Consider This from NPR - Dr. Anthony Fauci Steps Away

Episode Date: August 25, 2022

For nearly four decades, Dr. Anthony Fauci has been leading the fight against infectious diseases in America - including AIDS and COVID-19. Now, he's stepping away.Earlier this week, Dr. Fauci announced he would retire as the head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases at the end of the year. In this episode, we'll talk with Dr. Fauci about his decision to leave, and take a look at the twists and turns of his long - and sometimes controversial - career.In participating regions, you'll also hear a local news segment to help you make sense of what's going on in your community.Email us at [e-mail] more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Support for NPR and the following message come from the Kauffman Foundation, providing access to opportunities that help people achieve financial stability, upward mobility, and economic prosperity, regardless of race, gender, or geography. Kauffman.org. On January 21, 2021, the day after President Biden's inauguration, Dr. Anthony Fauci stepped to the lectern in the White House briefing room. The idea that you can get up here and talk about what you know, what the evidence, what the science is, and know that's it. Let the science speak. It is somewhat of a liberating feeling. You were basically banished for a few months there for a while. You feel like you're back now? I think so. Banished by the previous occupant of the White House, Fauci, the nation's top infectious disease doctor,

had tangled constantly and sometimes publicly with President Trump over his handling of the pandemic. The day after that press conference, I caught up with Fauci and asked him to elaborate on that liberating feeling. The president, in this case Biden, sat down with us literally a few minutes before I got on the podium in the White House press room and reiterated something he had already told us. He said, right now, everything we do is going to be based on science and truth. And if things go wrong and we make mistakes, we admit them and we try and fix them.

And what went through your head when you heard that? I said, hallelujah. After the year Fauci had just been through, that sense of relief was perhaps not surprising. Almost from the moment the pandemic hit, he had become a target for the right and not just President Trump. Good evening and welcome to Tucker Carlson tonight. The utter fraudulence of Tony Fauci is obvious now. Dr. Anthony Fauci, the mad scientist who locked down the country and injured our children. He is the left-wing New Green Deal socialist.

Anthony, flip-flop, Fauci is once again back in the news. Dr. Fauci is still, to this day, a favorite target in some corners of conservative politics. And that new chapter in the Biden administration would turn out to be his last as a public servant. This week, Fauci announced he would retire at the end of this year. I had been thinking about this, Mary Louise, now for over a year. Earlier this week, we called Fauci again. That decision, he said, came down to timing, finding the right moment when the pandemic hopefully was under control. Turns out it's clear that we will get COVID under control and make it much, much less impactful on our social order.

But it's not going to be eradicated and it's not going to be eliminated. So I felt the time was right to make an announcement now and give a bit of a long runway and just step down in December. Because I think by that time, Mary Louise, the pandemic will likely become more of an endemic situation, something that we can live with and doesn't disrupt us. Consider this. For nearly 40 years, Anthony Fauci has been leading America's fight against infectious diseases. Now he's stepping away. We'll talk with Dr. Fauci about his decision to leave and look at the twists and turns of his long and sometimes controversial career.

From NPR, I'm Mary Louise Kelly. It's Thursday, August 25th. This message comes from WISE, the app for doing things in other currencies. Send, spend, or receive money internationally and always get the real-time mid-market exchange rate with no hidden fees. Download the Wise app today, or visit wise.com. T's and C's apply. It's Consider This from NPR. In the fall of 1984, Dr. Anthony Fauci was chief of the Laboratory of Immunoregulation at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. And he and his colleagues had just attempted a new kind of treatment for a patient with AIDS. We had hoped that if we could get the immune cells from the donor and put them into the recipient,

that the recipient would have at least a partial normalization of the immune response. That's Fauci on NPR in October 1984, his first appearance on our network. But as it turned out, there was no real effect on the clinical course of the recipient. He continued to do very poorly and ultimately died. The treatment had failed. Just a week after that broadcast, Fauci became the director of the NIAID, a position he still holds. His early years at the helm were dominated by the AIDS crisis and by criticism that he was moving too slowly in response to that pandemic. October 1988, activists gathering at the FDA and NIH to protest the slow pace of drug development to fight the virus.

One of their chants even called out Fauci by name. I want to know why it takes five to ten years in this country to test drugs that you can test in Europe in half the time, a prominent AIDS activist published an open letter writing, Anthony Fauci, you are a murderer. Fauci would later acknowledge that he initially saw the AIDS crisis too clinically, through the lens of science, and that, quote, I had to change. He came to sympathize with the activists and even invited a group of them to his office that day in 1988. Fauci had been thrust into a role that he would reprise decades later, public official at the center of a highly politicized fight over a deadly virus. As the years went on, Fauci would continue

to be the public face of the federal government's response to disease outbreaks big and small, we went back through our archives for a sample. Here he is in 1997, talking about a small spike in avian flu. This particular flu, H5N1, has never before infected humans, which means the entire human population is essentially naive to this particular strain, which makes it all the more dangerous once a person is infected. A month after 9-11, he reflected on the possibility of smallpox being used as a biological weapon. When you have, again, a real situation, for example, of the return of smallpox potentially as a bioterrorism event or the serious risk of that, then you go back and re-evaluate the risk benefit of

vaccination. And then two and a half years ago, a novel coronavirus arrived in the U.S. We now have five confirmed cases in the United States, and I would not be surprised at all if we start seeing more in the coming days to weeks. That's Fauci in January 2020. Of course, we did start seeing more cases, and almost immediately Fauci and Trump began to spar over the response to COVID-19. Dr. Fauci, as was explained yesterday, there has been some promise with hydroxychloroquine, this potential therapy for people who are infected with coronavirus. At a press conference in March 2020, as the virus spread rapidly, Trump stood behind Fauci as he was asked whether hydroxychloroquine could help infected patients.

The answer is no. And the evidence that you're talking about, John, is anecdotal evidence. But Trump had other thoughts. Without seeing too much, I'm probably more of a fan of that than maybe than anybody. But I'm a big fan. We'll see what happens. And that contradictory messaging would repeat itself as the months went on. Trump downplaying the virus or promoting unproven treatments, Fauci doing his best to stick to the science. And as the 2020 presidential election heated up, Trump's rhetoric became more personal. People are tired of hearing Fauci and all these idiots, these people, these people that have gotten it wrong. Fauci's a nice guy. He's been here for 500 years. He called

every one of them wrong. Trump's base agreed. Here's the crowd at a rally two days before the election. Don't tell anybody, but let me wait till a little bit after the election. Of course, after the election, Fauci wasn't Trump's to fire anymore. And that brings us back to where we began, a new start in the Biden administration. COVID wasn't over, though, and Fauci was not out of the crosshairs. Dr. Fauci, do you still support funding of the NIH funding of the lab in Wuhan? That's Kentucky Senator Rand Paul at a hearing in May of last year accusing Fauci of covering up U.S. involvement in coronavirus research in China. Since the beginning of the pandemic, the theory that the virus had escaped from a lab in Wuhan

had become a focus for many on the right. Senator Paul, with all due respect, you are entirely and completely incorrect. The two had sparred before, and they would spar again. Just this week, Senator Paul said he would investigate Fauci if Republicans win back the Senate this fall. And now Fauci's retirement looms. COVID cases have been dropping lately, but the daily average is still more than twice as high as a year ago.

So when I spoke with Fauci this week, I wanted to return to a theme we had covered many times these last two and a half years. I was looking at the transcripts of our past conversations. I have asked you over and over as this thing has, I don't even know what the right verb is, as we have lived through this pandemic, where we are in the arc of this thing. It sounds like you don't think we're ever going to say goodbye to COVID, but that by the end of this year, you are hopeful we will be

living with it. It will be manageable. We can go about our lives. I believe so, but it's not guaranteed, Mary Louise, because there are things that we can do to make that more possible. We only have 67% of the population of this country is vaccinated, and only a half of those are boosted. The fall is coming up. We have a bivalent BA5 vaccine boost that will be available by early to mid-September. If we can get the people who've not been boosted to get boosted, and certainly those who've not been vaccinated to get vaccinated, we could be where you and I are talking about now, where we want to be as we get into the end of this year and next year, that the virus will be at a low leaving when we're not at the end of the coronavirus pandemic? And now we're looking at monkeypox and, of all things, a resurgence of polio.

Well, let's take each of these separately, Mary Louise. First of all, with monkeypox, unlike the early years of HIV, we know what the pathogen is. We have diagnostics, we have therapeutics, and we have antivirals. So we just need to implement and make accessible to the people at risk. And we will be able to control monkeypox if we do it correctly. Polio, there's a case of paralytic polio in New York. Polio is 99% preventable by vaccines. If you want to stop polio dead in its tracks get the children who are unvaccinated vaccinated and you and i would not be talking about polio well exactly we we know that that is the answer and yet here we are talking about polio in new york right exactly and that's because

if you look at certain places in new york such as in rockland county only about 60 percent of the children are vaccinated and in some sections of the county, as few as 37% are vaccinated. That's unacceptable. We've got to get the children vaccinated. One more question on COVID. We all know so much more about COVID than we did back in March 2020, including you. With the exquisite benefit of hindsight, is there anything you wish you could go back and do differently? Of course, Mary Louise, there are many things that we would do, but it's just one of those things. If we knew then what we know now, we would have done a lot of things differently.

We didn't know the capability of this virus to spread, particularly when people are without symptoms. We didn't understand fully that it was aerosolized. We didn't fully appreciate a number of things in January and early February that if we did, we certainly would have done things differently. Anything stand out to you? Well, I think it's the issue, you know, we often get criticized for having people, you know, restrict their activity and wear masks. Back then, if we knew that the virus was insidiously under the radar screen spreading, we would have been much more aggressive of asking people to avoid congregate settings indoors and to wear masks. Absolutely. Let me step you back a little

bit. I know you have said you hope to spend some of your time this next chapter encouraging young people to intergovernment service. You and I have talked about how vicious the politics can be that come with that work. I know you've experienced that firsthand. How are you going to make the case to young people when public health in this country has become so politicized? People like you have become targets of anger, even violence. Well, despite the negative aspects that you just mentioned, there are so many beautiful things about science, a feeling of gratification and contribution to mankind. That's what I'm going to stress to the younger generation of scientists and people who are considering going into science. Public service is an extraordinary profession, and I want to

encourage young people to do that. They should not be put aback by the politicization. That is there. It's unfortunate, but we can do it even in that context. Is there a moment you will tell them about that will stick with you? A site, a person, a patient? Yes, of course. You know, particularly in the early years of HIV, when we're taking care of desperately ill people, all of whom were dying. And then now we wind up with a situation where we have drugs, antivirals, that are literally giving these people normal life. That is a feeling that is just wonderful to go from absolute disaster up to a life-saving drug.

Dr. Anthony Fauci, reflecting on this moment in the pandemic and his decision to step down after 38 years as the top infectious disease doctor in America. It's Consider This from NPR. I'm Mary Louise Kelly.