Over his half-century career, Anthony Fauci learned what it was like to be both loved and loathed.
As director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, he was at the red hot center of the HIV/AIDS crisis, working exhaustively first to identify the agent that was killing so many young gay men 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 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 warning other officials, Fauci publicly called for a change in policy to provide access to drugs while they were in trials. Then-President George H.W. Bush’s chief of staff, John Sununu, called Fauci to find out “what the hell is going on,” the 83-year-old physician recounts in his new memoir, “On Call.”
Later, at a government hearing on the new policy, Kramer, who was famous for his outbursts, yelled from the back of the room, “Tony, I have called you a murderer in the past, but you are now my hero.”
“Go figure,” Fauci writes.
That muted reaction is vintage Fauci.
As a middle-class Italian American kid growing up in New York City, Fauci was schooled by Jesuits and excelled at basketball. He sailed through college and medical school at the top of his class. He opted for a career in public health, where he could cure diseases and treat patients, too.
Fauci’s prose is less poetic and more Joe Friday, but his humanity shines through on every page.
Over the administrations of seven American presidents, Fauci helped steer the nation through HIV/AIDS, the post-9/11 anthrax panic, influenza pandemics, Ebola, Zika and SARS. By the time COVID-19 emerged as a once-in-a-lifetime public health threat, Fauci was as seasoned a political player as he was a scientist.
And yet nothing, really, could have prepared him for the bizarre challenges of the Trump era.
Unraveling the constantly mutating novel coronavirus was difficult enough. Doing so alongside the partisan clowns of the Trump administration was almost farcical at times. But, Fauci writes, “I had to tell the truth to the American people.”
Although Fauci recounts many profanity-laced conversations with Trump, he is so measured and respectful in his assessment of the former president that it’s almost comical.
“President Trump’s tendency to announce that he loved me and then scream at me on the phone,” he writes, “well, let’s just say I found this to be out of the ordinary.”
He could have unleashed well-deserved fury on the former president and a lackluster response to a disease that ended up killing more than a million Americans. Instead, he writes, so many deaths “likely would not have happened had the right tone been set by the highest levels of government.”
In contrast, Trump’s vilification of Fauci has made him a predictable target of vitriol and worse. He recounts the vicious conspiracy theories that led to violent threats against him and necessitated round-the-clock security: He was a Hillary Clinton mole planted in the White House to destroy Trump. He was out to abolish the Second Amendment. His wife is the sister of Jeffrey Epstein’s girlfriend Ghislaine Maxwell. He tortured puppies for science.
“Welcome to my dystopian nightmare,” he writes.
The absurdity continues to this day, of course. This month, Fauci testified before Congress, whose MAGA Republican representatives seized the opportunity to beclown themselves as usual.
“You’re not a doctor,” spat Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene.
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 — didn’t respond.
He didn’t have to. He’s been saving lives longer than she’s been alive.
Robin Abcarian is an opinion columnist at the Los Angeles Times.
