Dr. Anthony Fauci on how COVID-19, Trump turned him into a hero and villain | The Excerpt

On a special episode (first released on June 19, 2024) of The Excerpt podcast: Anthony Fauci was one of the nation’s leading public-health doctors, working on the world’s deadliest emerging infectious diseases, from AIDS to Zika. Then came COVID-19. He soon became a voice millions of Americans trusted -- a straight-talker even when his candor put him at odds with President Trump. But it also made him the target of conspiracy theories and worse. In an exclusive interview about Fauci's new memoir, “On Call: A Doctor’s Journey in Public Service,” USA TODAY Washington Bureau Chief Susan Page sits down with Fauci to talk about his years in public health and whether he will ever again feel safe.

Hit play on the player below to hear the podcast and follow along with the transcript beneath it.  This transcript was automatically generated, and then edited for clarity in its current form. There may be some differences between the audio and the text.

Podcasts:  True crime, in-depth interviews and more USA TODAY podcasts right here

Susan Page:

Hello and welcome to The Excerpt. I'm USA TODAY's Washington Bureau Chief, Susan Page. Anthony Fauci was one of the nation's leading public health doctors working on the world's deadliest emerging infectious diseases from AIDS to Zika. Then came COVID-19. He became a voice millions of Americans trusted, a straight talker, even when his candor put him at odds with then President Trump. But it also made him the target of conspiracy theories and worst. In an exclusive interview about his new memoir, On Call: A Doctor's Journey in Public Service, I asked him if he felt safe, "Yes, but..." He replied. He thinks deep down that it's possible someone will kill him. Here's some of our conversation.

?

Dr. Anthony Fauci, thank you for being with us.

Dr. Anthony Fauci:

My pleasure. Good to be with you.

Susan Page:

Congratulations on your new memoir On Call: A Doctor's Journey in Public Service. Sometimes when people write a memoir, they figure out things they didn't understand before about themselves or about their careers. Did you learn something in writing this book?

Dr. Anthony Fauci:

It gave me a perspective that I didn't have before of looking at what I refer to often is this journey that I had been on that when I started it, when I came to the NIH more than a half a century ago, just the thought of that makes you kind of shudder that it was 54 years ago, and I've been the director of the NIAID for almost 40 years, that just by pure happenstance of the circumstances that my career has been bookended by two of the most important infectious disease outbreaks in recorded history. I mean, if you think about that, HIV and COVID, and in between the experiences I've had made me reflect. When you're busy every single day responding to HIV crisis, anthrax crisis, Ebola, Zika, pandemic flu, and then COVID, you don't get the opportunity to sort of look at the big picture of what you've been through. So I learned a lot about what I've been through when you sit down and actually start writing about it.

Susan Page:

You write in the book that you figured out at one point that you suffered from a kind of PTSD after the HIV/AIDS experience. Do you feel the same way after the COVID experience?

Dr. Anthony Fauci:

Actually, it's a different kind. It's not post-traumatic stress to the extent or to the qualitative nature that you did with HIV. Because HIV, I was personally taking care of desperately ill, mostly young gay men for the first several years when we had no therapy at all, and even for the first three years where we didn't even know what the etiologic agent was. And I refer to it in the memoir as really the dark years of my entire professional career. And when you personally take care of someone, it's a bit different than when you're in a bigger administrative position and you're making decisions that are important scientific and public health decisions, but you don't see every day from 7:00 in the morning until 10:00 at night these people who you're actually trying with all of your skills to make them better. And when you have no therapy, as I've described in the book, it's like putting band-aids on a hemorrhage.

Susan Page:

One factor in your long career is the number of times you testified before Congress. You write that you have testified before Congress perhaps more than anyone else in the history of the country.

Dr. Anthony Fauci:

I believe that that's not hyperbole. And the reason I say that is that I've been testifying actively for almost 40 years, 38 plus years. And first of all, even if nothing happens, you testify two, three times a year about the budget, even if there's nothing going on. So right away, three times 40, you're already 120 times. And then when you have a certain something with HIV, I've testified 10, 15, 20 times sometimes. Throughout COVID I testified multiple times. So when you do that on a yearly basis, it's somewhere well over 200 into the high 200s.

Susan Page:

So the other day you testified again, this must have been for the first time as a private citizen. Is that right?

Dr. Anthony Fauci:

Yes. It was the first time in a public hearing as a private citizen.

Susan Page:

And it was a doozy. You sat there as Marjorie Taylor Greene, the congresswoman from Georgia, accused you of abusing puppies and said you belonged in prison. So you're sitting there. What's going through your mind as she's saying those things?

Dr. Anthony Fauci:

Well, the first thing is you have to keep your composure and keep your cool because when people are acting extraordinarily inappropriately, who shouldn't be, given their position, you can't stoop to them and act in an inappropriate way. So you just answer the question the best you can. You don't let them push you around, but you don't get into a silly fray the way she was doing, it was just pure vitriol, pure ad hominem, and it didn't make any sense even to the people who were on her own side of the aisle.

Susan Page:

Some of these allegations are, of course, as you said, absolutely false and simply preposterous. But in your book you do discuss how on COVID, we got the science right and in an extraordinary way with extraordinarily fast development of a vaccine historically fast. But you talk about problems in other areas like communicating with Americans about it, and you said, "We should have made it clearer from the beginning to a deeply concerned public that we knew very little about this virus and that we should expect the unexpected because the virus was rewriting the history of pandemic outbreaks." So was there an inclination to speak with more certainty than you should have, do you think?

Dr. Anthony Fauci:

I think in fairness to everyone, and to be perfectly honest, when you think back at it, we should have emphasized a bit more the uncertainty. We said it, I mean, I had said it many more... If you go back and look at the clips, I said, "This is what we're doing now; however, this could change and things could be different in a month or a couple of months." When you communicate, in general, it's in soundbites. So what gets out to the public is generally the first part. "We feel this..." Or, "Not to worry right now." Or, "Don't wear a mask right now." Or, "This is going to happen."

I think for next time, there are a number of things that we can learn in communication, and one of them is to emphasize much more emphatically that the situation is a moving target. We did say that, but I think we need to say it five times as much as we did, that what we know now is based on information gained by the scientific process of the situation as it exists right now. And science, as I described in the memoir, is a self-correcting process. And as things change, the scientific process will help you to gain real-time information, which would be applicable for what you're going to say here, which might be different from what you said here, and I think we have to get the public to appreciate that more.

Susan Page:

Why do you think that didn't happen this time? I realize that you examine any of your public statements and it has these qualifiers about what we know now, what we may know next, but what people heard and what they took away was something with a lot more certainty. So why did that happen do you think?

Dr. Anthony Fauci:

Well, I think there is a bit of uniqueness about this particular outbreak. It was indeed a moving target. So the situation itself essentially lent to that. Whereas other outbreaks, you know what you had from the beginning and it didn't change much. However, I think there was a degree... I don't think, I'm very, very clear, that one of the several unfortunate aspects of the outbreak was that it occurred at a time of profound divisiveness in our society and there was an inordinate amount of non-productive gotcha. This side is out against this side. So you have criticisms that are not productive. You have people who are getting vaccinated or not based on political ideology. They're wearing a mask or not based on political ideology. If you throw that into the mix of the fact that we really do have a moving target that's difficult to explain, I think that's the reason why. It didn't turn out optimally, that's for sure, from a public health standpoint.

Susan Page:

When you think back on this really cataclysmic time, do have any regrets?

Dr. Anthony Fauci:

Well, people ask about regrets. I mean, yeah, I wish we could have done better. I mean, 1.2 million people dying is a terrible thing. I don't know if you call that a regret. I just wish we could have done better. I wish I knew things in January and February that became very clear in April, May and June. Again, it depends on what you mean by regret. I mean, did I do something nefariously wrong that I regret? Of course not.

Susan Page:

So thinking about the effect of this, of some of the failures of communications or the way in which Americans were confused about what to do or the advice changed and that was unexpected to them, even though if you read your full statement at the time, you would've understood that things were changing and so recommendations might change. But the effect on Americans was serious, I think. You write in your book, On Call, "This intensified and already growing skepticism and distrust of science and scientists." And we had a New York Times columnist the other day called the COVID response an object lesson on how to destroy public trust. Do you worry this has had a destructive effect on Americans' trust in science and scientists?

Dr. Anthony Fauci:

I think it's had a negative effect. I think the impact and the pain and suffering associated with 1.2 million deaths and the disruption of society, I mean put the deaths in and of themselves are terrible, but then when you look at all the disruptions of people's lives, of their jobs, in school and things like that, it led to a very charged situation where the scientific community was trying its best to give information as it unfolded. But since it was a moving target, there was confusion and there was some missteps in communication. I don't think it's an irreparable damage to the faith in science, but I think it needs to go back and try and rebuild that trust.

Susan Page:

Given the divisions that we saw in the response to COVID and the distrust in science that we saw among many Americans, is it going to be harder whenever the next pandemic is to deal with it?

Dr. Anthony Fauci:

Of course. We have to put an extra special effort to regain this trust that the American public has in science.

Susan Page:

My last question on COVID is this question of COVID's origins, and you make the case in your book about why you believe it was a natural jump, not a lab leak, but you say you have an open mind about what the origins are. Will we one day know for sure what the origins are?

Dr. Anthony Fauci:

We might not. I think there'll probably be a better chance than not because there's right now, given the tension between China and the United States, we are going to need total transparency for both possibilities, for if it is a leak from some lab that we don't even know about. The one thing I say in the book that's very clear that the grant that was a subaward from the NIH to the Wuhan Institute, that the viruses that they were studying molecularly could not possibly have turned into SARS-CoV-2. So that I'm certain about. What I don't know, and is a possibility, that there was a leak from somewhere that we didn't even know about. So I keep an open mind.

So if it's a lab leak and we're not allowed to be able to investigate it, we'll never know it. If it's a natural outbreak from a spillover, the Chinese have already done things to obfuscate that. As soon as they heard there was an outbreak, they got rid of all the animals that shouldn't have been there to begin with, and they cleaned up the market so there were no traces. So if, if, I think it did, but I'm not sure, if it did originate in the market, there's no way to prove it now because they've gotten rid of all the evidence. So I think there's a reasonable chance that we might not ever know where it came from, which tells me that what we should do is put things in place to avoid the possibility of either of these occurrences happening, of lab leaks in the future and of spillovers from natural reservoirs. You can do several things to prevent those two from happening. So rather than arguing which it was. Why don't we aim our efforts at making sure neither of them can happen again?

Susan Page:

The acknowledgments in your book are really something for a public health doctor. You thank your family and friends and your colleagues, but you think Bono for his encouragement and friendship and you say, "Special gratitude goes to my security details. How did it feel to require security details?

Dr. Anthony Fauci:

Sort of surrealistic. It's that how you think about, go back years when I was in medical school, did I ever think that I would be in a situation where millions and millions of people love me for what I've done, saving millions of lives, which I actually have through a number of programs, and yet have some people who actually want to kill me? It's tough to get your arms around that. And threaten you and threaten your wife and your children. That's a terrible thing.

Susan Page:

Do you feel safe now?

Dr. Anthony Fauci:

Do I feel safe? Yeah. I think that the people who are my security who are protecting me have done a very, very good job. But I still think deep down that there's a possibility that somebody's going to kill me. I mean, you're not totally protected all the time. I mean, people who have security often, not often, but can get hurt. So that's a possibility I wish I didn't have to think about, but it's true.

Susan Page:

Have you worked that through in your own mind?

Dr. Anthony Fauci:

Yeah. It's just that there's not much I can do about it. It is what it is. I've become the target of people with extremist views.

Susan Page:

Dr. Fauci, thank you so much for joining us.

Dr. Anthony Fauci:

My pleasure. Good to be with you. Thank you.

?

Susan Page:

Thanks to our senior producer, Shannon Rae Green for her production assistance. Our executive producer is Laura Beatty. Let us know what you think of this episode by sending a note to [email protected]. Thanks for listening. I'm Susan Page. Taylor Wilson will be back tomorrow morning with another episode of The Excerpt.

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Anthony Fauci on COVID-19 making him a hero and villain | The Excerpt