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Doctor Anthony Fauci became a household name during the COVID pandemic. However, his journey to becoming the top infectious disease doctor in the US started decades before, and really to his childhood in Brooklyn, New York, living with his family above his dad's pharmacy, Fauci Pharmacy.
He was a basketball player in high school, went on to become a doctor, graduating top of his class at Cornell Medical. Spent fifty four years at the National Institutes of HEW thirty eight as a director of the National Institutes of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. During that time, he advised seven presidents on various diseases including AIDS, Ebola, SARS, COVID nineteen, and more. He writes about it all in his memoir It's Just Out on Call, a Doctor's Journey
in Public Service. Doctor Fauci is also a Distinguished University Professor h Georgetown, and he joins US Night Right Now on Bloomberg BusinessWeek in New York City. Doctor Fauci, nice to have you here with us. How are you.
I'm well, thank you, thank you for having me.
Well, it's great to have you here. We've all been talking about your book, and you know, there's a lot about COVID, but there's a lot more about AIDS which
we want to get into. But the first thing we want to get into is you kept a lot of notes, and I'm curious, we are curious what it was like going through that those notes, putting this book together, going back to you know, your notes on the AIDS crisis, or STARS or COVID for that matter, anything anytime in particular that made you stop, that really took you back in a big way.
Well, you know, when you remember things in your mind forty years down the pike, and you go back over some of the notes that you made back in very stressful times, like those those terrible early years of HIV, when I was spending most of my time taking.
Care of desperately ill, mostly young, otherwise previously healthy gay men who were suffering terribly and then almost inevitably dying. It really brings back, you know what I've described, and I mean that, honestly is almost a post traumatic stress feeling of my goodness, I went through that, and I had to suppress all of those feelings. And then when you start to write your memoir, in order to write it properly, you have to go back and re examine
those experiences and re examine those feelings. So, you know, what I went through was a journey, But writing the memoir was itself a journey for me.
You know. I want to stay on this topic here because I think it's fair to say there's a generation out there that really has no idea about the AIDS health crisis, and we should remind people there have been more than eighty six million HIV infections throughout the world, forty million deaths. Some news today about Guiliad Sciences experimental twice yearly shot preventing one hundred percent of HIV cases
in women and adolescent girls in Africa. It's the first successful big trial of what's hoped to become a powerful new drug regimen for fending off the virus. There's a part in your book where you write about a visit to the White House in nineteen ninety six, nearly thirty years ago, when then President Clinton asked you why there was no HIV vaccine. Why is an HIV vaccine still so elusive.
Well, it's a very unusual virus in which the body, for reasons we still don't completely understand, does not make an adequate immune response to protect from or even clear the virus from the body. Most every other pathogen that we get infected with mankind civilization, even things that have a fair degree of mortality like smallpox and measles and
then the crypt effective polio. At the end of the day, most people clear those viruses from the body, and the body's immune response serves as a model for how you should make a vaccine to protect a person who's uninfected from getting infected. But we don't have that kind of a situation with HIV because once a person's infected, there are virtually no instances that are documented of someone who's
actually spontaneously cleared the virus. There's a very small percentage of elite controllers who can control the virus, but there's no real evidence of anyone actually on their own, through their own immune system, clearing the virus. That's a very high bar for a vaccine to be able to do because you want to do better than what even natural infection does. And that's the reason why, among all the
difficult diseases, we just don't yet. I think we may get it because science will figure out a way to do it, but it's been very difficult because of the unique nature of HIV.
I'm always amazed at doctors who are in very difficult situations and then but stay very level headed and stay cool. And you have to, I would assume, But I do think about your time with HIV and AIDS. You know victims ultimately, you know, because you write your book, you think of the years from eighty two into the late nineteen eighties as the dark years of your medical career. I mean, you got to know a lot of these patients. How I just can't even imagine how difficult it was.
Well, it was terribly difficult, I mean, and it was even made more difficult by the contrast with what I had been doing in the prior nine years before we started seeing individuals with HIV, before it was even known to be HIV in nineteen eighty one, My career had been quite successful, you know, parenthetically in developing therapies for inflammatory diseases and order immune diseases, and we developed some protocols that had diseases that were formally fatal have ninety
ninety three ninety five percent remission rates. So we were on a real high, as it were, for accomplishments, and then all of a sudden, you devote the rest of your medical career of taking individuals taking care of individuals to a disease. For the first several years, essentially all of our patients died with very very few exceptions. And you're right, you do get to know them, you develop a really good patient physician relationship, and you really care
about them. I mean, you know, part of the art of the art and science of medicine is to care for your patients, not only care for their medical issues, but to about them. And that was very tough, and it was several years because remember we started I did started taking care of persons with HIV in the fall of nineteen eighty one, very soon after the first cases were recognized, and then we did not get truly addic
with therapy until nineteen ninety six. We got the beginnings of some therapy which kind of slowed the disease down. Starting in nineteen eighty seven with AZT, But it wasn't until the triple combination cocktail that showed that you could durably suppress virus to below detective level. But that wasn't until nineteen ninety six, So those were really difficult times.
We're speaking with doctor Anthony Fauci, who's now a distinguished university professor at Georgetown. His new book out now. It's called On Call, A Doctor's Journey in Public Service.
Doctor Fauci. In the book, you write about how former President Donald Trump would ask, maybe after a tense moment or maybe an argument, are we okay? You know, and would message, you know, messaging would come back from his team or even Vice President my pensis team too, that they love you, you know, again, after maybe some tense moments. You've served seven presidents during your tenure, starting with Ronald Reagan, as we said earlier, all the way to President Biden.
Are all presidential relationships complicated or was just that one in particular? Yeah?
No, No, this was a very and as I mentioned explicitly in the memoir, this was a complicated relationship, very unique relationship when you compare it with the relationship with other presidents. Because we did in the beginning. I mean, even though right now the people who are in the Trump camp, you know, are very hostile to me. I had a very good relationship with President Trump, and we related well to each other. I describe it in the memoir.
I don't know whether it was the rapport that two people you know, who grew up in New York City to me in Brooklyn, and him and Queens had that kind of New York swagger relationship with each other. And it really was fine until I had to because of the fact that he was starting to say things that were just not correct from a public health and a scientific and medical standpoint, and I was put in a very difficult position, which I did not like, but I had to do it to preserve my own integrity as
well as fulfill my responsibilities to the general public. To have to contradict him in a public way when I was asked publicly, is it going to go away like magic? And does hydroxychlorican work? Which it doesn't and it can actually harm you. That's when the relationship started to fray. And even when it did start to fray, I don't think that he wanted to have conflict with me, nor did I want to have conflict within.
Well, speaking of inflict for better or for worse, You've become certainly a lightning rod in the dialogue about public health and in the dialogue about COVID. And I'm wondering if you have any regrets about your time at the as the nation's top doctor, in recommendations, in recommending school closures, anything like that in hindsight, given what we know now.
Well, first thing, that we were dealing with a historic catastrophic pandemic that ultimately killed one point two million Americans and more than seven million and probably closer to twenty million worldwide at the time, that we had to have
that physical distancing and that's slowing down it. We used to call it flatten the curve when the recommendations, and you know, most people, because I was the communicator of that, because I had been communicating with the public for four decades about outbreaks that I was communicating with the public, there was the misinterpretation, understandably that I was making all the policy about doing things like shutting down and having
physical distancing. I think at the time, when you make those decisions, you do it because you want to save lives. What the perfect decisions, No would you like to have done a better job. Of course, none of us did it perfectly, but the idea about at least slowing down and closing things for a while was the right decision with masks, with shutting down with schools. The issue that we need to re examine importantly is how long you
did that. And I think that's what we need to re examine, because if you look back, I was the one that said we should open the schools as quickly and safely as we possibly could, because there is collateral damage when you keep schools closed for a long period of time.
We only have about a couple of minutes left here. I am curious what you think the big health crisis will be the US Surgeon General is warning about, you know, or what's put a warning on social media? For example, you know we're talking about flesh eating bacteria in Japan. What do you think is the next big health crisis and are we prepared for it?
Well, you know, there are health crisises that are infectious diseases, which is my lane. I still think that we have to be very careful to be prepared better and prepared to respond to the inevitability of another pandemic of an infectious diseases, because history has taught us that we've had pandemics since before recorded history, and we've had it in our own lifetime with COVID, and one hundred years ago we had it with the nineteen eighteen pandemic of influenzas.
So my feeling is that the thing that would be most abrupt and surprising would be another pandemic. But you can't predict that because pandemics are not predictable. But there are a lot of other health see, some of which you mentioned yourself. I mean, I think the epidemic of obesit in this country. I think the mental health crises, the issue with fentenol and other narcotics that are killing so many people. Those are the things that we need to address.
Well, doctor Fauci, I appreciate getting some time with you. Thank you so much, Doctor Anthony Fauci. His new memoir on Call, A Doctor's Journey in Public Service not new, it's his memoir. It is just out