Americans putting trust in Dr. Fauci, so who is he?
‘America’s Doctor’ known for hard work, dedication to serving the public Marco della Cava
Dr. Anthony Stephen Fauci didn’t grow up wanting to be famous. Mostly he just wanted to make a difference. But now a lifetime of service has flicked on a searing spotlight.
Perhaps not since the late actor Jack Palance did one-armed push-ups at the 1991 Oscars at age 73 has the nation been this seduced by a senior citizen.
By virtue of his calm, Brooklyninflected White House briefings on coronavirus that frequently if diplomatically contradict statements by President Donald Trump, Fauci, 79, has become a meme, spawned fan clubs and been lovingly parodied by Brad Pitt.
Fauci’s longtime official title is director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, a part of the National Institutes of Health.
But since becoming the face of this country’s COVID-19 pandemic, the career immunologist who has battled everything from AIDS to Ebola is increasingly referred to as America’s Doctor. So just who is Tony Fauci? Interviews with friends and colleagues offer overlapping descriptions of a man as dedicated to hard work as he is to his wife, scientist Christine Grady, and three accomplished daughters.
They describe a man who takes as much pride in his Bolognese pasta sauce as he does in enduring relationships.
“Tony’s capable of elevating his game to whatever is needed, and more has been demanded of him now than in any time in his career,” said Michael Osterholm, director of the University of Minnesota’s Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy. “In the eyes of the American public, he’s the voice we need right now, one of credibility.”
Steven Gabbe met Fauci when both were at Cornell Medical College in New York City in the late 1960s, and “the person you see now on TV is the same guy I met back then, smart and humble.”
Gabbe, emeritus CEO of The Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center, lauds his friend’s sense of humor. “I’m sure he finds it entertaining that there are bobblehead dolls of him now,” he said. “But he’s so grounded I don’t think it would go to his head.”
Such a high-profile status inevitably also has generated criticism.
That harsh assessment has some grounding in a real issue, said Jonathan Engel, professor at the Marxe School of Public and International Affairs at Baruch College, part of the City University of New York system.
“Cost-benefit analysis is not the way Fauci thinks, he’s a physician and immunologist,” said Engel. “... You’re saving lives, but you’re also destroying lives. Someone else needs to be there to step back and think about the whole picture, but that’s not Fauci’s role.”
Critics ask: Did Fauci ‘miss it’?
Even some fellow scientists who praise Fauci’s professional accomplishments suggest not only that he was late sounding the alarm, but that having one celebrated virus point person is dangerous.
“In January, February and part of March there was one physician on show after show, him, and while he’s great at explaining things, in terms of telling the country to get prepared, he missed it,” said Marty Makary, professor at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.
If anything, Fauci’s rise highlights the fact that no one person regardless of their stature – his laurels include almost every scientific accolade short of a Nobel Prize – should hold all the reins when it comes to national and global pandemics.
“Tony’s taken on this big role in part because of the vacuum that exists,” says David Relman, a Fauci friend and professor of medicine at Stanford University.
“But what if the next pandemic destroys our food? Or a bioterror attack?” he said. “We need a new leadership system that sits inside the White House, where people have the authority to tell the attorney general what to do, or the Federal Reserve or the Secretary of Defense, so you can move fast . ... The system needs to change.”
Fauci’s current national stature indeed appears unique in U.S. history, said historian Douglas Brinkley of Rice University in Houston, citing past examples that fall short.
In the late 1700s, a yellow fever outbreak in Philadelphia caused President George Washington to flee the city, leaving in charge the preeminent doctor and fellow Founding Father, Benjamin Rush.
When President Woodrow Wilson got sick while visiting Paris during World War I, many scholars believe his physician and his wife were running the country for a spell.
“So you have moments when doctors have become the voice of the country, but nothing like this,” said Brinkley.
Brinkley says after the coronavirus pandemic starts to recede, Fauci is likely to go down in history “as one of few scientists who are now household names.”
Fauci Pouchys and ‘Docta Fauci’
And yet the public can’t seem to get enough. The Anthony Fauci Fan Club on Twitter has 24,000 followers and a pinned tweet that reads: “If you don’t have a crush on this man, do you even care about public health?”
New York-based singer Missy Modellrewrote the lyrics to Lady Gaga’s 2008 hit “Paparazzi” to rhyme with “Docta Fauci.” Her Instagram hit includes the line, “Tony, there’s no other superstar except for Andy,” New York governor Andrew Cuomo.
Fauci’s likeness is splashed on coffee mugs, T-shirts and even donuts. In Washington, D.C., the town Fauci calls home, Capo’s Speakeasy teamed up with a real estate company to sell Fauci Pouchy to-go drinks, cocktails in seethrough sealed bags emblazoned with the doctor’s image.
Fauci recently told an interviewer he appreciated the way “classy” actor Brad Pitt played him on a recent “Saturday Night Live” stay-at-home broadcast, this after Fauci said in an interview that Pitt would be his top choice for someone to impersonate him on the show. But friends note celebrities don’t really phase him.
Fauci’s hoop dreams dashed by height
Fauci grew up in Brooklyn the grandson of Italian immigrants. His parents ran a pharmacy. He did deliveries on his bicycle, while his older sister Denise ran the register.
In past interviews, Fauci hasn’t revealed much about his hard-working upbringing except to say that it laid the foundation for a life ultimately devoted to science and public service.
Fauci went to Regis High School in Manhattan. Although a stand-out basketball player, his height, 5-foot-7, prompted him to look for a career outside sports.
For college, he attended Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts, whose educational philosophy seeks to meld spirituality – Fauci is a lifelong Catholic – with social justice.
In summers during college, Fauci worked construction. As the story goes, one job found him helping on a new building at the Cornell Medical College. Fauci vowed one day he would be an alum, and made it happen.
Fauci’s role in the AIDS epidemic changed him. At first, he tackled the growing crisis with a measured, datadriven approach to trying to find a treatment. But that methodical tack infuriated gay activists watching friends die daily.
“Initially, Fauci was very rigid in his approach to AIDS and people like (gay rights activist and playwright) Larry Kramer got in his face, calling him the worst things,” said Baruch College professor Engel. “And to Fauci’s credit, he got it and he changed.”
Fauci had been seen as the detached scientific face of an uncaring administration led by President Ronald Reagan, late to understanding the scope of the AIDS crisis. Fauci started to meet with members of the gay rights community and quickly understood the need to include those who were suffering in finding a solution.
Fauci turned enemies into allies
That shift in attitude soon turned enemies into lifelong friends, said Matt Sharp, a San Francisco-based AIDS survivor and activist who was part of many ACT UP protests in the nation’s capital aimed at calling out Fauci.
“What developed was a very interesting mutual respect, where you have a hero who once was an enemy,” said Sharp. “Once we got him to relate to us and our reality, trust was established. Today, the AIDS community is glad he’s the one leading this effort right now.”
Fauci has worked for presidents as philosophically wide-ranging as Reagan, George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and Barack Obama, helping them through crises that included the post-9/11 anthrax scares, SARS in 2003, H1N1 in 2009 and Ebola in 2014.
Those who know Fauci marvel at how he keeps his political leanings private.
“He has always had a knack for telling it like it is, and letting the political chips fall where they may,” said Stanford’s Relman. “Don’t forget, Tony Fauci is a proud card-carrying New Yorker. He has a blunt, endearing and no-nonsense New York attitude, and I think Trump kind of gets that.”
Indeed, a brief #Firefauci firestorm that flared in the wake of Fauci appearing to show exasperation at the president’s coronavirus remarks ended with Trump saying Fauci wasn’t going anywhere.
That’s probably just fine with Fauci. He may not get much sleep these days, and he’s contending with political forces dueling over just how much reopening the country will lead to another coronavirus case spike and then more shutdowns.