I was thinking about Docs yesterday since I have to go and see one this morning. This one wants to do a plunge into my left leg and look at a clot, which has been the cause of some circulatory issues. I have not burdened you with a series of missives regarding Medical Adventures, They are a tiresome component of the Aging Process, but this one seems fairly straight-foward and necessary. To the degree there is anything of interest, I will let you know. A fleeting question is whether some of the clotting they have observed might be related to something else of recent public health interest. We will see.

Thinking of Doctors made my ears pop up when Dr. Fauci announced he was going to retire in President Biden’s term in office. That naturally seemed to wrap a bunch of other issues into a single one, like whether Covid panic is going to be part of the Fall Theater of Political Excess. Or whether Mr. Biden will run again, however unlikely that matter appears at the moment. There will be plenty of excitement and maximum volume on all the narratives for that show, so no need to bring them up yet. But I have stayed away from talking about Dr. Fauci and the unique opportunity to work on his team in a near pandemic twenty years ago. I respected him enormously then, and have avoided much comment on the Covid matter.

The whole thing came out of wrapping up Government Service. I enjoyed my time in Naval Intelligence. It was a career that included just about all the magic in the world. The stark reality of the nature of sea-going operations in places far away was a remarkable thing, particularly with the organizations I had a chance to serve. The Cold War and playing the anti-submarine games against the Soviets was a daily jolt of adrenaline. The years and jobs passed with a certain focus, and the nature of the community provided opportunities quite impossible to imagine out in the real world. When it was time for the community to pick the Flag who would lead us into a new functional role, I was not the guy they wanted. But I had a great time in the Navy, and enjoyed it thoroughly. One of the most interesting parts was as a Navy Captain in the organizational and social chaos that went along with 9/11.

I was at the Pentagon that morning, cleaning out a locker in the POAC on my way to something else, and so the airstrike on the Building had an immediacy hard to convey. You can imagine that whatever the new job had been intended to be vanished in the storm of sudden emergency activity. The new job had been with the Community Management Staff up at Langley, and we immediately had entirely new jobs. Left over in one of the old binders about Cold War disruptions was the instruction for our office to provide direct intelligence support to the Designated Successor. That was the Cabinet Secretary who was held away from mass meetings to ensure there was a legitimate successor to the Presidency in case a meeting or location was taken out by the terrorists.

It was quite surreal at the time, since we appeared to be immersed in something called the Global War On Terror, affectionately known as the GWOT. As you can imagine, the instructions and paperwork for so doing were all left-overs from the long struggle with the Russians. So were some of the places, the undisclosed locations you used to hear about. No one liked it, not the Secretaries of Education or Interior that we baby sat in old bunkers. But there was one who was interested and alert, and a former Governor of a fairly important State. His name was Tommy Thompson, Secretary of Health and Human Services. He had never had real intelligence support before. His office got a designated CIA briefer who stopped by the Hubert Humphrey Building once a week. The idea that he could ask questions- and get answers- from someone who reported to him directly appealed to him.

As things settled down with the new war, Tommy asked for some help in setting up an intelligence organization- or at least a capability- within Health and Human Services as he began to understand his Department might have to respond to whatever was being grown on those little plots of land in East Africa by bin Laden’s organization.

My letter to the Navy was in, with a retirement date in September to help them use my number for someone else. I went to a large meeting of the management structure at CIA to justify sending my billet over to HHS to work for the Assistant Secretary for Publich Health Emergency Support to actually do something else, which was to try to rope together the various elements of the sprawling HHS bureaucracy that had skin in something that looked like what the Intelligence Community would have called “indications and warnings.” The CIA folks thought it was a way to create a new outstation, and I was just a no-cost body to see if they could do something useful.

That was my introduction to field epidemiology, and a world of warning and assessment that actually seemed to have a lot in common with submarine analysis. There were some interesting learning points. As you can imagine, the number of people who had “clearances” was small, and largely a function of health service connections to DoD and the Army. I discovered small rudimentary functions like granting access to “Secret” level material was actually used by the people holding the jobs to run positions of influence that had nothing to do with intelligence. Other organizations had no classified mission, but a host of sensitive programs and networks related to the international health scene. Finding them was fun, and involved liaison work with the CDC and related outposts in NIH and other places.

Just scoping the spectrum in order to assess how Secretary Thompson got his information and who was managing it was a romp of extraordinary freedom. I thought there was the potential to at least set up an ad hoc group to focus and process matters of potential interest to the HHS leadership. But of course another crisis came up as I floated toward retirement from active duty. This one was called SARS. It was a cool name when said with all the letters- “Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome.”

It had some potential to be what we are all now familiar with due to Covid. In fact, it was worth. In the early stage it looked like a 10% fatality rate. It started in China, or what we used to call “Hong Kong,” and had rocketed to Canada and made an appearance at the big Mouse down in Florida. As those alarm bells rang, a working group was established on the Headquarters staff at HHS, and being an object with an expiring shelf life, I found myself sitting next to Doctor Tony Fauci at a long table in an office near the Secretary’s floor in the Humphrey Building.

Being at the end of my Government service, there was a mixed feeling of interest and ambiguity. There had been some potential in cycling into an HHS position upon retirement, and some interesting games played in a new bureaucratic pond. Decisions were made in some other office, and my time remaining at HHS seemed limited to what I had left on active duty.

The SARS menace did not erupt in a way that would have been catastrophic, but the motions and meetings I got to attend made Covid seem familiar. With no remaining interest in government service possibilities, I let my military mode hang out at one of the meetings to determine whether quarantine methods should be employed. My support for the dramatic approach to lock things down resulted in a modest but emphatic lecture in the meeting from Dr. Fauci. He told me I had not concept of how dramatic the effects of a lockdown would be, and the Q-Word, their short hand for quarantine, was wildly unwise.

So I know for a fact that what was done later in the Covid Pandemic was done with the certain knowledge of the consequences. I have kept that as one factor in trying to understand what was done that time.

I also recall a quite casual conversation between some of the seniors at the end of one of the last working group meetings I attended twenty years ago. It was a discussion in the post-crisis mode, and revolved around a question about investigating SARS. Such research had been banned in the US Government for reasons associated with biological warfare technology. It was a fascinating chat with those in the know about such things. Dr. Fauci explained how such research could be done overseas, funded in a manner with which he was familiar. I do not recall if “Wuhan” was mentioned in that context, but it was clear that Dr. Fauci had already worked out a way to continue what he considered necessary research whether it was legal here or not. It seemed medically appropriate from my time in Epidemiology.

That is what I know about Dr. Fauci, and he taught me a lot. He taught me enough, in fact, that the strange progression of events around Covid- the novel coronavirus descended from SARS- did not produce anything surprising, since it worked exactly the way Dr. Fauci told me. And he is reportedly the best compensated man in the United States Government. And not retiring for a few months.

Copyright 2022 Vic Socotra
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