Dr. Anthony Fauci on pandemics, partisan critics, and “the psyche of the country”

Growing up on 13th Avenue in Dyker Heights, Brooklyn, in the 1940s and 1950s, Anthony “Tony” Fauci was the precocious son of the corner pharmacist. “They called him Doc,” he said. “The pharmacist at that time worked as a neighborhood psychiatrist, marriage counselor. So he was serving the community.”

Fauci Pharmacy no longer exists. But beneath the calm facade that Dr. Anthony Fauci has shown the world for more than 50 years, he is still — as he says — “the Brooklyn tough guy.”

Did he get into fights from time to time? “How could you not?” he said.

“How did it go?” LaPook asked.

“Well, I’m not the biggest guy in the world.”

“But at 5’7”, you were the captain of the basketball team. As you did what?“

“I was really quick and made a really good shot,” Fauci said.

“What killed your NBA career?”.

“I discovered that a very fast, good shooting guard, who is 5’7″, will always be destroyed by a guard who is 6’3″. That was very clear!” Fauci laughed. “So I said, ‘Oh, let me settle for science, whatever.'”

There are millions today who owe their lives to the work of the man who “settled” for science. And as he recounts in his new memoir, “On duty: a doctor’s journey in public service”, Dr. Fauci’s career treating infectious diseases at the National Institutes of Health was marked by the two great pandemics of our time: AIDS and COVID-19.

When it first emerged in the early 1980s, an HIV/AIDS diagnosis was a death sentence.

LaPook asked, “Looking at your background, you were raised in Brooklyn in the ’40s, kind of a conservative family. You might not necessarily have predicted that you would then treat a group of people who were kind of shunned by society.

“One of the predominant themes in my home, which was strengthened through a Jesuit education, was empathy,” Dr. Fauci responded. “My father was quite conservative, you know, an Eisenhower-type Republican, as was my mother. But my father was very, very driven by empathy for anyone.”

Although empathy for AIDS patients was in short supply and he was criticized from the start, Dr. Fauci used his position at the NIH to lobby the White House for funding — and for national attention.

He has worked with seven presidents on AIDS, bird flu, swine flu, Ebola, Zika and COVID. An AIDS program started by George W. Bush saved an estimated 25 million lives worldwide.

With Bill Clinton, Dr. Fauci established the NIH Vaccine Research Center, which laid the groundwork for the record development of COVID vaccines during the Trump administration.

But this latest collaboration hit a wall on April 3, 2020, the day President Trump held a press conference in which he said the CDC now recommended that people wear masks and added, “That’s voluntary. I don’t think I’m going to do that.”

Fauci said, “I was deeply disturbed by this, because he had the opportunity, as the leader of the country, with a very strong and dedicated following, to say, ‘The CDC has recommended masks, and I’m going to wear a mask, because masks will protect me and protect others. That was really a missed opportunity, because it was a signal to his devoted followers that you don’t really need to listen to the CDC, you don’t need to listen to public health messages.”

As the country’s willingness to follow public health advice has largely split along party lines, Dr. Fauci has been attacked and received death threats.

Has this ever happened before? “No, they are not credible death threats where a person who clearly intended to kill you is arrested,” said the Dr. “And this happened at least twice. We are acting as if we have a virus that is the common enemy and we are fighting each other.”

Earlier this month, Dr. Fauci was called before a Republican-led congressional committee to discuss the origins of and preparedness for the pandemic. But things quickly got out of hand, as Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) said: “What did this committee he must be doing… we should recommend that you be prosecuted.”

LaPook asked, “How did we go as a country from worshiping Jonas Salk, who helped develop the polio vaccine, he was a national hero, to Dr. Anthony Fauci having to have security details to stop people from killing him .?”

“It’s a reflection of the psyche of the country,” Dr. Fauci responded. “If the purpose of the hearing is to find out how we can do better to prevent, respond to, and prepare for the next pandemic, well, that [attack] doesn’t even begin to contribute to that.”

One of the deepest points of controversy is the still unknown origin of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that caused the COVID-19 outbreak. Because the NIH funded research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China, there are accusations that American taxpayers could have paid to create SARS-CoV-2 through genetic manipulation, which is called “gain of function.”

Dr. LaPook said such manipulation is biochemically and genetically impossible. He said, “See, this is what I think the public doesn’t understand: When you have a virus, if you’re going to manipulate it in such a way as to make it a ‘dangerous’ virus, you have to start with a precursor virus. that is close enough to the virus that you produce, that it is molecularly possible to do this. What is absolutely 100% certain is that the viruses that were studied under the NIH grant, for the types of experiments that were done, molecularly were so distant from SARS-CoV-2 that they could not have transformed it into SARS-CoV -2, even if they tried, which they obviously didn’t.

“But it was exactly what we call phylogenetically distant… what that means is that, evolutionarily, it’s so far away, it would take 20 years of evolution to get there. And that’s something that just gets away when people talk about it.” , said Dr. Fauci. “What we’re talking about is that what the NIH funded were viruses that couldn’t have done this.”

COVID origins aside, Dr. Fauci has been subjected to other accusations, such as taking money from pharmaceutical companies. Dr. Lapook asked, “You were offered money to leave the NIH, right, and go into, say, the pharmaceutical industry, right?”

“Right, or private equity,” Dr. Fauci responded.

“How many times have you been offered your current salary?”

“So at the time I was offered this, I was making $125,000, $200,000. So I was offered a job that would pay me $5, $6, $7 million a year.”

“So why didn’t you take it?”

“Because I really felt like what I was doing was having an impact on what I cared about, which was the health of the country and, indirectly, the health of the world,” Dr. Fauci said. “And to me that’s priceless.”

“There have been ups and downs. There’s been a lot of friction recently. Any regrets?”

“No. No,” Dr. Fauci responded. “I mean, when you say regret, any regret for what I did? My choices? No. Could we have done things better at various points, turning points along the way? Sure. Because we’re not perfect. You try, you give the best of yourself and humbly realize that you are not perfect. And you don’t pretend to be perfect, but you follow your best, and if you make a mistake, you try to correct it.

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Story produced by Ed Forgotson. Editor: George Pozderec.