Fauci documentary offers flattering look at public health figure both loved, reviled.
‘Fauci’ covers work in AIDS crisis and COVID era that left him loved, loathed
When activist and playwright Larry Kramer, frustrated at the slow government response to the AIDS crisis, penned an open letter published in the Hearst-owned San Francisco Examiner in 1988, it was open season on Dr. Anthony Fauci.
Kramer called the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases “an incompetent idiot.” But while Fauci and his colleagues had already spent years focusing on understanding and finding solutions for the disease that was ravaging primarily the gay community, Fauci didn’t fight back. Instead, as detailed in the documentary “Fauci,” directed by John Hoffman and Janet Tobias, Fauci worked hard to become an ally of the very activist groups who were targeting him, even showing up at a contentious ACT UP meeting.
A breakthrough came during the 1990 International AIDS Conference in San Francisco, when Fauci came to the realization that the gay community could be helpful in working with scientists to tailor clinical trials to specific groups of people.
He and Kramer even became friends.
Of course, now Fauci is the enemy of the anti-vaxxers and antimaskers during the COVID-19 crisis, and is enduring death threats and meriting a Secret Service detail.
“I’m the enemy of a whole subset of people, because I represent something that’s uncomfortable for them,” Fauci says in the film. “It’s called the truth.”
“Fauci” is a mostly admiring documentary, clearly enamored
with its subject who has attained movie-star-level fame. Luminaries such as former President George W. Bush and U2 frontman Bono — both of whom worked with Fauci on bringing advanced AIDS treatment to Africa — sing his praises (Bush gave him the Presidential Medal of Freedom), as do former National Security Adviser Susan Rice and Microsoft founder Bill Gates.
“He becomes the size of the challenge he’s facing,” Bono says.
But it doesn’t let Fauci off the hook from some of the NIH’s early missteps during the AIDS crisis, and his assertion early in the current pandemic that wearing masks was not necessary. “Fauci” doesn’t find its subject perfect, but honest and human.
Archival footage and home movies — including Fauci in a Speedo — give us a glimpse into his early years and his family life. Wife Christine Grady, who also works at the NIH, and daughter Jennifer Fauci are interviewed.
The strength of “Fauci” is its underlying theme, which is really not about Fauci at all. Hoffman and Tobias jump back and forth in time, from AIDS to Ebola to the COVID years, and surreptitiously a portrait emerges of the uneasy relationship between the scientific community, the general public and the political establishment.
That dysfunction was at its worst last year as President Donald Trump and Fauci clearly were at odds, even as scientists sped toward COVID-19 vaccines in record time.
“When you have a global pandemic, you absolutely need a global solution,” Fauci says.
While there was eventually a global effort to combat AIDS, the COVID crisis has turned into madness, and getting this country, let alone the world, in sync doesn’t appear to be in the cards.