 30. (Al Drago/Bloomberg News)

Moderna plans to test its vaccine on 30,000 people, many of them located in coronavirus hot spots around the world. While at least 21 vaccine candidates are currently in clinical trials, the company is the furthest along in testing its shots.

There’s no sign the Trump administration’s public criticism of Fauci is slowing vaccine development down behind the scenes.

The White House’s recent treatment of Fauci generated a lot of buzz this week, especially after my colleagues Yasmeen Abutaleb, Josh Dawsey and Laurie McGinley published a story reporting that his relationship with the president has sharply deteriorated and the two haven’t spoken since early June.

During a Fox News interview last week with Sean Hannity, Trump said Fauci “is a nice man, but he’s made a lot of mistakes.” When Greta Van Susteren asked him about Fauci’s assessment that the country was not in a good place, Trump said flatly: “I disagree with him.”

Trump attends a news conference in the Rose Garden on Tuesday. REUTERS/Jonathan Ernst/File Photo

The most pointed attack on Fauci by an administration official came in a USA Today op-ed out last night, in which Trump trade adviser Peter Navarro wrote that Fauci “has been wrong about everything I have interacted with him on.” Navarro criticized Fauci for opposing Trump’s move in January to block flights from China and some early statements Fauci made downplaying the virus – even though many health experts said similar things at the time.

Conservative economist and Trump ally Stephen Moore told the Daily Beast that he’s working on a policy memo going after Fauci, both for past statements he made about the pandemic and his decades of work at NIAID. The memo is currently entitled “Dr. Wrong,” Moore said.

But Fauci remains on the executive committee of a public-private partnership launched in April to speed up development of vaccines and treatment options for covid-19 patients. He told me in an interview last month that he is still meeting twice a week with other coronavirus task force members, and texting and emailing with them more frequently than that.

“I think for many different reasons the president has taken that posture, but behind the scenes there is no implication on Fauci’s reputation or his effectiveness,” said Esther Krofah, executive director of FasterCures, a center of the Santa Monica, Calif.-based Milken Institute.

“Fauci is very much in the mix,” she added. “I don’t suspect he will move out of any of those leadership discussions.”

Fauci also has many defenders.

Health professionals and politicians leaped to his defense this week. Some noted Fauci was merely echoing the best scientific knowledge available at the time, while others pointed to his storied career, which includes many years of leading HIV research.

CNN reporter Andrew Kaczynski:

Zeke Emanuel, a vice provost at the University of Pennsylvania:

“Reports of a campaign to discredit and diminish the role of Dr. Fauci at this perilous moment are disturbing,” said Thomas File, president of the Infectious Diseases Society of America.

Judith Feinberg, chair of the HIV Medicine Association, also said Fauci’s voice needs to be “amplified, not silenced, if we are going to get control of the covid-19 pandemic.”

Howard Bauchner, editor of the Journal of the American Medical Association, called the attacks on Fauci “unseemly and unfair.”

They “reveal a lack of commitment to the health and well-being of all Americans, and ultimately will be counterproductive and potentially destructive,” he wrote.

Asked about the reports of the White House shutting out Fauci, Sen. Lindsay O. Graham (R-S.C.) told reporters yesterday that undermining Fauci “is not going to be productive, quite frankly.”

“Has he been right all the time? No. We don’t have a Dr. Fauci problem. We need to be focusing on doing things that get us where we need to go,” Graham said. “So I have all the respect in the world for Dr. Fauci.”

Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) departs the Capitol. (Stefani Reynolds/Bloomberg News)

None of this guarantees Fauci and others will be able to deliver on Trump’s promised time-frame of early next year.

While Moderna’s trial hasn’t yet hit any major glitches, there’s no guarantee it will be able to get a shot licensed by the Food and Drug Administration by early 2021, as Trump has promised. Most vaccines takes years, not months, to develop. And when a vaccine is ready, there will be further challenges around widely distributing the shots.

There are certainly some naysayers, including Merck CEO Kenneth Frazier. In an interview yesterday for Harvard Business School, Frazier said officials are doing a “grave disservice” to the public by talking up the potential for vaccines quickly, noting the major obstacles to such quick development.

“What worries me the most is that the public is so hungry, is so desperate to go back to normalcy, that they are pushing us to move things faster and faster,” Frazier said. “Ultimately, if you are going to use a vaccine in billions of people, you’d better know what that vaccine does.” 

Ahh, oof and ouch

AHH: Scientists are applying knowledge from their search for an HIV vaccine to the search for a coronavirus vaccine.

Some of the efforts are led by the same researchers who have spent years looking for a cure for AIDS. “Those decades of research on HIV have taught scientists an enormous amount about the immune system, honed vaccine technologies now being repurposed against the coronavirus and created a worldwide infrastructure of clinical trial networks that can be pivoted from HIV to the pathogen that causes the disease covid-19,” Carolyn Y. Johnson and Lenny Bernstein report. 

“Laboratories, testing sites and recruitment networks that were rushed into action against the coronavirus exist because of the enormous amount of money spent on HIV,” they add. “Equipment and expertise are in place. Infection control has been upgraded. Regulators are engaged.” 

A caretaker cuddles a baby infected with HIV in 1988 at the nonprofit Grandma’s House in Washington. (Frank Johnston/The Washington Post)
 

“The investment in HIV research has made the response to covid-19 possible,” Dan H. Barouch, director of the Center for Virology and Vaccine Research at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston, told Carolyn and Lenny.

Governments and private firms have pledged billions of dollars in the search for a vaccine. There are 160 vaccines currently under development, including the 21 that are being evaluated in clinical settings. 

Scientists are seeing some key differences between how HIV and the coronavirus work, making them hopeful a covid-19 vaccine will be successful.

“Science is gambling that one or more of those efforts will yield and deploy a coronavirus vaccine within 12 to 18 months,” our colleagues write. “Researchers are heartened by the key differences between the viruses. HIV integrates itself into the body’s cells, which means a vaccine has to start working immediately to rout it. People’s immune systems are not able to naturally defeat HIV, making a vaccine even more difficult to create. And it mutates much more quickly than the novel coronavirus.”

OOF: The federal stockpile of protective equipment is dwindling.

That means states, hospitals and nursing homes in need of critical supplies — some of which have reported shortages — may not be able to rely on the federal government for help, NBC News’s Jonathan Allen and Cyrus Farivar report. 

Navy Rear Adm. John Polowczyk, supply chain task force lead at the Federal Emergency Management Agency. (Patrick Semansky/AP)

“For example, the Strategic National Stockpile and the Federal Emergency Management Agency have fewer than 900,000 gloves in reserve after shipping 82.7 million of them — or just 30 percent of the amount requested by state, local and tribal governments — since the COVID-19 crisis began, according to figures compiled Sunday by Health and Human Services Department officials for senior leaders of the interagency coronavirus task force effort,” they write. 

Rear Adm. John Polowczyk, the chief supply chain official for the White House coronavirus task force, insisted the situation is “just not that dire” – even as several states reinstitute lockdowns and others move to shut down bars as cases and deaths surge.

“I’m not going to pretend to tell you that supply and demand are perfectly aligned again, because there is still some residual hunting and pecking for a few things,” Polowczyk said. “But supply and demand back orders are trending typically down, and we’re fundamentally in a volume place differently than we were in, say, March and then very early April.”

OUCH: A former employee at a Veterans Affairs hospital admitted to injecting elderly patients with lethal doses of insulin. 

Reta Mays, who was a nursing assistant at the facility in West Virginia, admitted in federal court to the killing spree that occurred in 2017 and 2018, pleading guilty to second-degree murder in the deaths of seven veterans, and also to the intent to murder an eighth veteran who later died. 

Melanie Proctor with a photo of her mother and father, Army veteran Felix Kirk McDermott, outside the VA Hospital in Clarksburg, W.Va., in September. Felix McDermott’s death at VA Medical Center in Clarksburg in 2018 has been ruled a homicide. (Jeff Swensen for The Washington Post)
 

“After a two-year investigation into a pattern of suspicious deaths that took the hospital almost a year to detect, Mays, who denied any wrongdoing in multiple interviews with investigators, told a federal judge she preyed on some of the country’s most vulnerable service members,” Lisa Rein and Molly Born report. 

“Mays, a 46-year-old Army veteran hired by the Louis A. Johnson Medical Center in 2015 with no certification or license to care for patients, chose victims admitted to the hospital from July 2017 through June 2018 with heart conditions, strokes, cancer. A few had mild diabetes. But they were not about to die, court documents show.” 

Mays tended to the patients, taking their vital signs and glucose levels during late-night shifts. She injected the veterans in the middle of the night with insulin she was not authorized to administer. 

“The hospital has come under fire for leaving its insulin supplies so easily accessible and for failing to detect the suspicious pattern of the deaths, issues that VA Inspector General Michael Missal said would be addressed in an upcoming report on its operations,” our colleagues add.

Trump chided Los Angeles schools and others for deciding not to reopen their doors to students in the fall. 

“I would tell parents and teachers that you should find yourself a new person, whoever’s in charge of that decision,” Trump said in an interview with CBS News when asked about his message to parents and teachers. “Because it’s a terrible decision, because children and parents are dying from that trauma, too.”

“Mothers can’t go to work, because all of a sudden they have to stay home and watch their child — and fathers,” Trump said. “What’s happening — you know, there’s a tremendous strain on that whole side of the equation.”

Agency efforts

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director Robert Redfield says the U.S. could get the spread “under control” within a month or two if everyone wore face coverings. 

“Like herd immunity with vaccines, the more individuals wear cloth face coverings in public places where they may be close together, the more the entire community is protected,” Redfield and a pair of colleagues wrote in an editorial published yesterday in the Journal of the American Medical Association.

In a live webcast, Redfield added: “If we could get everybody to wear a mask right now, I really think in the next four, six, eight weeks, we could bring this epidemic under control.”

CDC Director Robert Redfield wears a mask during a Senate Appropriations subcommittee hearing in Washington earlier this month. (Saul Loeb/AFP/Bloomberg News)

“The ‘if,’ of course, has been the problem. Because masking or refusing to mask has become a political statement, only 62% of Americans said in April that they did so (the CDC recommended the practice on April 3); in May, 76% said they did, according to another MMWR study,” Stat News’s Sharon Begley reports. “The CDC advice followed weeks of mixed and contradictory messaging, and even after it was issued, President Trump and other national leaders fell well short of endorsing face coverings.”

Redfield also warned the fall and winter would be “one of the most difficult times that we have experienced in American public health.” 

“Redfield has repeatedly warned that the co-occurrence of the coronavirus pandemic and the flu season in the fall and winter is likely to compound the public health crisis,” Meryl Kornfield writes for The Post’s live blog. Redfield urged Americans to get a flu shot to avoid overtaxing the health system. 

“Keeping the health-care system from being overstretched, I think, is really important, and the degree we are able to do that will define how well we get through the fall and winter,” he added.

A new report from the CDC says most Americans started covering their faces in public within days of the federal recommendation. 

“The findings, based on two Internet surveys of about 500 adults each, suggest quick adoption of a measure that’s become politicized and drawn vocal pushback in some communities,” Hannah Knowles writes for The Post’s live blog. 

“When the first survey cited by the CDC was conducted April 7 through 9, about 62 percent of people who said they left their home in the past week said they had used a cloth face covering. A month later, face covering use increased and was ‘primarily associated’ with three demographic groups, the CDC report states. Usage jumped from about 54 percent to 75 percent among non-Hispanic white people; from about 37 percent to 79 percent among people older than 65; and from about 44 percent to 79 percent among residents of the Midwest.” 

The ongoing debate about reopening schools

Coronavirus latest

Here are a few more stories to catch up on this morning

Around the world: 

• The surge in coronavirus cases around the world is being led by poorer nations, including areas in Latin America, the Middle East, South Asia and Africa. “And then there’s the United States, which leads the world in new cases and, as with many nations that possess far fewer resources, has shown no sign of being able to regain control,” Griff Witte, Mary Beth Sheridan, Joanna Slater and Liz Sly report.

The fallout:

• Elective surgeries and procedures have been put on pause once again in many areas where coronavirus cases are seeing a resurgence. But the surge in cases is also reigniting fears some have about going to the hospital or doctor’s office at all, Laurie McGinley reports. “Doctors worry that could undermine their efforts to win people back, and lead to more lives being lost from other, often preventable causes, such as cancer and heart disease,” she adds. “… The virus’s refusal to go quietly is the latest challenge for medical facilities grappling with new safety protocols, huge backlogs and public anxieties surging along with the virus.”

In other news: 

• Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg was admitted to Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore to receive treatment for a possible infection and will remain there for a few days, Mark Berman reports. “In a statement Tuesday afternoon, the court said Ginsburg had been experiencing fever and chills on Monday, so she was initially taken to Sibley Memorial Hospital in the District that night,” he adds. She was given an endoscopic procedure yesterday to “clean out a bile duct stent that was placed last August.”
• Ronny Jackson, the former White House physician, won a Republican runoff for a House seat in Texas. Jackson ran on his close ties with Trump and his “victory in the 13th Congressional District over Josh Winegarner, a lobbyist who had the backing of the cattle industry he represented and the man he’s seeking to replace, was hailed by the Trump campaign as a triumph for the president who endorsed him and for the Trump re-election campaign that propped him up,” the New York Times reports.

Sugar rush