USA
Cases: 87,411,319
Fauci speaks - WaPo: (pay wall)Deaths: 1,017,470
The Pandemic Is Waning. Anthony Fauci Has a Few More Lessons to Share.
Americaâs most famous doctor on mitigating covid, giving your adversaries the benefit of the doubt and working way too much
You gotta f---ing suck it up,â Anthony Fauci tells me from the deck of his home in Washington, D.C., overlooking a small pool that takes up nearly the entire backyard. The secret to his obscene productivity, he says, is to simply never stop working â even when âitâs 9 oâclock at night and you really, really want to have a beer and go to sleep.â
Fauci commits acts of science 12 to 16 hours a day, seven days a week. No wonder the man wants a drink. But this schedule and suck-it-up worldview have allowed the 81-year-old â who serves as director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) and chief medical adviser to the president of the United States â to tackle one pandemic after another, from AIDS to covid-19. During the seven hours Iâm at his house on a Sunday in June, I am uncomfortably aware that every moment we spend together is a moment when Fauci is not working.
I am also aware that it would be a moral crime to transmit the coronavirus to Fauci. So when I got covid two weeks before our interview, I obsessively parsed the guidelines from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention: As long as I waited 10 days after my first positive test, I could still meet Fauci in person, right? No, I was informed by Fauci, via a member of his communications team. I would need to test negative three days in a row and wear a mask, even outdoors.
I manage to follow this guidance, but not to keep myself from extending my hand when I meet Fauci, which he shakes after one horrifying moment of hesitation. âIâm sorry I did that,â I say, uselessly. âNo, itâs fine,â Fauci says with the resigned patience of a man who has dealt with many people who have made his life harder over the past few years. (Several days later, he will test positive for the coronavirus, as will two others who also attended the reunion for the College of the Holy Crossâs class of 1962, which took place the same June weekend as the dedication of the schoolâs Anthony S. Fauci Integrated Science Complex. For my mental health, I choose to believe the gathering of elders was the vector of infection.)
But for now, Fauci still thinks heâs avoided the virus, and suggests we relocate to the deck after heâs done cooking an egg in an ancient, teacup-size pan and smearing I Canât Believe Itâs Not Butter on an English muffin for a breakfast sandwich. Itâs safer that way, where my newly negative aerosols can disperse in the fresh air.
Fauci has lived in this comfortable but modest house since 1977. Its furnishings belie the conspiracy theories that heâs made a fortune profiting off the coronavirus: There are mismatched chairs, a print of a presumably-Italian canal, a near-shabby red couch decorated by a pillow screened with a cartoon of Fauciâs smiling face. The refrigerator is festooned with cheery aphorisms held up by Beatles magnets. A whiteboard in the kitchen bears the handwritten note âTOMORROW WILL BE BETTER â I PROMISE.â
Though Fauci earns $480,654 a year at NIAID â making him the highest-paid government employee, as Sen. Roger Marshall (R-Kan.) gleefully pointed out in January during a Senate hearing about the federal covid response â the salary is set by the agency that employs Fauci and increases at federally mandated intervals. The reason no one makes as much is because people at that skill level tend to leave government to make a lot more money. Fauciâs friend Ellen Sigal, who runs the nonprofit Friends of Cancer Research, says that if he worked outside of government, âhe could have been worth not tens of millions, [but] billions. He couldâve cashed out. We needed him. He didnât need us at all. I donât think Tony is driven by money and avarice.â
On the deck, Fauci declines to put on sunscreen, citing his Mediterranean complexion. Sitting back, glasses-less, in a gray T-shirt and jeans belted at regulation dad height, Fauci explains why he hasnât left NIAID for a higher private-sector salary, or even to take an entire weekend off work. If heâd stayed a regular doctor, he says, things would have been different. âI pride myself in having been â with all due modesty â a fantastically good clinician,â Fauci says of his early-career internship and residency days. âMy responsibility would be to the patient, and I would take care of them throughout the night. But when you were off, you knew that somebody [else] was taking care of them. I could compartmentalize. I would go to the Caribbean and snorkel and scuba dive.â
Once he stepped into the director role at NIAID in 1984, however, he found that the âresponsibilities are infinite. Youâre trying to develop drugs. Youâre trying to come up with a vaccine.â Even when momentarily straying from his duties, like walking with his wife, the bioethicist Christine Grady, âit was always like I could never let it go completely,â Fauci says. âIt wasnât like feeling uninhibitedly free. Once something still lingers as your responsibility, then it makes it very difficult for me to pull away from it.â Today, Fauci sounds ready to relinquish the burden; the end of his time leading NIAID is coming âsooner rather than later,â he tells me.
Since March 2020, Fauci has a been a ubiquitous presence in the news. But despite the countless stories about him and his endless TV appearances, most Americans still donât have a sense of what heâs learned in his role as their top doctor: what heâs come to understand about pandemics, about the good and bad of government service, and, really, about all of us. Now feels like the time to get his analysis of the data heâs been collecting all these decades. After all, as Anthony Fauci knows better than anyone, thereâs always another disease coming. And at some point, weâre going to have to heal without him.
As a child, Fauci developed a fascination with World War II. Soldiers began returning home to his neighborhood of Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, when he entered grade school, and he would go to the theater and watch movies with battle scenes like âThe Story of G.I. Joe.â It was clear which side you were supposed to root for. The right team would prevail. âIt started, we fought it, it ended, we won,â says Fauci, explaining why World War II was so satisfying. âAnd then, the world was good again.â
Fauciâs mother worked at a dry cleaner and his father owned a pharmacy, functioning as what Fauci calls the neighborhoodâs âpseudo doctorâ; clients gave the older Fauci the honorific âDoc.â The younger Fauci delivered prescriptions for the business and decided halfway through high school to be a physician. At Cornell University Medical College, Fauci focused on adult internal medicine â specifically the immune system and infectious diseases. âI like the definitive nature of it,â Fauci says of the specialties, making his now-familiar hand gesture: fingers spread and hands parallel, chopping down and then rising slowly. âItâs a microbe. If you identify it, you can treat it. And it could kill the person, but if you really treat them, they get better. There was something sharp about it.â
Even when momentarily straying from his duties, like walking with his wife, âit was always like I could never let it go completely,â Fauci says. âIt wasnât like feeling uninhibitedly free.â
The field of infectious disease also carried a certain excitement. âItâs dangerous,â Fauci says. âI look upon a pathogen, a virus, as an enemy.â There was the same comfort in the clarity of good and evil Fauci felt as a child when he saw films about Allied soldiers defeating the Axis powers.
After arriving in 1968 at the National Institutes of Health, the organization that encompasses NIAID, Fauciâs first triumph was discovering how to re-dose cancer drugs to turn a 98 percent mortality rate of the autoimmune inflammatory disease vasculitis into a 93 percent remission rate â an almost complete reversal of virulence. For the next few years, Fauci experienced something rare in medicine: eureka moment after eureka moment. âIf you expect it, youâre in the wrong business,â he says of those early successes. âBecause youâre going to be so frustrated that you quit.â He was a rising star, but in a field where he was developing treatments for diseases that few people knew about. If Fauci had stayed in immunology, rather than switching to the splashier world of infectious disease, he says, his work âwouldnât have been as much a global impact.â Then came AIDS.
This part of the story is famous: Three years before he became director of NIAID, Fauci read an article in a medical journal highlighting five cases of what we would later understand to be HIV, which became 25 cases. Mentors discouraged him from taking on what they felt was a niche disease contained to the population of gay men. âI was prescient enough to realize that it wasnât going to just go away,â Fauci says. âI said: Iâm an infectious-disease doc. Iâm an immunologist. ⌠Itâs killing young gay men. Itâs almost certainly sexually transmitted. And sexually transmitted disease is going to spread globally, because if thereâs anything thatâs universal, itâs sex. ⌠If ever there was a disease that was made for me, it was this new disease.â There have since been 79 million cases of HIV worldwide.
Fauci went from curing nearly all his pre-HIV cases to, he says, a situation where âyou developed relationships with your patients ⌠but almost all of them ultimately die.â It was unendurable to emotionally process that much loss. âIn order to be able to live through that, youâve got to do a lot of suppression,â Fauci says of his preferred coping mechanism. âYou canât mourn every patient, or you spend your entire life mourning. But when you suppress everything, years later when somebody asks you to describe what you were doing, all of a sudden, itâs like you almost canât even speak about it.â Fauci says he believes he has post-traumatic stress disorder from this experience, though he has never sought therapy. (âIâve discussed it a lot with my wife, whoâs the worldâs greatest therapist,â he says.)
There were many lessons gleaned during the AIDS crisis that would become invaluable to Fauciâs work. In 1989, he began meeting with activists at the home of his NIAID deputy, James Hill. Hill was, unknown to the public, gay and HIV-positive. (He died in 1997.) There were no effective HIV drugs at the time, and people with the virus were dying as they waited for the Food and Drug Administration to complete clinical trials that could lead to the approval of lifesaving medication. Activist Peter Staley says the group was wary about falling victim to what he calls the âFull Fauchâ: being so charmed by Fauci that they would capitulate on their goals for changing the governmentâs AIDS response. They agreed to never meet with Fauci one-on-one, lest they be seduced. After a long night discussing AIDS policy ideas over dinner and many bottles of wine, they would drive from D.C. back to New York and conduct a four-hour analysis of the evening. âIâm a decent drunk driver,â Staley says with mock pride. âWeâd say, âWhat did we get? What did he stonewall?â We had been just all wowed, and it would refocus us on exactly what we wanted to accomplish. And thatâs how we handled the Full Fauch. It kept us from being co-opted by Tony.â
Meanwhile, Fauci was facing internal pressure. âI had to get rid of some of my own people,â he says of NIAID employees who thought their process shouldnât be influenced by nonscientists who had the disease they were fighting. âI didnât fire them in the street, because you canât do that in the government. But I made it very clear that I donât want to work with you anymore.â
Fauci met with other AIDS patients outside of clinical settings, including at their homes. He vividly remembers a blind, bed-bound man saying to him, âYouâre telling me either, âTake AZT [an antiretroviral drug] and go blind or take Ganciclovir [an antiviral used for eye infections] and dieâ â so youâre giving me a choice of either going blind or dying. Isnât that f---ing crazy?â Fauci says he âfinally realiz[ed] the activists were absolutely right â that what we were doing was too rigid.â Eventually, the FDA guidelines were changed to allow âparallel tracks,â where certain people could get access to multiple experimental drugs that each combated different facets of HIV and attendant secondary infections without enrolling in trials for all of them. âOnce we realized we had the same enemy, and it was not each other, it was the virus,â Fauci says of the activists, âthen we went from adversaries to allies.â
During the AIDS crisis, Fauci met Grady, who was then a nurse at NIH. They married and had three daughters. With a lot of help from a longtime nanny â and somewhat less help from Fauci â Grady worked part time and got her PhD from Georgetown while being the primary caregiver for their children.
To say that Fauci found it difficult to maintain a work-life balance would be incorrect; he chose to work, missing out on developmental milestones and things like soccer games. âI am sorry and sad, but I donât regret,â he explains. Of his daughtersâ athletic events, he says: âI tried as best as I could. ⌠I didnât miss them all. I went to a few of them. But I wouldâve liked to have done what Chris did. Chris missed none of them. She sacrificed career opportunities literally every month for years because she wanted to make sure that she was there with the kids.â Grady has since become renowned in her field and leads the Department of Bioethics at NIH. Their oldest daughter, Jenny, is a clinical psychologist at Cambridge Medical Group who works with adolescent girls suffering from abuse-related mental distress; their youngest, Alison, worked at Twitter before spending time as an EMT. Their middle daughter, Megan, teaches third-grade math and science at an inner-city charter school in New Orleans and got married the weekend after Fauci and I met in D.C.; her father attended remotely, via FaceTime, because of his covid infection.
âI would do it over again,â he says, of being less-than-present for his family, âbecause I was doing things that are really important. When they were growing up was right in the early, challenging years of HIV, when we didnât know what the virus was. And then we wound up with pandemic flu, and the anthrax attacks, and Ebola. It was constantly one time-consuming challenge after the other.â
By 2020, Fauci had worked under six administrations as the director of NIAID, enjoying positive relationships with both Democratic and Republican presidents. He came to consider George W. Bush a close friend. âObviously thereâs been appropriate controversy regarding decisions regarding Iraq,â Fauci says, âbut his moral compass about health equity is very strong.â Fauci says Bush did âby farâ the most to combat AIDS of any president he worked with, especially through the work of the U.S. Presidentâs Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR), which distributed lifesaving HIV drugs across Africa. âHis exact words to me were, âWe have a moral responsibility as a rich nation to not have people suffer and die merely because of where they live and the circumstances in which they were born,â â Fauci says.
Though Fauci votes, he says he is an independent nonpartisan, and his voter registration confirms he is not officially affiliated with any party. âHe actually got along better with Republican presidents, in [the activistsâ] mind[s], than he did with Democrats,â Staley says. âWe always thought he leaned more right â more R than D.â
âI would do it over again,â Fauci says, of being less-than-present for his family, âbecause I was doing things that are really important. ... It was constantly one time-consuming challenge after the other.â
In recent years, Fauciâs work, like everything else, became politicized around whether he appeared to be pro- or anti-Donald Trump. But in the mold of generations of government bureaucrats who predated our insane current political moment, he seems to be ideological only in his fervent belief in taking action that corresponds with the available facts â and in his commitment to working productively with the people who enable fact-based work, regardless of what political sect they belong to.
Fauci was so highly regarded across parties that he was asked, several times, to run the National Institutes of Health. âThereâs a lot of work thatâs âwork-workâ as a director,â Fauci says of the administrative duties that would have taken him away from the investigative science he loves. In his current role, heâs in the office before 7 a.m., Fauci says, and spends his days approving policy and reviewing clinical trials with scientists across NIAID, seeing patients and consulting with clinicians at the NIH Clinical Center, and meeting with the White House and federal agencies.
As director of NIAID, he says, âyouâve got to answer every goddamn email that comes along. You got meetings that last too long. If you become the director of the NIH, youâre responsible not only for infectious diseases, youâre responsible for cardiology. Youâre responsible for mental health. Youâre responsible for neurology. Youâre responsible for cancer. Youâre responsible for 27 institutes and centers. Whereas, as director of NIAID, Iâm directly responsible for the thing I like ⌠new and emerging infectious diseases. ⌠And I know more about that than just about anybody.â
But Fauciâs expertise apparently did not impress Trump. âTony was telling us that he was already shaking his head at Trump,â Staley says of the pre-covid period of Trumpâs presidency. âHe was amazed that he was into his sixth president [as director of NIAID], and this was the first one that he hadnât met with, like, three years in. And he was just stunned by that.â (Trump did not respond to a request for comment.)
When covid emerged, the country began to share Fauciâs preoccupation with infectious disease. (While more than 1 million Americans have died because of the coronavirus so far, Fauci believes the real number is two to three times that, because so many deaths that should have been attributed to the disease were not.) Suddenly, a geriatric civil servant, mostly unknown outside the medical community, was famous. âItâs been fun to see Tony become the real rock star between the two of us,â says Bono, Fauciâs friend through AIDS activism. âBrad Pitt playing him on âSaturday Night Live,â Julia Roberts swooning, Tony T-shirts and Christmas ornaments, the bobblehead dolls. ⌠I know he thinks itâs all bizarre and some of it is, but ⌠Tony became this voice in a very scary time that you could trust. He just says it like it is, and turns out thatâs what people wanted to hear. Or at least thatâs what people not swept up in conspiracy theories want to hear.â
Initially, Fauci seemed to be a great boon to the White House during the pandemic, patiently explaining complicated science in language a child could understand. (âThereâs no stupid questions when it comes to covid,â Fauci told me as I barraged him with stupid questions.) He stood onstage next to Trump, lending credence to the proceedings. But Fauciâs allyship shifted when the information presented became reality-averse; he engaged in what appeared to be a mid-presser existential crisis in March 2020, literally burying his head in his hand after Trump called the State Department âthe Deep State Department.â Fauci began correcting Trump when he espoused bleach as a covid treatment or suggested that the virus would just disappear. âI kept on pushing back,â Fauci says. â âNo, itâs not gonna end. No, hydroxychloroquine doesnât work. I donât care what the pillow man says.â â (Thatâs My Pillow founder Mike Lindell, an avid believer in covid- and voting-fraud cabals.) A faction within the White House led by Trump adviser Peter Navarro began conducting and releasing opposition research on Fauci. (The My Pillow press team did not respond to written questions. Reached via email through the lawyer representing him on contempt of Congress charges, Navarro said, âI didnât need to do any opposition research to know that Fauci was both an idiot in love with his own ego and a danger to the White House, which is why I advised President Trump to fire Fauci on more than one occasion.â)
Fauci was struggling. He agonized over the question of whether to stay, take the abuse, and tacitly endorse the administration â or leave and let his half-century of work be taken over by God-knows-who in his absence. Fauci went to Grady, his live-in therapist, who said, âWell, letâs balance it. What is the advantage of this versus the disadvantage? And whatâs the advantage of this [tack] versus the liability?â
Members of Congress began to blame Fauci for the increasing number of deaths from covid. âThere was not a rationale to it,â Fauci says of the July 20, 2021, hearing set up to improve future pandemic responses. âThis is a hearing thatâs an oversight hearing. We want to make sure we look at whatâs gone on and we do better the next time and understand the next time we can make things better.â Instead, he found himself on the receiving end of congressional vitriol, held responsible for millions of deaths.
Fauci has sometimes fought back, including calling Sen. Roger Marshall a âmoronâ during congressional testimony. (âDr. Fauci is more concerned with being a media star and posing for the cover of magazines than he is with being honest with the American people and holding China accountable for the COVID pandemic that has taken the lives of more than one million Americans,â Marshall said via email.) As Bono says, âMaybe he popped off a few times in response to some insanities, but heâs only human, and he is Italian.â But Fauci learned he could endure this new reality to continue his work. It was his version of the personal sacrifice he was asking us to make for everyoneâs collective well-being.
When Grady passes by, I ask her what she thinks of all this, both as someone whose family is receiving death threats and as a bioethicist. In National Geographicâs 2021 documentary âFauci,â sheâd said that the combination of callousness and cruelty Fauci faces has shaken her faith in humanity and affected Fauci as profoundly as the early years of AIDS, when nearly everyone he treated died. âWhen youâre faced with somebody who you canât help but want to and they want help, itâs sad,â Grady says, before offering me a glass of water. âAnd itâs frustrating. ⌠When youâre faced with somebody who chooses not to do the things that would help him or herself and doesnât really want to help either, itâs frustrating also, but in a different way. I donât know if âangerâ is too strong, but something in that direction.â
Fauci also says he feels something âjust short of anger.â âListening to divergent people with divergent opinions is something heâs really skilled at, and good at, and [he] doesnât get angry when people hang him in effigy,â says his friend John Gallin, the chief scientific officer and scientific director of the NIH Clinical Center. âWhen people wonât work with him, thatâs when he gets upset.â Fauciâs foundational belief is that people are good â even people who donât agree with him or say awful things about him. In 1990, AIDS activists held up a Fauci mask on a pole, as if heâd been decapitated. Fauci understood: He was letting them down. He realized that he would do the same thing if he were in their position â and that helped move the science forward. âWhen the Peter Staleys and the Gregg Gonsalveses and the Mark Harringtons and the Larry Kramers were attacking me,â Fauci says of Staley and other prominent AIDS activists, âI [could] have done what 99.99 percent of the scientific and regulatory community did, which was pull back from them and say, âYou guys are attacking me. Screw them and to hell with them.â I didnât. I gave them the benefit of the doubt.â
Fauci was able to extend the same empathy to the last administration. âI try to look for the positive aspects of people in the Trump White House,â he says. âI think anybody who says, âEverybody who was in the Trump White House was a bad personâ is incorrect. I mean, there were people there who were really trying their best, except that there was a prevailing motivation, with few exceptions, of âDefend Trump and what he does at all costs.â â
Fauciâs humanistic conviction has prevailed, despite the need for a federal protection detail that protects him from people who want him dead. âI donât think itâs naivete, because Iâm the least naive person youâve ever met,â Fauci says of believing in the inherent goodness of people. âI always look and try and find out: Is there a degree of something positive about what theyâre trying to do? Can I put myself in their shoes and say, âDo their motivations have some kernel of positivity to it, or is it all just tearing things down?â â He says of some of his congressional critics: âI still give the benefit of the doubt to people like Rand Paul and Roger Marshall and people like [Representative] Jim Jordan.â And yet, Fauci says, his forehead wadded up in disgust: âEven when you give them the benefit of the doubt, I still canât find something there that is reasonable. Itâs just attacking for the sake of attacking.â
When I emailed the Republican congressmen and asked whether they felt they were âattacking for the sake of attacking,â a representative for Jordan (R-Ohio) replied that it was âa ridiculous questionâ and that Fauci had âlied to President Trump, lied to the White House Coronavirus Task Force, and lied to the American peopleâ about when he learned it was possible the coronavirus originated in a lab. Actually, Fauci has publicly spoken many times about his belief that this was conceivable, though unlikely. A representative for Paul wrote in an email, âDr. Paul has painstakingly tried to get Dr. Fauci to follow the science. At the most recent committee hearing on June 16, Dr. Paul did get Fauci to admit that there are no scientific studies that indicate a booster vaccine for children prevents hospitalizations or death.â In reality, Paul asked if children would receive 10 boosters if data showed each shot produced antibodies, then asked whether Fauci had profited off royalties from vaccines. Fauci responded that, between 2015 and 2020, he made an average of $191.46 a year from patent payments. (When I followed up with an NIH spokesperson about the 2021 and 2022 numbers, she said the figure Fauci cited covered 2015 through 2022. The 2021 royalty payment was $153.01 and the 2022 amount was $259.16.)
Fauci still wakes up in the middle of the night, anxiously turning over the problems he has yet to solve. But, he says, âwhen youâre lying in bed and youâre half asleep, youâre not gonna work anything out meaningful.â In those minutes, Fauci allows himself to leave his responsibilities. He thinks about the sun shining through trees. He imagines a breeze in the woods, somewhere near water.
Before the time pressures of his jobs and potential threats to his safety prevented it, Fauci would go out to the Potomac River with Gallin. âHe had a float that we used to [take] near the National Airport,â Gallin says. âThereâs a spot where you can park your car while youâre waiting for a plane to come in, and we used to go there and fish.â Bob Seder, another close friend who works at NIAID and helped develop Modernaâs coronavirus vaccine, would take Fauci to baseball games. Seder says, âRather than me saying, âJesus, when are we going to need the next boost?â and âShould we change the vaccine?â â they would eat hot dogs and talk about the minutiae of game play and question the umpireâs calls. They would invariably leave the games early, Seder says, but âhe would always comment, âBob, for two or three hours, this is fabulous. I needed this.â Then I drop him off at 9:30 and heâs got 4,000 emails [to answer].â
Maybe there will be more time for fishing and watching sports when Fauci retires from NIH. He has said covid will be his last pandemic and that he expects deaths will drop to 100 a day, with a mortality graph featuring bunny-slope waves rather than black diamond peaks. (As of press time, the daily death count was 239.) Fauci thinks weâre in the second-to-last spike; the next one will come in the fall, perhaps, but will hopefully be accompanied by a variant-specific booster. He believes we will eventually only need yearly shots.
Fauciâs foundational belief is that people are good â even people who donât agree with him or say awful things about him.
Fauci has started to think about his own mortality, how he wants to use the rest of his time. His mother died when he was 25, of liver cancer; his father lived to 97. âBut he was not able to easily get around in his 90s,â Fauci says. â[In] the last few years, particularly the stress on my body and my mind with covid, I think I have aged. I just feel it. Iâm just beaten up. I do think more now that there is a finiteness to my being.â
Considering that, as Gallin says, âhis work is his hobby, to a major degree,â Fauciâs last good years will probably not be spent on a beach. He says he wants to teach and lecture, to publish the story of the covid pandemic and another, more lighthearted book about his Brooklyn youth, with hope of encouraging young people to enter civil service. Fauci proudly tells me about âThe Fauci Effectâ: an increase in medical school applications based on his impact on public health, or so heâs been told.
Before I started reporting, I assumed the inevitability of Fauciâs work â another pandemic always coming â inspired dread. Seder tells me Iâd gotten it all wrong. âThatâs what we all live for,â he says of the people in Fauciâs tribe. âYou understand, thatâs what we do. He loves that. Itâs not like heâs going, âOh, Christ.â No, thatâs whatâs keeping the blood going.â âAbsolutely,â Fauci agrees when I relay that exchange.
Even though his efforts feel superhuman, Fauciâs motivations, it seems clear, were earthly. He wanted to save lives, but he also enjoyed the work â and receiving credit for it. âTonyâs got a big ego,â Fauciâs friend Staley says. And yet, his ego is also âone of his very useful tools for creating change.â Fauciâs career stands as a reminder that in government â or in any endeavor â your motives donât have to be pure in order to do good.
In the 38th year of Fauciâs tenure as Americaâs primary-care doctor, he imparts to me what may be the most important lesson of his career. âYour patient is your responsibility,â he says. âWhether thatâs a likable person or an unlikable person or someone whoâs self-destructive or someone whoâs hurt others, theyâre your patient. ⌠In many respects, the country is my patient.â He explains: âI canât see myself rejecting somebody because they get up there and say, âFauciâs taken our liberties away. Heâs a disgrace for democracy.â I donât say at all what a--holes they are.â He smiles beatifically. âI just say theyâre part of this broad patient metaphor of the country, that Iâm as responsible for them as I am for somebody whoâs very compliant.â The idea that there are people in public service who will care for all Americans unconditionally shouldnât be remarkable, of course â but in our current dystopian moment, it seems soothingly old-fashioned.
âYouâve been exhausting,â Fauci tells me by way of signaling the interview is over. This isnât really what anyone wants to hear from one of the most respected people in the world, but I will later comfort myself by blaming it on Fauciâs nascent covid. For now, outside his house, under the receding sun, Fauci checks his phone for the first time in hours. âOh s---,â he says. Problems require his attention. He needs to review a PowerPoint for tomorrow. He has âa Zoom meeting with the White House.â Fauci walks me to the door, and we say goodbye without shaking hands. Heâs tired, so tired, but he has to suck it up and get to work.
So, I know you know this, but I'm going to reiterate just the same:
Rand Paul and Jim Jordan
are colossal assholes
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