Over the course of his half-century career, Anthony Fauci learned what it was like to be loved and hated at the same time.
As director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, he was at the hot center of the HIV/AIDS crisis, working exhaustively first to identify the agent that was killing so many gay youth and then to develop treatments to keep them alive. .
As the public face of the government's response, he was vilified by activists such as playwright Larry Kramer, founder of the radical group ACT UP, and accused of having blood on his hands. They wanted him to allow people dying of AIDS to be treated with promising but still experimental drugs.
Finally, and without notifying other officials, Fauci publicly called for a policy change to provide access to the drugs while they were in trials. Then-President George HW Bush's chief of staff, John Sununu, called Fauci to find out “what the hell is going on,” the 83-year-old doctor recounts in his new memoir, “On Call.”
Later, at a government hearing on the new policy, Kramer, famous for his outbursts, shouted from the back of the room: “Tony, I've called you a murderer in the past, but now you're my hero.”
“Imagine,” Fauci writes.
That silent reaction is classic Fauci.
As a middle-class Italian-American boy growing up in New York City, Fauci was educated by Jesuits and excelled at basketball. He went through college and medical school at the top of his class and loved every moment. He opted for a career at the highest levels of public health, where he could cure diseases and also treat patients.
Fauci's prose is less poetic and more Joe Friday, but his humanity shines through every page.
In 2014, for example, Fauci insisted on being photographed hugging Nina Pham, a Texas nurse he had treated for Ebola, to ease her fears about the stigma of the disease.
In 2021, he knocked on the doors of Washington's 8th District, a primarily Black neighborhood, with Mayor Muriel Bowser, encouraging people with a deep distrust of authorities to get vaccinated. “I am very aware that historically the medical community has not treated them well and we should be ashamed,” she said at the Abyssinian Baptist Church of Harlem. “But that's history. “These vaccines are designed to save everyone: you and me.”
During the administrations of seven American presidents, Fauci helped guide the nation through HIV/AIDS, the post-9/11 anthrax panic, influenza pandemics, Ebola, Zika and SARS. When COVID-19 emerged as a unique public health threat, Fauci was as experienced a political actor as he was a scientist.
And yet, nothing could really have prepared him for the strange challenges of the Trump era.
Unraveling the mysteries of the constantly mutating new coronavirus was difficult enough. Doing so alongside the partisan clowns of the Trump administration, including the president himself, was at times almost a farce. But, Fauci writes, “I had to tell the truth to the American people.”
He writes that it was painful to publicly contradict the president, who, thanks to the insistence of people like Fox News' Laura Ingraham and White House official Peter Navarro (neither of whom had medical experience), adopted the antimalarial drug hydroxychloroquine as a treatment. for COVID. Early in the pandemic, the Food and Drug Administration gave emergency approval to the drug to treat the disease, only to revoke it when it proved ineffective and was found to cause heart problems and even death.
Although Fauci recounts many insulting, profanity-filled conversations with Trump, he is so measured and respectful in his assessment of the former president that it is almost comical.
“President Trump's tendency to announce that he loved me and then yell at me on the phone,” she writes, “well, let's just say this struck me as out of character.”
He could have unleashed his well-deserved fury on the former president and his lackluster response to a disease that ended up killing more than a million Americans. Instead, he writes, so many deaths “should never have occurred and probably would not have occurred if the highest levels of government had set the appropriate tone for the promotion of appropriate public health principles and practices from the beginning of the outbreak.”
In contrast, Trump's vilification of Fauci has made him a predictable target for vitriol and worse. He recounts the vicious conspiracy theories that led to violent threats against him and required round-the-clock security: He was a Hillary Clinton mole planted in the White House to destroy Trump. His intention was to abolish the Second Amendment. His wife is the sister of Jeffrey Epstein's girlfriend, Ghislaine Maxwell. He tortured puppies for scientific reasons. He was responsible for the very creation of SARS-CoV-2.
He was also baselessly accused of “crimes against humanity” and sexual assault. Republican congressional candidates vowed to jail him. Pro-Russia conspiracy peddlers said Moscow's airstrikes in Ukraine targeted bioweapons labs where Fauci was developing a sequel to COVID-19.
“Welcome to my dystopian nightmare,” he writes.
Of course, the absurdity continues to this day. This month, Fauci testified before the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic, whose MAGA Republican representatives took the opportunity to clown themselves as usual.
“You're not a doctor,” Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene spat.
Fauci, who has received the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the National Medal of Science and 62 honorary doctorates and has written, co-written or edited more than 1,400 scientific publications, did not respond.
I didn't have to do it. He's been saving lives longer than she has.
