There are certain things that you have to do. The infectious disease expert and chief COVID-19 advisor to both Presidents Trump and Biden is the subject of a new . This acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS) was traced to the presence of a previously unknown human immunodeficiency virus (HIV). Anthony Fauci was born and raised in Brooklyn, New York and received his M.D. He serves on the editorial boards of many scientific journals and as an author, coauthor, or editor of more than 1,400 scientific publications, including several textbooks. If you meet any trouble, well do it. His father and mother came over from Italy at the turn of the century, in the very early 20th century. Anthony Fauci: Its a combination of prioritization, and when you get a certain amount of experience, you know what you really do have to spend time on and things that you can just blow off. Back then it was very common for calling up the pharmacy or getting a prescription done, and you would deliver it to the house. Dr. Fauci, thank you so much for your time with us. He was a wonderful, wonderful man. And that is, one of the activists from San Francisco, Marty Delany, who was a phenomenal guy I really related to him because he started off as a Jesuit priest and then dropped out was a gay guy, and he was an activist. The British Military Government's 'Operation Marriage' created the State of North Rhine-Westphalia on 23 August, 1946, by merging the northern part of the former Prussian Rhine Province with Westphalia, another province of the now defunct state of Prussia. This is referred to as treatment as prevention.Dr. Fauci and NIAID continue to explore new treatments for AIDS and a vaccine to prevent HIV infection. Anthony Fauci: Yes. Do you remember that? At a certain point in his life, his father, my grandfather who was, as I mentioned, from a financial standpoint, reasonably well helped finance him buying a pharmacy, which he did, and he owned the drugstore where we lived. I wanted to do infectious diseases, and I wanted to lead the AIDS effort. Theyd come back, theyd have a little snack, theyd do their homework, and then theyd come and wed eat together. Jan. 13, 2022. So we knew that; it was sort of like a failsafe, and I said, Mr. I dont even leave work until I mean during the crises of Ebola when Nina Pham and Amber Vinson got infected, and we were not sure whether it was going to be spread in this country, I was in my office until 11, 12 oclock. There was a C-SPAN panel you did with Larry Kramer where he just yelled at you for the whole hour, and then he called you up afterwards. What about this? Anthony Fauci: Well, I first explained the pros and cons of that to Scooter Libby and Carol Kuntz, who was a woman who worked closely with the vice president, and then they said, The vice president needs to hear this. So they brought me into the White House to explain it to the vice president. And he wrote an article in the San Francisco Examiner, I think, the Sunday magazine section, which was just phenomenal. In the early 1980s, the NIAID was confronted with a devastating new public health crisis. That was taught right from the minute you walked into the school. Well, a month before, one of the organizers, Peter Staley, who has become quite a good friend I mean a really good friend of mine right now we used to bring him down to Washington, the activists, after we got rid of this confrontational thing. Coming home was interesting because I was captain of the basketball team and . In 2002, after the anthrax scare, Vice President Cheney was very hot to use the stock of live smallpox vaccine for a massive U.S. inoculation, for fear that there might be a terrorist attack. Anthony Fauci: My father was a pharmacist. They decided that they were going to focus it on me. So when I wanted to come out, and when I went to San Francisco and this guy told me, The way youre doing these protocols is ridiculous. If you dont learn from experiences, then you can just burn out and run out of time, but I dont really think about retiring. And it was that kind of involvement back then, with very little attention paid by the public or the government at the time, that was another triggering thing for me to make a career change. Probably the most enjoyable part of my medical school was something I didnt do ultimately, was OB-GYN, was just delivering babies. So they were trying to figure out what this was, and they found out that theres an enzyme that no one had ever identified before. Anthony Fauci: On a regular night, I sleep about five hours maybe a little about five hours, five hours and ten minutes. Its Larry. It was kind of an interesting story I think common among families like this where he bought a drugstore on 83rd Street and 13th Avenue, and thats when we moved from the Bensonhurst section to a little bit more of a highfalutin section, Dyker Heights, which was a little bit more financially prosperous than the Bensonhurst section. So you didnt get a bachelor of science, you got a bachelor of arts. How did you get this reputation? Number one, the first administration of Reagan didnt take this as seriously as they should have. In 1968, Dr. Fauci joined the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland, as a clinical associate in the Laboratory of Clinical Investigation (LCI), part of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID). So I said, Ill be happy to do this. But what I had in mind was, if I did it, I was going to take this sleepy field of infectious diseases, which was like the sixth or seventh largest institute at NIH with a budget that was about 300 million dollars at the time and I was going to make it something bigger because and particularly, I was going to use it as the bully pulpit to get attention to HIV-AIDS. They worked in New York City, moved to Brooklyn, which at the time was a move up, to go from the Little Italy section. Maybe I would grab a sandwich and do it. Fauci's permanent pay raise was to . But multiple media outlets quote the National Institutes of Health as saying . Recipients of the award, administered in affiliation with Tel Aviv University, are expected to contribute ten percent of the prize to scholarships in their field. Activists were particularly enraged that the multi-year process of clinical trials for experimental drugs was keeping promising drugs from patients who would certainly die without a breakthrough in treatment. One of the first times that I had to do that was with Vice President Bush and then President Bush. He owned the drugstore, and my sister and I and my mother and father lived in the apartments above the drugstore. Back then when I was an intern, and a couple of years of residency, and then a chief residency we were on every other night and every other weekend. Everything back home would have gone to pieces if I didnt have a group that I trained, that I gave them the vision and that I didnt micromanage them so that they knew how to take care of things when I wasnt there. This was after (George H. W. Bush) became president; (George W. Bush) became a staffer. And then I realized that, as a director of this institute, when you had challenges like outbreaks and influenza or anthrax and all those kinds of things, that what we needed was a scientist who was a serious scientist, who could articulate to the White House, to the Congress, and to the public the kinds of things that are important and that we need. It says, I call you murderer, an open letter to an incompetent idiot, Dr. Anthony Fauci, the director of NIAID. So I said, Whoo! That really got my attention. White House COVID-19 czar Dr. Anthony Fauci and former National Institutes of Health Director Francis Collins have aggressively silenced doctors who don't toe the government line on matters. What the hell is going on here? Its very hard to get political leaders to plan for the future when they have pressing issues in the present, isnt it? She speaks Portuguese. So she came in, and I told the guy, in a very serious way, I say, Mr. And when I got there, much to my I thought it was dismay I get a phone call from John Sununu, and John says, Tony, what happened out there? And I said, John, it really needed to happen. I said, The president just needs to get filled on this, whats going on.. I loved you, and you loved me, so there was no problem. But Im told I can either be on AZT or I can be on ganciclovir, but I cant be on both. And he looked at me, and he said, What kind of a choice is that? With the crisis situations that you handle, not to mention the regular duties of your day job, do you find time to sleep? So if you didnt have a good team to continue the good work that youve already they know what you want. "Every day you fight like you're running out of time." Dr. Fauci is nonstop it seems, and he's not tired yet. Youre going to get home, youre going to eat, and youre going to do this, and then youre going to get up, and then youre going to do the next thing. You had to have a very organized life, which seems now, retrospectively, a little nuts for a young kid to have to do that, but it was great training. I went back there for one of their anniversaries and gave a couple of lectures. You die or you get better, that kind of thing. I didnt clear it with anybody. So you had a freshman college team that would scrimmage with the varsity high school team. I went to medical school, and thats when I came back to New York City at Cornell University Medical Center, which is where I really wanted to go. If I chain myself to the White House fence, you will feel gratified. I dont know what its going to be. So he did pretty well. Mark Dybul and I and Josh Bolton were fine-tuning: how many people, how many countries, how much will it cost, etc., etc. There had been a lot of activity around, after the drugs that, in combination, were proven to be totally lifesaving for people who had access to certain drugs. When Fauci took charge of NIAID, its annual budget was only $320 million. You were on the basketball team? It was a very interesting phenomenon because he spoke hardly any English at all. Senator Susan Collins of Maine grilled the C.D.C.'s director, Dr. Rochelle Walensky, at a committee hearing over what she called the C.D.C.'s "secret negotiations" with the teachers' union. Two or three, in particular, were very lethal, with almost 100 percent mortality. The thing you get concerned about is an outbreak of an infectious disease thats respiratory-borne, that has a high degree of morbidity and mortality, such as a pandemic influenza. I was very good at that at the time. But I did that. Thats the thing. At some point, you became the pin cushion for HIV activists, who were pushing for more resources, more studies, a cure and faster, better treatment. I surround myself with the very brightest people, and I dont micromanage them. That the president trusted me, so he called me in and said, I really want to do something thats transforming in the field of AIDS, for the HIV-infected people in the developing world, particularly in Africa. Where did you grow up and what was it like? You know, amazing psychology of it; I mean its a lesson that in many respects is beautiful. So he was in New York, and I was in the studio down at wherever C-SPAN was North Capitol Street. So I told the appropriate people who were picking that I would be happy to take the job, but: a) I have to still be able to see patients, and b) I have to continue to run my lab. And they said, My God, you cant do all three! Because Ebola is not spread by someone who was well and not coughing and bleeding and throwing up and having diarrhea. So thats why she thought I was this really bad guy, but I wasnt because if you were really good, and you did your job well, we were great. Dr. Fauci is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Medicine, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the American Philosophical Society, as well as other professional societies including the American College of Physicians, the American Society for Clinical Investigation, the Association of American As global epidemics such as the coronavirus COVID-19 emerge as new threats to Americas health and security, Dr. Faucis leadership and expertise are more valued than ever. I mean the phenomenon of delivering babies was amazing. Since I was interested in the immune system, I was saying, Is there any way that we can suppress the immune system enough to suppress the disease but not enough to make a person susceptible to the secondary infections you get when you knock out someones immune system? So, for example, the drugs that were used for cancer cyclophosphamide, a variety of other drugs when given to people who have cancer, you want to completely kill all the cells. Why are you giving a cancer drug to someone who doesnt have cancer? And the answer was, Well, if you do it carefully and monitor them, you can shut off, selectively, the aberrant immune response without necessarily shutting off the immune response that protects you against a variety of infections. Thats really what I was doing very successfully, and I became probably prematurely well known because of that, for a period of time for around I would say nine years or so. I would have to take a bus from my house to a local train that was then called the BMT, Brooklyn Manhattan Transit. And thats where I lived until I went away to college. I went back there now, and there may be three or four of five Jesuits and 100 lay teachers because very few people are going into the priesthood. Whats the NIAID budget today? So what I explained to Carol and to Scooter and to the vice president is that we would have some time to vaccinate people. I hear theres this guy Fauci out there that I see in the news and stuff like that. Dr. Fauci was a key advisor to seven Presidents and their administrations on global HIV/AIDS issues, and on initiatives to bolster medical and public health preparedness against emerging infectious disease threats such as pandemic influenza and COVID-19. Not as many priests. Dr. Anthony Fauci has gotten the Disney treatment. Anthony Stephen Fauci ( / fati /; born December 24, 1940) is an American immunologist. All right, it went well.. Thats how we got to start going out. So I would see them almost all the time, but it was a bizarre situation. Hes given into these crazy people who are stomping on the campus! But that was a good startbecause that gave me creds with the activist community. So he really didnt interpret, given that phase of our relationship, that that was part of the act. It was mostly fast-break set shots and things like that. But Ill give you a really cogent example of basic research that has ultimately transformed diseases. Tell us about Regis High School. I looked down upon administration. At the time, it was a very unusual way that they would get people to it still is, and was then, an all-boys school. Dr. Fauci was the longtime chief of the Laboratory of Immunoregulation. Not dueling directly against each other because I would be on many of the shows Meet the Press, Face the Nation talking about things, and then he would be saying certain things. During the Ebola crisis, you actually took care of patients. Although President Reagan appeared reluctant to address the issue directly, Fauci built a strong relationship with Reagans vice president, George H. W. Bush. Anthony Fauci: That would take about an hour maybe a little bit more. And you never, ever left the hospital unless your patient was stable. I think were starting to see that things are evolving at a global level, where you have the global health security agenda, where we get other countries to have enough surveillance and transparency and collaboration so that when there are outbreaks in different parts of the world, you dont start from scratch. You know, in 1918, we had a devastating pandemic that, at the time, killed from 50 to 100 million people which, in the population back in 1918, that would spell out into many, many, many more people. If heaven exists, what would you like to hear God say when you arrive at the pearly gates? At some point, you must have persuaded him this was not a smart thing to do. Im an inveterate Beatles fan, Eagles fan, America fan. I mean just doing that, and doing all of those very important things, and realizing that sometimes when youre really tired you can just pull yourself up and get it done. And that would protect me from getting smallpox. You dont go home and have dinner when youre in the middle of an anthrax crisis. So thats what Im going to do. She didnt know what to do, so she gulped, and she turned around and instinctively said, He says, Fine. Hell agree with you. And I said, Okay, fine. Anthony Fauci: Taking care of someone whos really sick surprised me because, depending upon what your fundamental nature is and this isnt good or bad or better, its just the way you are is that for me, the sicker the patient, the better I function. I remember when the NIH was invaded, as it were. So I graduated with very much of a humanitarian classics humanities background. And sometimes people not only presidents you tell them something they dont like, they dont want to hear it, and they dont want to ask you back again. Ive been in situations where people didnt make it, that you always question, Could I have done something differently? But you cant second-guess yourself on that. Anthony Fauci: Thats assuming Im arriving at the pearly gates! And one of the things that I would not like at all when someone is presenting a patient to you, and theyre going through and the patient has let me see, whats this? If you dont know in your head whats going on with your patient, you were going to have trouble with me. Thats what I remember doing from the time I could ride my bicycle. I was fascinated by the intricacies of how the immune system was regulated. During that time, he began treating patients with autoimmune diseases where the body made abnormal immune responses against its own tissues, including blood vessels. If you work hard, youre going to love me because Ill give you a lot of responsibility. Thats great., So I was struck by her beauty and her grace, and I said, Nice-looking new nurse. So I went back, and about a week or so later, I decided, Let me just take a chance and ask her out to dinner. So I told the head nurse on the ward, Would you please have Christine Grady come to my office?. I need everybody knowing all the things that are going on because I think its a sacred privilege to be able to take care of the patient. Government agencies were slow to respond to the crisis. Not rare but unusual diseases polyarteritis nodosa some of the other autoimmune diseases. So she came in and heard from people who you know, stories get magnified, legends get magnified. If you all of a sudden vaccinated the whole country again, you would wind up given the unlikelihood that youre going to have a bioterror smallpox attack that would not allow you to then vaccinate around the people who were infected I think the weight of the waiting, getting a stockpile, is infinitely better than just feeling better about vaccinating everybody. What my wife was saying was a different story. Now, the only ones who really needed that were HIV-infected individuals. I cant make judgment better or worse, but now, you know, youre on for a certain number of hours, and then you have to leave, and you cant be tired. When Bush became the 41st president in 1989, he offered Dr. Fauci the job of director of NIH, but Fauci declined, believing that his work at NIAID was too important to interrupt. And what this person told me was that what you need to do is that, when you go to the White House, always say in the back of your mind that this may be the last time Im going there because I might have to tell this president something he doesnt like. In April 2020, an email from the director of the National Institute of Health, Francis Collins, nudged Dr Fauci with the subject line "conspiracy gains momentum". How do you account for that? Your wife, Christine, is now a Ph.D. Shes chair of bioethics at the institute, but how did you meet her? We had maybe 85 percent, 90 percent priests in scholastics, and the scholastics were young Jesuits-in-training and a few lay teachers. And often, the news you bring is not the kind of news that presidents want to hear. I did that when I became the director of NIAID. But to say that anybody who takes care of an Ebola patient automatically is quarantined, nobody would ever want to take care of an Ebola patient, and you would immediately drain the people who would be brave enough to go and do that. Dr. Fauci has received numerous prestigious awards for his work. What happened was a series of events. Such-and-such, I need you when you go home, you need to rest. Organizations are springing up, there are talks of emergency medical funds, infrastructure is being built in different places. Playwright and activist Larry Kramer accused Dr. Fauci of murderbecause he thought that the government was withholding experimental drugs from patients who could not survive the waiting period. And you talk to people now: Why would a pre-med want to do this? metaphysics, ethics, philosophical psychology, all those kinds of things that I still cant remember at all what it was all about back then. So yes, it keeps me up at night that one of these days that might happen, and you really want to be prepared for it, and one of the ways to be prepared is for an investment in basic and clinical and translational research. So you had long days at Regis High School. And by the way, the country would not have accepted being vaccinated. But one of them was, you strive for excellence and nothing else. Further, he was instrumental in developing treatments that enable people with HIV to live long and active lives. Anthony Fauci: Yeah. He also received 58 honorary doctoral degrees from universities in the United States and abroad. Thats why, when I talk to students, and when I give commencement addresses, particularly at medical schools, I say. If you dont agree with that direction, tell me, well discuss it, and you might convince me that we want to go in a different direction. I am very clear in what I expect, so the one thing that people will tell you in my institute: Theres no ambiguity about where Tony wants to go with this.. Nobodys ever done all three. I said, Fine, then I wont do the job. I said, But I promise you, I would make sure that my primary interest would be running the institute in a broad way and not just focus on what Im doing. So the rather insightful director of the NIH, at the time, a man named James Wyngaarden, said, Okay, give it a shot. Anthony Fauci: The relationship with George H. W. Bush was really an interesting relationship because he wanted very much for me to be the director of NIH, and it was kind of an interesting situation, where I didnt want to do that because I didnt want to get out of the AIDS business. So you may be on every other night and every other weekend but there were days in a row when you just wouldnt leave. In 1984, at the height of the epidemic, the director of NIAID accepted another position and Dr. Fauci was recommended to take his place. I started off with a budget of about 300 million dollars. You know theyre presenting the patient, they dont know what the laboratory data is, and she had heard that when people are like that, I dont suffer that very lightly. Any kind, even a soothing Mozart, doesnt help me. Anthony Fauci: People who hear stories about medical school would think Im a little bit off-kilter by saying this, but I absolutely loved medical school. Anthony Fauci: Yes. My office at the time was right in the clinical center in building ten. So I explained it to him, and I said, This is really the right thing to do, and the next thing he says is Okay. Some of the things were off base they werent making any sense. At the time, NIAID was smaller than half a dozen other institutes within the NIH, with a budget of roughly $320 million. An article circulating on social media claims that Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) at the National Institutes of Health (NIH),.