"My life was untenable at one point... I was constantly walking on eggshells." .
There's a rare honour in Washington, bestowed upon any hardy official who appears on all five of the big Sunday talk shows in a single day. They call it the "full Ginsburg" after Monica Lewinsky's lawyer William Ginsburg, who first scaled this political Everest back in 1998.
Near the height of the coronavirus pandemic, this distinction took on a new name. "The full Ginsburg became the full Fauci," says Dr Anthony Fauci when we meet over Zoom, with pride only a seasoned resident of the Washington beltway could feel.
For a while you couldn't turn on a television without seeing the diminutive doc. "In Fauci we trust" became the pandemic's clarion call, plastered on bumper stickers and coffee mugs. The director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases was dubbed "America's doctor", his face adorning everything from T-shirts to doughnuts. A Fauci bobblehead doll was created. Thousands signed a petition for People magazine to anoint him the sexiest man alive. He became a meme — and a hero.
Through the long painful months of the pandemic, Fauci has been America's healer-in-chief, his calm, experienced pragmatism presenting a stark contrast to the volatile president. Fauci has been Donald Trump's foil, injecting science and sanity into the chaos of the now-defunct daily coronavirus task force briefings. They will live long in the collective memory.
One poll in April gave Fauci a national approval rating of 78 per cent, with just 7 per cent disapproving, numbers that any president would kill for. Then Fauci disappeared. There was speculation of a rift with the president. Had he committed the cardinal sin of any Trump-era official: becoming more popular than the boss?
Was he sidelined? "Absolutely," he laughs in typically blunt fashion. "What changed is that the focus is now on economic reopening, so I am on the bench." For Fauci to appear on prime time, he has to be cleared by the White House, which means no more full Ginsburgs for him. "I still get the same number of requests from all the networks and all the cable channels," he says. "I just don't get cleared."
It's difficult to imagine anything more damning in Trump's mind than taking someone off television. But there is an "advantage" to being dropped, Fauci points out, which is more time to focus on developing a coronavirus vaccine, the mission that now consumes him. A lesser benefit is that he finally has an hour to spend on a video call with me, reflecting on all that has happened to him — and the world — in the past few months, and what might come next.
It's 7am when we meet — mid-morning for the famously industrious doctor. He is at his desk in Bethesda, Maryland, trim and compact as he is on the telly, wearing a crisp button-down shirt and thin blue tie. At first glance, Fauci's office looks a lot like your average doctor's lair: pictures of his three daughters on the wall, medical dictionaries and case files on the shelves. In another life, Fauci would have made a splendid family GP.
Then you spot framed photos of him with presidents Bush, Clinton, Obama and Trump — and you realise that this man has carried the health of a superpower on his shoulders for almost five decades, never more so than in 2020, at the age of 79.
"It's been extraordinary," he says, in his familiar husky Brooklyn accent. "My life was untenable at one point. I was literally getting three or four hours' sleep a night. I was constantly in front of the cameras, dealing with a deadly outbreak that's devastating the planet, with all the political undertones, constantly walking on eggshells."
Sometimes those shells cracked. For all Fauci's popularity, a small minority of Americans view him as the devil incarnate, "Dr Doom", the bureaucrat who hoodwinked Trump into shutting down the country for no good reason. Wild conspiracies have circulated about his ties to Big Pharma and the "deep state".
What came next were "credible" threats to his life along with persistent harassment of his wife, Christine, and their daughters. "They hack into their emails and iPhone accounts and send threatening obscene emails," Fauci says. "They know where they work, where they live, writing to say, 'You're at this address', 'I see you walking your dog', really bad stuff." He doesn't go anywhere now without secret service protection.
It's not the first time the doctor has found himself under attack. As a newly qualified physician in 1966. Fauci was drafted for Vietnam and served his military obligation as a "Yellow Beret" at the National Institutes of Health (NIH). He's been there pretty much ever since, advising six presidents all the way back to Reagan, working on ebola, zika and swine flu. Back in 1981 a baffling new virus emerged that attacked the immune system and was particularly prevalent among gay men. Then a young immunologist, Fauci threw himself into researching HIV/Aids within weeks of the first cases being reported. It "transformed" his life, but also made him the poster boy for the medical establishment's intransigence over HIV. "Anthony Fauci, you are a murderer," wrote Larry Kramer, the playwright, film producer and LGBT rights campaigner, as furious gay activists marched on the NIH chanting "F*** you, Fauci".
"Aids was a bigger challenge [than the coronavirus] over time," Fauci reflects, describing the 1980s as a "very dark" period in his career. "The ultimate death toll was enormous, about 38 million accumulating over almost four decades. We still have over one million deaths a year." Yet progress on treatments was made and Kramer, who died last month, became a close friend.
Over the years it has been the possibility of a coronavirus such as Covid-19 that has truly kept Fauci up at night; a highly transmissible, deadly respiratory virus that jumped from animals to humans. This pandemic was his "worst nightmare coming true".
Media-hyped public figures rarely live up to expectations, but Fauci's company really is a tonic. It's nice to be reminded what a model public servant is like: genial, accomplished and devoted. Even his family is work: Fauci and his wife, Christine Grady, are the Brangelina of public health, with Grady leading the bioethics department at the NIH clinical centre. They met while taking care of HIV/Aids patients in the 1980s and have worked together, run marathons together and brought up their three daughters.
"Chris is very special," Fauci says. "She understands the subtleties and stress of all that's going on." In mid-May he took a rare night off to celebrate the couple's 35th wedding anniversary. "We had spaghetti carbonara with some salad, a little wine and a little bread," Fauci recalls like a true Italian-American. Who cooked? "I'm the sous sous sous chef," he laughs.
Being the spokesman for a once-in-a-century pandemic is undoubtedly a challenge, but doing it at the behest of Donald Trump has been uniquely demanding. One of the enduring images of the pandemic is the Fauci "facepalm", when he reacted in despair as Trump used a coronavirus press conference to lambast his own state department. The president has recommended injecting disinfectant, persistently touted hydroxychloroquine (on thin medical grounds) and treats science like a ball of Silly Putty, to mould as he sees fit. Does it bother Fauci?
"Of course it's frustrating," he says. "Obviously that makes you very uncomfortable. My job and my identity is science. You have to go with the science, so when you hear statements like that made apart from the science, it gets frustrating. At the end of the day, though, the science and the evidence will always prevail."
During the early days of the virus, Fauci says, he was "pushing" the White House to lock the country down before the decision was made. He was "very concerned" about the British experiment with herd immunity. Does he now view the delay as a fatal error? "If you lock down at a certain time and you see cases start to get controlled, you almost have to make the conclusion that if you locked down earlier you'd be better off," he says. "It's a no-brainer of course."
"It would have been better to do it earlier," he adds. "But the information we had at the time was not as compelling. It's always easy to look in the rear-view mirror. [But] I can assure you that if we tried to lock down America with 12 cases and one death, the country would have thought we were crazy." It's worth noting that other, smaller countries did manage the task.
Fauci has spent his life as a scientist butting heads with careerist politicians. He has a motto, drawn from The Godfather — nothing personal, strictly business — that describes his pragmatic approach to managing presidents. His relationship with Trump, he says, is "really quite good. We're both from New York, we're both from the same generation, we both have a no-nonsense style about us. There is that kind of closeness."
Professionally, though, they are apples and oranges. Trump recently announced that America would withdraw from the World Health Organisation (WHO), for which it has long been the primary funder. Fauci believes this is a serious error. "The WHO made some mistakes, they've dropped the ball a few times, but the world really needs a WHO," he says. "As imperfect as it is, it's better to improve it than eliminate it. My concern is that if the US pulls out as a member, that would not be good for the health of the world. So I'm very concerned about that. I want us to continue to have a strong relationship with them."
Fauci isn't given to mindless boosterism, so when he says he hopes to have 200 million coronavirus vaccines by the start of 2021, that is cause for real — if cautious — optimism. Why is he so confident? There has, after all, never been a vaccine developed for HIV, which Fauci has been working on for almost 40 years.
"A big clue as to whether you'll be successful in developing a vaccine is what the body is able to do against natural infection," he says. "There are no instances of the body completely clearing HIV of its own accord. Then you come to the coronavirus and the vast majority of people who get infected ultimately clear the infection, which means that the body is capable of making a good response. This tells me that, even though there's no guarantee, it is likely we will be able to develop a vaccine that induces the kind of response that protects you from infection."
Over his many decades of waging war on infectious disease, Fauci credits running with keeping him sane. It's a "meditative" process for him. As the years have advanced, he's now more likely to be found power-walking whenever his schedule permits, which can often be in the middle of the night. Tales of Fauci's pavement-pounding have become a media cottage industry in America, taken as evidence of his discipline and iron will, but also part of a strange fetishisation that has played out during the pandemic.
Gripped by fear of the virus and the emotional turmoil of lockdown, Americans found comfort and assurance by latching onto the running doctor instead. Dr Deborah Birx, co-ordinator of the White House coronavirus task force, also received adulation, but nothing comparable to the idolisation of Fauci. How does he explain it?
"It certainly surprised me," he says, viewing it through the prism of the two Faucis: real and symbolic. "There's Tony Fauci, me, who my friends and people know. Then there's this symbol, which the country and the world actually needed. They needed someone who was honest, who had high integrity, who would tell it like it is during a period of great stress. By accident I was thrown into a very visible position."
During one April interview Fauci was asked who he wanted to play him on Saturday Night Live. His answer, naturally, was Brad Pitt. Following the immutable laws of American show business, Pitt then quickly appeared as "Fauci" on the sketch show, reportedly making the president jealous.
"This figure isn't really me," Fauci insists. "I am not a sex symbol. I don't look like Brad Pitt, even though I wish I did. The one thing I don't do is take that seriously. If I started to take that seriously I wouldn't be me. I think I'm a pretty humble guy. I know it's just symbolism and not me."
Fauci certainly seems to enjoy the spotlight and the celebrity chitchat, but the conversation always comes back to science and, of course, the pandemic, which at our time of speaking has claimed some 110,00 American lives. "Obviously this is a very, very difficult situation we're in," he says, expressing concern that the protests ripping through America's streets might cause a coronavirus "resurgence" and "set us back". Come winter, he believes we may have "another resurgence, which could really be terrible".
Even as the coronavirus rages on, many scientists are busy predicting another pandemic in the years to come. Does Fauci think we'll see further disaster? "I fear we will," he says. "With all of the other distractions in the world, our memory is short-lived." He recalls failed attempts to build the strategic stockpile for protective equipment and ventilators following bird flu in 2005. "You wouldn't imagine the pushback we were getting — 'You're overreacting, you don't need it.' Our memory for bad things is short."
Given Fauci is approaching his ninth decade, someone else may have to spearhead that next battle. How, I wonder, does he reflect on his long reign in public health? "I hope I'll be remembered as somebody who devoted their entire life to bettering the health of my nation and the world," he says. "I am going to have to stop one of these days. I just hope I do it willingly."
It was Hippocrates, father of medicine, who said "the life so short, the craft so long to learn", which sums up Fauci's time on earth thus far rather well. It's been a "full and challenging" life, he reflects, working, running, striving and learning his craft even today. If he helps to develop a coronavirus vaccine, that would be a crowning achievement. After a fortifying hour with Dr Fauci, I realise that I'd better let him go to get on with doing just that.
© The Times of London
