The doctor who became America’s face of the fight against Covid tells Will Pavia about death threats, lab leaks and how he survived the dysfunction and danger at the heart of Donald Trump’s White House.
There’s a man in America who is loved and reviled. People think he has extraordinary powers. Past presidents call him to ask how he’s holding up. “I’m concerned about you,” Barack Obama said. Bill Clinton wondered how he was still standing.
He lives in a small, rickety-looking house in the suburbs of Washington. The door opens and there he is: neat grey hair, blue eyes, large ears, crisp dark suit, red tie. It’s Dr Anthony Fauci of America’s Covid briefings: the calm face who appeared before millions during the pandemic, charged with explaining what was going on — while standing next to President Trump.
Fauci, now 83, retired as head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) in 2022. For 40 years he was the scientist that the White House dispatched to television studios to explain the public health threats of the day: “HIV, anthrax, ebola, zika, pandemic flu … it was almost always me,” he says. When he played this role during the Covid pandemic, something different happened. On numerous occasions, he had to contradict his boss. That’s where his problems began.
“Make yourself comfortable,” Fauci says. In the living room a small flock of wooden ducks peer from a dark wood sideboard behind a leather sofa. He bought the house in 1977, when he was 36 and single. At the time he was a rising star at the National Institutes of Health, developing therapies for rare autoimmune diseases.
“In those days the only thing I wanted was a place to put a pool,” he says. “I thought it would be great for socialising. Lot of girls.” He leads me out onto a wide deck overlooking a shady garden, mostly taken up by a swimming pool. He thought he would throw terrific parties — I picture the scene: hot dogs on the grill, Fauci doing cannonballs — but “then HIV came along. I got so busy.”
It was on an HIV ward in 1983 that he met Christine Grady, a nurse, now 72. They married in 1985. She used the swimming pool and so did their three daughters, all now in their thirties. Fauci loves living here. “It’s the most tree-strewn neighbourhood you could imagine,” he says. The only cloud in this suburban idyll is the security team that must keep vigil over the house, protecting the doctor from people who might want to kill him.
Fauci has written a memoir, On Call, and in it he pinpoints the fleeting moment the hatred began — when it seemed, to supporters of President Trump, that he might be trying to undermine their man.
It was March 20, 2020. Trump had just given a particularly feisty press briefing with Mike Pompeo, then secretary of state. Trump said Pompeo had to “get back to the State Department, or, as they call it, the Deep State Department”. Fauci was standing behind the president. “I had a moment of despair, mixed with amusement,” he writes. A reporter he knew caught his eye and Fauci put a hand to his forehead, tried not to smile and covered his face. Millions of TV viewers saw him. Fauci had spent decades desperately trying to be apolitical.
Death threats arrived by text, email and phone. Then, in April, he and Debbie Birx, the White House coronavirus co-ordinator, went to see Trump to advise him that an initial 15-day national lockdown needed to be extended. Trump agreed, he says. But that evening Fauci switched on his TV to learn that the president had made a series of tweets: “Liberate Michigan! Liberate Virginia!”
“Somebody must have come into the Oval Office and said, ‘Are you crazy? We can’t have a shutdown this long. We’ve got to tell the states they can do whatever they want to do.’”
Fauci was particularly dismayed by a press conference Trump gave in early April 2020, where he announced new guidance to wear a mask and then added that he wasn’t going to wear one himself. “That was the beginning of the politicisation of interventions. That was a cannon-shot signal that if you’re with Trump, you don’t wear a mask. If you’re against Trump, you wear a mask,” Fauci says. Later, “tragically, vaccination became a political statement” too. “Hospitalisations and deaths are much higher among Republicans than they are among Democrats. That is really sad that someone would endanger their own personal health based on ideological considerations.”
A 2022 study found the excess death rate among Republicans was 1.5 times that of Democrats. Does he think historians will say that Trump caused more deaths?
“They will,” Fauci says. “In fact Peter Hotez, an infectious diseases guy, wrote a book” — The Deadly Rise of Anti-Science: A Scientist’s Warning — “in which he said there were approximately 200,000 people who died unnecessarily because they did not want to get a vaccination based on political reasons.”
In June 2020 a letter arrived on Fauci’s desk at the National Institutes of Health, filled with a fine white powder that puffed into the air when he opened it, settling on his face, his shirt, his hands. “MANDATORY LOCKDOWNS,” said the letter. “REAP WHAT YOU SOW. ENJOY YOUR GIFT.”
Fauci had to strip and be hosed down with chemical foam. Then he went home and sat with his wife and one of his daughters, waiting to learn his fate. After hours of analysis, the powder turned out to be harmless. “With tears in our eyes, we hugged each other,” he writes.
Throughout all this, however, it seemed to Fauci that Trump himself was not particularly angry about all the things that enraged his followers. Fauci remembers being asked if he agreed with the president’s suggestion, early in the pandemic, that the coronavirus would soon “disappear … like a miracle”.
“I swallowed hard, and said to myself, I have a great deal of respect for the presidency of the United States, I take no pleasure in having to contradict him, regardless of whether you like him or you don’t like him.” Fauci knew it would not just disappear. “Then he started to invoke magic elixirs — ‘hydroxychloroquine [the malarial tablet] is going to cure it’. I would have to say, ‘No, I disagree, there’s no evidence that it works and there is some evidence that it could be harmful.’”
Trump “didn’t like that but he wasn’t furious with me”. His attitude, Fauci says, was, “‘You need to do your thing and I need to do mine’ — those were his exact words. I wrote that down when I got home.”
The president’s supporters, however, were furious. “Fire Fauci!” the crowd shouted at a Trump rally on the eve of the 2020 presidential election. He told them he’d think about it. In the years since he lost that election, Trump’s staunchest allies in Congress have assailed Fauci at every opportunity, claiming that he imposed rules such as social distancing on the public.
This summer they leapt on testimony made by Fauci that the six-feet rule was arbitrary and “sort of just appeared”. The rule actually came from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), Fauci explains, and was not his idea at all.
It was only later in the pandemic that it became clear that the virus could stay in the air for periods of time, so “distance is almost irrelevant”.
He didn’t get a chance to explain this to Marjorie Taylor Greene, the Georgia congresswoman who took him to task over it at a congressional hearing in June. She didn’t let him get a word in. “Making up guidelines!” she cried. “Do you think that’s appropriate? … No! I don’t need your answer.” She said he should be jailed and have his medical licence revoked, adding: “You should be prosecuted for crimes against humanity.” Fauci remained almost preternaturally calm throughout.
“I’ve just trained myself,” he says. “I’ve testified before Congress more than anybody, I think, in history. I just know when not to engage somebody and let them do their thing.” But his wife, Christine, did not enjoy it. “She was sitting right behind me. That was a terrible experience for her.”
The only attack that did get Fauci’s hackles up came from the Republican senator Rand Paul in relation to the theory that Covid might have escaped from the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China. Republicans have suggested that Fauci sought to suppress the so-called “lab leak” theory because the institute Fauci led had funded — indirectly, via a grant to a scientific research group called EcoHealth Alliance — some research into bat viruses at the Wuhan lab. “The viruses that were being funded to study … were evolutionarily so different from Sars-CoV-2 [Covid-19] that anybody who’s in virology 100 per cent agrees that it is molecularly impossible for those viruses to turn into Sars-CoV-2, even if you tried to do it,” Fauci says. “That gets lost.”
The likely origin of the virus has been hotly debated for four years. Earlier this month, researchers from the US and France concluded “beyond reasonable doubt” that Covid was first transmitted to humans in an animal market. Fauci says that while there is a small chance it originated in the lab, the evidence for that is purely circumstantial.
Paul, however, accused Fauci of “trying to obscure responsibility for four million people dying around the world from a pandemic”. He added: “There will be responsibility for those who funded the lab, including yourself.”
Fauci is still stunned by this: “He accused me of being responsible for the death of four million people! In a public hearing! That is the only time I have ever fought back.” He called Paul a liar. “That shocked everyone,” he says. “It goes back to Brooklyn.”
Fauci grew up in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, in the 1950s: a tough, tight-knit, Italian-American neighbourhood, where fist fights would sometimes break out between kids.
“The thing I learnt is you got to stay your ground and not let people push you around, because once you do they sort of sense a weakness and they could just pile on you,” he says. Fauci never grew taller than 5ft 7in. “I may not be the toughest or the biggest guy around but you’re not going to get away with just pushing me around. You get people like Rand Paul who make up stupid things. I’m not going to take that crap.”
His father, a pharmacist, was known locally as Doc Fauci. This was a time when the pharmacist was also the neighbourhood psychiatrist and marriage counsellor and “if you had a delinquent kid and you didn’t know how to handle him, you’d go see Doc Fauci”. He would let people keep their own records of what they owed him, which they often seemed to lose. “He was a very poor businessman,” Fauci says. “If I didn’t have scholarships through high school and college and medical school, I wouldn’t have been able to do it.”
He studied medicine at Cornell University and found his feet as a doctor while training in a New York hospital, working shifts that sometimes lasted days.
In 1968 he took a job at the NIAID, based in Bethesda, Maryland. It was there in 1981 that he first came across reports of a disease afflicting gay men in New York and Los Angeles. Fauci abandoned his research to study this new disease, which by the summer of 1982 was being called acquired immune deficiency syndrome (Aids). In the thick of this work he was promoted to director of the NIAID in 1984. He also became the target of Aids activists, who called him a murderer. “They didn’t think the government was putting enough resources in, and they were right,” Fauci says.
In the years that followed he pushed to increase research funding and helped develop, under President George W Bush, a global Aids relief programme now credited with saving 25 million lives.
People often compare these activists to the Covid protesters. Fauci rejects this: the HIV protesters were pro-science, they just wanted to be involved in it, he says.
Efforts to develop an Aids vaccine were unsuccessful. But Fauci argues that they did result in a technique — the mRNA delivery system — that was used in the Covid vaccine. It’s in this regard that Fauci says the Trump administration deserves great credit. It launched Operation Warp Speed, which accelerated the testing phases and encouraged pharmaceutical companies to manufacture the Covid vaccine before they knew if it worked or not.
But this was a White House quite unlike any he had seen. Fauci had advised five presidents before Trump. “It was the only time that there were negative consequences, for me, for speaking straight,” he says.
Trump initially seemed well disposed towards Fauci, because the Fox Business Network presenter Lou Dobbs had told the president how smart he was. Consequently, Trump arrived at a meeting in the White House situation room, on January 29, 2020, and wanted to hear only from Fauci. “Trump walks in and says, ‘I hear you’re the smartest guy around.’ Right away you immediately have people who resent you in the room.” Other presidents would have gone around the room “hearing from everybody”, he says. “It was very flashy.”
“When you’re with him for more than a little bit, it’s very clear that he’s charismatic but he’s totally narcissistic,” he says. He remembers Trump stepping out of one Covid press briefing and boasting about TV ratings. “The only thing that was on his mind was not that we had, like, five million infections the day before. It was, ‘the ratings are really great’.”
After the president contracted Covid in October 2020, Fauci says Trump called him from hospital to declare that the experimental treatment he was receiving — a monoclonal antibody cocktail made by a pharmaceutical company called Regeneron — needed to be approved immediately. Before he received it, he “felt like f∗∗∗ing shit”, Trump said, according to Fauci. Now he felt fabulous. Fauci explained that it was still in trials, to which Trump replied that the most important trial of all had now been done, on him. “He was serious!” Fauci exclaims. “These are the kind of conversations I had with him.”
As a rift appeared between the White House administration and its infectious diseases expert, Trump himself kept calling to assure Fauci that he loved him before screaming down the phone at him. One of these strange calls came after Fauci told an interviewer that any vaccine would probably require a booster shot. This was true, but it had dampened a rise in the stock market.
He says Trump called him up that night and said, “What the f∗∗∗ are you talking about?” He accused him of costing the country “one trillion f∗∗∗ing dollars”, Fauci says. “But he would always say at the end, ‘We’re still good, right?’” His book has a lengthy account of his last call with Trump, two days before election day in November 2020. The president called him and said, “You have got to give them hope. I like you but so many people hate you because of what you are doing. I am going to win this f∗∗∗ing election by a landslide. Just wait and see …”
Fauci clearly feels that Trump was culpable, in the months that followed, for focusing all his energies on mounting challenges to the election during some of the worst days of the pandemic. “We were in a major surge of cases,” Fauci says.
The most persistent charge against Fauci, and perhaps the most plausible, is that he rather likes the limelight. “That is understandable that people would say that,” he says. “I don’t like the limelight and the TV camera. I use it because I think it saves lives.”
At the height of the pandemic, when liberal Americans hailed him as a hero, it made him uncomfortable, he says. He did not like that there were Fauci bobblehead toys, that his face was on doughnuts, that Brad Pitt was playing him on Saturday Night Live. Well, all right, he did like that last thing. After the episode aired Fauci emailed a colleague saying that “one reviewer of the SNL show said that Pitt looked ‘exactly like me’. That statement made my year.”
Fauci continues: “You know, I say this, but I know my enemies will scoff at it. Fundamentally, I’m a humble guy that doesn’t like attention to me personally.” It’s a distraction “from what my goal is. I focus just the same way as when I was an intern and a resident at New York Hospital. In the middle of the night, you focus on a patient. Your job is to save their lives. Everything else is noise. I’m a public health official. I’m a scientist. People falling in love with me, doing candles — that’s noise. People saying I’m the devil, I should be killed — that’s noise. My job is to preserve and protect the health of people. Like, wow, you know, ‘People magazine voted you one of the sexiest men alive.’ Give me a freaking break, will you?”
So might he vote Trump this time around? “Yeah,” he says, chuckling softly. “Wow.”
Surely now that he is retired, he can stop being impartial? “No, I’m still not going to do that because then people will say I was lying that I’m not political,” he says. “I’m going to stay this way. I don’t need to let people know what my political feelings are.”
Not even on your deathbed? “No.”
He now teaches at Georgetown University. When I ask him what he’ll do for the rest of the day, he says he’s working on a paper about Mpox, a disease I’d almost forgotten about. A week later it is all over the news.
But Fauci doesn’t have to be on television explaining it. Being the US government’s face of science and medicine, “it’s got a lot of downsides to it”, he says. “So if I start falling off the radar of being the doctor for the world, it doesn’t bother me at all. I’ve been there, done that. Let’s move on.”
- On Call by Anthony Fauci (Penguin Putnam)
Written by: Will Pavia
© The Times of London