San Diego Union-Tribune (Sunday)
FAUCI WAS READY FOR THIS, EVEN IF AMERICA WAS NOT
Top infectious disease expert long feared epidemic
Thursday’s White House news conference began and, within minutes, so did the cries of alarm on Twitter: “Where is Dr. Fauci?” “What happened to Dr. Fauci?
“Dr. Fauci, paging Dr. Fauci. Where the heck is Dr. Fauci ????? ”
Seventy-nine year-old Anthony Fauci has become the grandfatherly captain of the coronavirus crisis. Through unrelenting appearances both in the media and onstage with the president and his lieutenants, the longtime head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases has been a reliable constant in a time of uncertainty.
But now, for the second day in a row he was absent. And it was making people nervous.
Had he been sidelined? Was he (extremely hard swallow) ... sick?
Turns out Fauci was back at the office, pushing ahead with work on a potential vaccine, having briefed the president before the presser. But the worry was telling. As recently as a few weeks ago, it might have seemed as if the gravest threat facing the country was the fact that reality had split along partisan lines, creating unresolvable disagreements about what was happening in America and why.
Now a public health catastrophe has pushed Fauci into the spotlight as a figure that might have seemed impossible less than a month ago: a government expert with an unwelcome message who is nonetheless regarded as a truth-teller, if not a godsend, by the president, Democratic leaders and media figures alike. Surviving may require a single set of facts; and Fauci has them.
But are facts enough to sway a president who often trusts his own feelings more than other people’s expertise? When Fauci returned to the briefing room for Friday’s news conference he was there to see Trump tout the potential benefits of a malaria drug that is not yet proved to be an effective treatment for COVID-19.
It fell to the doctor to lower the temperature in the room, delicately bridging the gap between Trump’s feelings and his own scientific approach.
While we weren’t ready for this, Fauci was. He’s been preparing for decades.
People have always asked the scientist — who’s been at the forefront of battles against AIDS, West Nile virus and anthrax — one question: “What keeps you up at night?”
His answer, he says, was always the same:
“A respiratory-borne illness that’s easily spread from person to person that has both a high degree of morbidity and mortality,” he said in a phone interview from his office at the National Institutes of Health. “And unfortunately for us that’s exactly what we’re dealing with right now.”
The doctor’s mandate now is not just to help the White House brace for impact but also to convince all of America to buy into a terrifying prognosis, along with prescriptions — washing hands relentlessly, maintaining distance from friends and loved ones — for how to minimize the pain the virus could inflict on society.
It’s a daunting task, but Fauci has a few things going for him: not just his expertise but his bedside manner.
The grandson of Italian immigrants, Fauci was born in New York the year before the United States entered World War II and grew up in an apartment above his father’s pharmacy. He delivered prescriptions to customers and decided to pursue medicine early on. As a clinical doctor, caring for patients, he cultivated perfectionism. “I came to the conclusion that I owed it to these people, who were really quite ill, to give it everything I possibly could,” he says. “I tried to be as perfect as I could.
Even though I know I’m not perfect.”
As a researcher, he made waves in scientific circles for research on immune regulation that led to breakthrough advances in the treatment of rheumatology. But he never lost his gift for retail medicine, which has matured into a straight-talking-uncle-from-brooklyn charisma.
“One of the reasons everybody loves this guy is that he combines this extraordinary intellect with a demeanor that does not confront you with, ‘I’m the smartest guy in the world,’” says Hoyer, the Maryland Democrat, who has worked closely with Fauci for decades. “It’s not fancy words or fancy concepts, no attempt to awe you, but to communicate what is serious and how we ought to respond.”
Speaking truth to power is recommended, but individual outcomes may vary.
“Depending upon the character of the president, if you give bad news they may say, ‘I don’t want this guy around anymore, he’s causing trouble,’” Fauci says. “So the first thing I decided was I would only speak the truth, based on the evidence I had and my purely clinical scientific judgment.”
Fauci knew that commitment would be tested with Trump and whatever publichealth threat emerged under his watch — just as it had been with George H.W. Bush and AIDS, Bill Clinton and West Nile virus, George W. Bush and anthrax and Barack Obama and Ebola. After Trump was elected, Fauci wrote papers describing his work on previous epidemics. He says the series ended with a picture of Trump and a question: “What’s next?”
“Certainly,” he remembers writing, “this president and this administration will be challenged with an outbreak of an infectious disease, just like every previous president that I’ve been involved with.”
“And sure enough, to my dismay, it’s happened,” Fauci says now. “It’s happened.”