The Jordan Harbinger Show - 1011: Dr. Anthony Fauci | The Science and Politics of Public Health

Episode Date: July 2, 2024

Leadership in public health requires adaptability. Dr. Anthony Fauci joins us to share lessons he's learned from decades of managing disease outbreaks. What We Discuss with Dr. Anthony Fauci: The importance of transparency and honesty in public health communication, even when it means delivering inconvenient truths or disagreeing with political leaders. How social media and political polarization amplified attacks on public health officials and spread misinformation during the COVID-19 pandemic. Why the changing guidance on masks over the course of the pandemic was due to evolving scientific understanding, not flip-flopping. The potential for future respiratory pandemics and the need for ongoing preparedness, even when threats are not imminent. Dr. Fauci shares insights about his own career choices, including turning down high-paying private sector jobs to continue his work in public service. And much more... Full show notes and resources can be found here: jordanharbinger.com/1011 This Episode Is Brought To You By Our Fine Sponsors: jordanharbinger.com/deals Sign up for Six-Minute Networking — our free networking and relationship development mini course — at jordanharbinger.com/course! Like this show? Please leave us a review here — even one sentence helps! Consider including your Twitter handle so we can thank you personally!See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Coming up next on the Jordan Harbinger Show. Now you're asking me what keeps me up night now. It's the same thing. It's another respiratory-borne outbreak that's highly transmissible and that has a degree of morbidity and mortality that can be very, very disruptive and painful. Because when you're talking about pandemics, it's got to be something that easily is spread from person to person.

And the easiest way to do that is through the respiratory route. Welcome to the show. I'm Jordan Harbinger. On the Jordan Harbinger show, we decode the stories, secrets and skills of the world's most fascinating people and turn their wisdom into practical advice that you can use to impact your own life and those around you. Our mission is to help you become a better informed, more critical thinker through long-form conversations with a variety of amazing folks, from spies to CEOs, athletes, authors, thinkers, performers, even the occasional rocket scientist, four-star general hacker, gold smuggler, or economic hitman. And if you're new to the show, or you want to tell your friends about it, I suggest our episode's starter

Pax is a great place to begin. These are collections of our favorite episodes on persuasion, negotiation, psychology, geopolitics, disinformation and cyber warfare, crime and cults, and more. That'll help new listeners get a taste of everything we do here on the show. Just visit jordanharbinger.com slash start or search for us in your Spotify app to get started. Today on the show, doctor and former medical advisor to the president, to multiple presidents, in fact, and presidential Medal of Freedom winner Dr. Anthony Fauci, one of the most famous slash infamous people in the world as of the past few years. It is rare that someone has become such a hero to some

and such a villain to others. Love them or hate them. This is a great conversation about pandemics, public health, COVID-19, just as you might expect. What you might not expect is that this conversation is mostly not political. We just don't get into the contentious weeds on everything, yet still keep things interesting and relevant, in my opinion.

All right, here we go with Dr. Anthony Fauci. It seems like you were born to be a public health official with your father being the neighborhood pharmacist and delivering prescriptions on your Schwinn bike back in the day. Did you have designs on this kind of career early in the game? No, Jordan, I don't think I could say that I had designs on this kind of career. What I did feel, you know, both at the time vaguely, though I probably didn't recognize it, but later when I retrospectively reflected on it, the fact that my father was sort of in the, in his pharmacy, a mom and pop shop in a working class section of Brooklyn.

The pharmacies that were very different than the industrial CBS and Walgreens type pharmacies that we have now. The neighborhood pharmacist was kind of like the surrogate dock of the neighborhood. He was a combination marriage counselor, a person who advises parents on juvenile delinquent children, gets prescriptions filled.

and he felt a kind of responsibility to the neighborhood. We're talking the 40s and the 50s now, and I was at the time, you know, seven, eight years old, nine years old, 10 years old, with my, as you mentioned, my Schwinn bicycle delivering prescriptions. The one thing that came through to me was my father's commitment to service to the community because, quite frankly, with no disrespect for my father, he was a terrible businessman in that, you know, people could not afford sometimes to pay for the prescriptions. So he would put it on a tab. And often, if they were not

well off financially, they couldn't pay. And he would just absorb the cost, which made the pharmacy not a particularly profitable business. I mean, could you imagine today going into a pharmacy saying, I can't pay, but give me the prescription anyway? It would never happen. So service to the community was sort of ingrained in me. And that was subsequent. quickly enhanced by the nature of my education, you know, with the Dominican nuns in elementary school and then the Jesuit priest in high school, whose motto was service for others. So, in answer to your question, it wasn't like I foresaw this as my avocation later on, but I think the seeds of what drove me to public health and public service were probably planted in those

very early years in the Bensonhurst and Dyka Heights section of Brooklyn, New York. It sure seems that way from the reading of the book that you were kind of, I mean, aside from your little foray into basketball, you were kind of headed in a more or less straight line. By the way, 5-7 white guy playing basketball with big, you don't hear that too often anymore. That's a relic of the times. Indeed, indeed. And that's why I described it as such. It was a very important, an enjoyable period of my youth, the playing and a very competitive New York City high school basketball, but being a fast five-seven point guard, today is an anomaly that would never happen. Right, right. Yeah, maybe if you grew six to 12 inches, you could still do.

Yes. Do you still ball? I go one-on-one occasionally fun, you know, playing horse with my wife up in the gym. I used to go half-court games in medical school and when I was doing my fellowship, but right now it's tough to get a group of people who are so busy to get at their place. So I just shoot around. I'm on the faculty now at Georgetown University, and they have a great athletic center, the E.H. Center. So I go up there to work out a bit, and every once in a while I just shoot around. So somebody might walk in there, and if you're wondering who the 5'7 man with white hair shooting hoops is,

it could be Dr. Fauci. That's kind of, that's a double take, I think, for a lot of people, for sure. Yeah, it's kind of fun. dealing with the students. I love them. They're probably not screaming at you, speaking of which. I know you were attacked in the 80s. This is stuff most people my age don't know because we weren't watching the news back then, but you were attacked a lot in the 80s pretty viciously for not doing enough about

the AIDS virus to sort of put it in a simple container. And one of your harshest critics back then actually later said that you were the one true hero from the government with respect to the AIDS epidemic. And I know that you've been quoted it possibly before COVID. is saying that your career and indeed your identity was sort of defined by the fight against HIV. Well, that is true. It was defined by AIDS. It's a memoir. As you mentioned, I'm elderly. You know, an 83-year-old person. Did you almost say elderly? Yeah, I almost did. You don't have to do that to yourself. Yeah, I mean, but I'm 83. I'm a young 83.

But COVID is a very small fraction of my career. I mean, most of it is defined by what you mentioned earlier is HIV-AIDS. I spent over 40 years in the AIDS battle from the very difficult years in the beginning to the triumphs of the drug. But the point you're making about the activists, I'm glad you pointed out because it's a major part of the book that contrasts and compares the attacks on me in the AIDS years and the attacks on me now. Back then, the underlying reason for the confrontation with the AIDS activist community was that the scientific community and the regulatory community in the form of the NIH and the CDC and the FDA were treating HIV the way they successfully treated a bunch of other diseases where the people who would be dictating how things were done were the scientists

and the regulatory people. And they had very rigid criteria, for example, for entry into clinical trials, entry criteria, exclusion criteria, a long time to get a drug approved, measured in years and years. That worked very well for diseases in getting interventions that were safe and effective to the American public. But when you had a disease, that was a brand new disease, the likes of which we have never seen before, where these desperately ill, young, almost exclusively gay men who had been previously healthy was suffering and dying within 10 to 15 months of the clinical diagnosis. So this slow, rigid kind of measured response to the outbreak did not work well for HIV. But the scientific community, understandably, but inappropriately, said,

we know what's best for you because we've done this before. And the gay community was saying, Well, not so. We want to sit at the table with you. We want to be part of the discussion of what the right agenda would be for clinical trials and for regulation. And when the scientific community didn't listen to them, that's when they became provocative, iconoclastic, disruptive, and confrontative. Most of the scientific community pulled back and withdrew even more from them. And as I described in the memoir, one of the best things that I've ever done of the things in my half a century career was to put aside the theatrics of the demonstration and listen to what they were saying. And what they were saying was making absolutely perfect sense. And I decided that if I were in their shoes, I would be doing exactly what they were doing. So I, you know, I can best describe it by saying it's kind of like John Lewis, the iconic civil rights leader, said they make trouble but they made good trouble.

So the AIDS activists were making good trouble. What you're seeing today with the vitriol and the ad hominem attacks on scientists is not good trouble. That's just pure ad hominem to try and discredit and undermine the scientific and public health community. We're not perfect by any means and we've done things that we could have done better,

but to attack the community with no purpose but to undermine them is infinitely different than the pushback by the AIDS activists in the 1980s. A big, big difference. Yeah, it's, I was going to jump into some of this later, and I suppose we could, but some people really hated you under Bush because of the AIDS stuff. Then it was Ebola under Obama, Trump because of COVID, Biden because of the COVID vaccines. What do you hope people will hate you for next, Dr. Bauer? Well, you know, I don't know how to answer that.

The one thing that has been consistent with me is that I have done everything I can with whatever abilities I have and energy I have to put all of my energies into trying to preserve and protect the health of the American public. Sometimes that's in circumstances that are very charged and sometimes people react. And as I mentioned, the reaction of the gay community in the 80s, was a very positive and value-added reaction. In contrast to what you saw at that congressional hearing a few weeks ago, which was just pure circus. I really do think that a lot of those hearings now are designed to create social media clips for the politicians because they've essentially become Instagram influencers in many ways or news clip influencers, which I don't think is healthy for public discourse.

But that's a whole different rant from me, I suppose. You're absolutely correct. I mean, you're totally correct that if you look at things like the congressional hearings, the supposed purpose of it was to take a look at potential lessons learned about how we might do better in preparedness and response for the inevitability of another and the next outbreak, be that a year from now or 20 years from now. But that's not what took place. What took place was, just as I mentioned, pure ad hominem and pure vitriol. Yeah, it doesn't seem like it makes it easier for people to do their jobs. I wonder, how did what you experienced during the outbreak of HIV AIDS inform your response to the COVID-19

pandemic, right? Because it seems like, uh-oh, new disease, we got to act fast. We didn't act as fast as we could have or should of during HIV AIDS. Was that kind of like, let's not make that mistake again? Was there thought to that? Well, you always learn from your experiences. Hopefully, yeah. I mean, yeah, that's right. Hopefully. And we try very much to learn from our experiences. There are a lot of lessons learned, some positive lessons and some painful lessons. I mean, for example, even though in the mid to late 80s, it was eminently clear that HIV was the cause of AIDS, there was some otherwise qualified scientists who went rogue and started saying, that HIV didn't cause AIDS. They were AIDS denials, and they said, well, AIDS is caused by

aberrant sexual behavior that has nothing to do with the virus. And when you try and treat them with drugs, it's the drugs that are hurting them. And the virus is, no, essentially benign. And that led to, in another country, namely South Africa, to have the South Africans who were sort of ambivalent about providing drugs for their people to latch on to the denialists from very good institutions like Berkeley and Stanford and others, and to say, well, the scientists don't think that AIDS is caused by HIV, so we don't have to give drugs to our people. And people who've done modeling studies showed that during that period of time, when Tabo Mubeki, who is the president of South Africa at the time, and their health minister,

Minister Monta Shlaba-Bah, Missamong, they said that we don't want to give drugs because we don't think the virus causes HIV. And approximately 300,000 South Africans unnecessarily died preventable deaths because of denialism. Fast forward 40 plus years, and you have people that say, you don't need to wear a mask. The vaccine kills you worse than the virus kills you. Right. And then you have a substantial segment of people who actually believe that. Yeah.

And test assess the data that it is more likely for you to die, I'll be hospitalized with COVID. If you're a Republican living in a red state, then if you're a Democrat living in a blue state. And that's completely crazy that a person makes a decision about something that could impact their safety, their life, the fact that they might be hospitalized. or die based purely on ideological concerns. As a person who's not political at all, you know, I'm not a Democrat, I'm not a Republican, I'm a physician and a scientist. It's very painful for me to see people choosing to not implement or apply an implementation that could be life-saving to them or to their families.

Yeah, it was really shocking. We saw people saying, hey, it's the ventilator that's killing you. And it's, well, wait, aren't they only putting people who are close to death on ventilators because they can't breathe? And no, the hospitals are killing. And when I was reading your book and doing research about the HIV-AIDS thing, it was really scary how similar these pandemics were. It was people telling you in the 80s calling you saying, hey, don't waste too much time on this HIV thing. It's probably going to go away in a few months like magic. They also called it grid, gay-related immune deficiency.

In other words, who cares? it's a bunch of gay guys. Stop wasting your time on it. I mean, talk about politically incorrect disease nomenclature. It was just really, the denialism was there, like you said. The kooky theories that were there, like you said. And I looked up some sham cures, all present with COVID just like it was with AIDS. And it's really amazing to see once you know the history.

Because if you were thinking, I'm going to do this sham cure for COVID, but then you go look at anything having to do with AIDS in the 80s, you just kind of. look at the stack of stuff you bought from Thailand on your desk and throw it immediately in the trash because it's the same nonsense. Yeah, no, you're absolutely correct. History repeats itself. And in fact, if you go back even further to 1918 pandemic flu about people, some of whom refused to wear a mask, some of which refused to have social distancing and how that came back to really bite them back then because they didn't want to be told what to do. And they didn't. And they There was some really interesting studies of one city that actually shut down and had physical

distancing compared to another city that actually said to, heck, let it rip, you know, let it go through. It's not going to bother us. And the death rate and the hospitalization rate in one versus the other was stunning. Very similar to what we're talking about now. I was looking at some stuff about germ theory a few months back and how doctors delivering babies who had just been at the morgue touching a dead body, they were like, oh, this is a bunch of BS. I mean, it's really, you just see this cycle of like denying science and not bothering to change your ways. And it's sort of, I guess, no surprise that they say science advances one

funeral at a time. Yeah. It just depends on whose funeral it is. A lot of unproven drugs with AIDS, although that part I kind of understand, right? If you have AIDS and you're not able to get any treatment and somebody says, hey, just dilute bleach in water and drink it every hour, I guess, you know, you try what you can because you don't want to die. That's the only thing I can sort of understand. Well, you know, I have to maybe just put an editorial on that. Sure. Is that true when there's desperate nature, but that's what the clinical trial process is about. To get a clinical trial to prove or not whether a drug works, whether it's effective and whether it's safe. One of the things that we did with the help of the activists, because the clinical trial does not meet everyone's

needs, because not everybody can be in a clinical trial. And as long as you're going in the direction of trying to get data that would either prove or disprove the safety and efficacy, that's a positive thing. But in the meantime, you might want to have access to these drugs and people who, for one reason or other, could not get into the clinical trial, either because of exclusion criteria, because of geographic considerations. And that's why we started the parallel track program, which I described in the memoir, where, it was the first foundation for compassionate use, where if people could not get into a clinical trial, that the drug would be made available to them outside of the clinical trial or in parallel.

That's why we called it a parallel track. And that would not count against the data in the trial. So you would not disturb the pristine nature of the clinical trial, but at the same time, you'll allow the accessibility of these potentially, but unproven life-saving drugs to people who could not be in the clinical trial. I know that you were in charge of prepping the United States for bioterrorism, like smallpox, anthrax. How prepared are we for something like that?

Because when I look at how people wouldn't do sort of some of the simplest things for COVID when we didn't know what we were dealing with, it seems like if we had a major bioterror attack, a bunch of people would say it's fake, a bunch of people would say it's a false flag, a bunch of people would say it's China, a bunch of people would say it's not actually happening at all, and you should actually just go outside and get more sun,

even though you're supposed to stay inside, whatever it is. I mean, it's not looking good as far as... Yeah. You know, when you talk about preparedness and response, I generally, for clarity, like to break it up into two categories of two buckets. One is the scientific response and preparedness, and the other is the public health preparedness and response.

scientifically, if you were to grade us for COVID, we were A-plus because we put decades of investment in basic and clinical research over a period of time that allowed us when the sequence of the SARS-CoB-2 was made available, we were able to start a vaccine trial with a very adaptable platform and imitogen, and an imidogen is just the business end of the vaccine, we were able to do that within a few days of the appearance in a public database of the sequence. And then in a completely unprecedented way, we went through the phase one, two, and three components of the clinical trials, and we're able to demonstrate in less than 11 months in studying tens of thousands of people, in randomized placebo control trials,

that the vaccines were, is safe and highly, highly effective to the tune of more than 90%. To say that is unprecedented is a profound understatement because usually something like that takes seven to 10 or more years, usually more than that. So already, when you look at the data, the vaccines have saved millions, of lives in the United States. The Commonwealth Fund did a study over a couple of year period

during the middle of the outbreak to show that vaccinations saved 3 million lives, 18 million hospitalizations, and about $1.1 trillion in health care costs. And the Europeans and others did the same thing. And that saved about 14 million lives internationally. So it was just extraordinary. That not only is an incredible accomplishment, but just think what would have happened if we didn't have a vaccine and it took five to seven years to get it, how many more deaths there would have been. So scientifically, we did well. What we really need, and you alluded to it when you introduced the topic, what we really need to do is to take a look at what our public health preparedness and response is. You know, the fractionation.

of the response between the local public health and the federal public health response, the antiquated way we collect and distribute data with some local public health components still using fax machines and not being able to get things online in real time. When you compare that, what goes on in countries like Israel, the UK, and South Africa, they're way ahead of us in getting real-time information and an outbreak. And in fact, during the height of the outbreak, more often than not, I was on this screen that I am with you talking to my colleagues in the middle of the night or very early in the morning in different countries in Israel, UK, South Africa, Australia, to find out what they were doing because their health care system allowed them to get information in real time, which was very difficult for us. hopefully the CDC recognizes that that is a problem and are doing everything they can to correct that. I do think my favorite nickname for the vaccine was the Fauci-Ocee.

That one was pretty creative. I don't know. You must have been hearing this in real time and thinking, like, really? Yeah. Surely some of this was massively stressful. We'll get into that a little bit. It just, before we do that, during the Zika virus outbreak, you lamented that partisan politics might affect the next disease breakout. And it might get even worse.

And I'm paraphrasing here, but man, did that come true with COVID? It was just really sad to see, I know you're working like 14 to 16 hours a day for much of your career, especially during the pandemic. I know you've kids as well. Did you ever think, like, you worked a little bit too much at the expense of family and maybe even your sanity? I don't know about the sanity, but certainly to be. Mental health.

How's that? Yeah, mental health. I admit that I'm guilty that I'm not the poster child for a good work-life balance. But that was really kind of the circumstances I found myself in and that I chose to be in. Because, you know, if you look at my career, it's bookended by the extraordinary tragedy of the early years of HIV on one end of the early part of my career. and in the December of my career, by the most impactful outbreak that we've seen in this planet in over 100 years. And in the middle is the diseases that you mentioned.

You know, the pandemic flu of 2009, Zika, Ebola, the anthrax attacks, chicken gunya, multiple drug-resistant tuberculosis. There was always some crisis or semi-crisis, which actually did put me in a position where I had to make sacrifices. Certainly, I would have wished that I was able to spend more time with my family, with my wife, and my children. Fortunately, for me, I had a partner who I describe in the book, Dr. Christine Grady, who is my wife, who's an amazing person, and who actually was a great support for me for what I had to do, and just went the extra mile to make sure that the family unit, you know, functioned really well. And we did some interesting things about timing so that we could be together, even if it was at very odd hours of the day and night, she was very good at making sure we stood together as a loving family.

Yeah, there's a funny anecdote in the book where you two decided to run a marathon together and you were like, let's hold hands across the finish line. And she's like, actually, I love you dearly. And then she just smokes you and finishes several seconds before you, which I think says a lot about your relationship and her personality in one tiny little anecdote. You know, she's great. I mean, I throw that anecdote because she is amazing. I mean, she's a wonderful person. And I still think we have the intensity of a love affair that started 40 years ago. But she's a great athlete and she's in good shape. And when we got to the end,

I was sort of like, oh, my God, I'm in such great pain. We're at 26.1 miles. And we did that. We were running together and chatting for that period of time. We did a great time. In the Marine core marathon, we did it in three hours and 47 minutes. And in the New York Marathon, we did it in four hours and six minutes, except that both times she was about 15 seconds ahead of me because just at that last 10th of a mile, she would say, I'm sorry, but I got to give it my all. And she took off. And you're right. She smoked me at the end. That's it. It's really funny. And it's even better that you told that anecdote in the book instead of, you know, being embarrassed about it or something like that, I think it's quite funny. In part because of COVID, you're now one of the most

recognizable, famous slash infamous people in the world. And I know that's not probably why you signed up for the position that you did. But for example, one reason why we're not doing this in person was because the publicist that I spoke to had said, I said, look, I'll fly out there, we'll do this. She said, actually, the security situation is such that it's going to be a huge pain to get you cleared and then your camera crew cleared, especially if they're local. And I thought, like, wow, okay, I didn't really think about that. Usually I just show up with guys with equipment and nobody's got to look through the bags and do a background check. And maybe I'm a pretty sketchy guy, so I guess I can't blame them. But it sounds like it's pretty serious, more so than it is

with most guests of this podcast. Yeah, that's true. I mean, over the last couple of years, you know, related to the fact that I had to, in order to preserve my own professional integrity and my responsibility to the American public, I had to, under certain circumstances, publicly disagree with the president of the United States. That immediately triggered a tsunami of hate against me by people who have a tendency to do hateful things, like storm the capital and do things like that. So I became the target. The thing that people need to understand, I have a great deal of respect for the presidency of the United States. And I took no great pleasure in having to contradict the president. He wanted desperately for this outbreak to go away, the way flu goes away, when March comes in the

beginning of April. He wanted it to disappear. My relationship with him in the beginning was actually quite good. We had a very good report together. You know, I kind of described it as maybe, you know, two people from New York City, you know, one from Queens, one from Brooklyn. You know, we had that New York rapport with each other. And we got along very well. But when he started to see that this outbreak was not going to disappear and it was going to sort of interfere with the economy and certainly with the election cycle, he began to say things that just were frankly not true. He would say it would disappear like magic. And then I would have to say when the press asked me, no, it's not going to disappear like magic. In fact, does he even get to.

worse. And then when he realized it wasn't going to disappear like magic, he would invoke some magic elixis, like, okay, hydroxychloroquine is the answer. That's going to be the thing that's going to work. And when the reporters asked me, I have to say, no, unfortunately, that's not the case. It's anecdotal. Clinical trials show that it doesn't work. And in fact, it could be harmful. You know, it's interesting, as I described in the book, is that he did not take as much offense as that as one word might have thought. He maintained our good rapport. It was the people around him that became infuriated with me for what they thought I was undermining him, which was not my intention. I had no antipathy towards him, and I had certainly no intention

of underlying him, but I felt it was my responsibility to the American public to tell the truth. That's when the threats started to come in. That's when the White House themselves try to discredit me. I mean, the communications people at the White House did opposition research on me and started to say things to the press that I didn't know what I was talking about, which is mind-boggling when you think about that. You're working in the White House, and the White House comms team telling reporters that I don't know what I'm talking about, which is really weird at best. All right. Time to infect yourself with the great deals on the fine products and services that support this show. We'll be right back.

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well, actually, your whole career was pretty much spent in a position where you have to often give bad news to powerful people, stuff they don't want to hear. And I assume you have some way of, typically avoiding damaging those relationships while also being effective because otherwise you couldn't really do your job. I mean, a lot of people, yeah, they want to shoot the messenger. You've experienced that. But I feel like a lot of people just tell powerful people what they want to hear and then try to slime their way around. But eventually they're going to get found out. And that's, yeah, that's it. Well, I describe in the memoir the first time I was getting ready to go into the White House to advise a president. And I had a close friend, much older than I,

who had spent six years in the Nixon White House, and he gave me some advice that I would hope that I would have felt this way without his advice. But his advice helped me and fortified it. And he said exactly what you were alluding to. He said, whenever you walk into the White House, and now, Jordan, I've been in the White House

hundreds and hundreds of times. He said, whenever you walk in the White House and you go under that awning in the lower level of the West Wing, just whisper to yourself, this may be the last time that I'm going to walk into this building, because it's such an awesome and heady place that your natural instinct is you want to get invited back again. I see. So that might get you to tell a president or the president's advises something that you think they may want to hear as opposed to telling them what might be, an inconvenient truth. So I said to myself, that's what I'm going to do. And I did that. I did that

with Ronald Reagan. I did that with George H. W. Bush, with George W. Bush. And after a while, people begin to respect you because they know that you are going to be truthful to them. So instead of the messenger getting shot, it just got more and more rapport and respect for the different administrations. It was only when we got to the Trump administration that when I said that, more his staff than him were very offended by it and started to really try and discredit me. I mean, Peter Navarro writing an editorial in USA Today saying everything I'm saying is wrong and the comms people essentially going along with that. I mean, that to me was, you know, an example of, yes, I'm going to tell the truth, but, you know, if you want to get rid of me, then get rid of me.

But I'm not going to tell you something because I think you want to hear it. Yeah, I think it seems like you would know, as a physician, you just have to know, look, the entire country and the world kind of are relying on you to figure out how to stop this pandemic. So your feelings, Mr. President, or people in the room with the president, like, that just comes, that is a distant second to like figuring out how to stop this thing from killing a million more people. Absolutely. I mean, the main goal, I mean, people ask me, you know, how do you tolerate that? What you need to do, Jordan, is you need to focus like a laser beam on what your purpose is and what your goal is. And if your purpose is to preserve and protect the health of the American public,

then stick with that goal. And if something conflicts with that, then you're going to have to push back on it. And that's exactly what I did when I was saying that these matters. magical elixirs don't work. You've had a complete-ish loss of privacy since COVID, and that it seems like that's not likely to stop. I mean, I know you're at Georgetown now, so maybe it will slow down a little bit. I wonder how you adapted to that over the past few years, because, of course, it's not always good, right?

For every standing ovation at a restaurant, you got people who want to kill you with anthrax, real or fake. No, I think I don't think the numbers are correct. I think there are many, many, many more people who want to applaud you and thank you for helping save them and their families and their mothers. It's the people who are against you are very loud and very persistent. And it sounds like there are a lot of them, but they're very, very loud and persistent. But getting to your original point, it's even worse than you think, because both myself and my wife and my children, we're very private people. You know,

I don't really like all the attention at all. It's there. You know, it's nice when people accomplish complementing you and thanking you for saving them and their families. But I much would rather be a private person. And you're absolutely right. Your privacy is completely destroyed because, you know, wherever you go, people recognize you. Almost invariably, they're complimentary to you. But every once in a while you get somebody who just blasts off about why your, you know, vaccines are killing people and you're killing people with vaccines and things like that. That's not pleasant, but you just have to accept that's part of it. I know with AIDS, a lot of people, like we discussed earlier,

were sort of against your, you know, you're evil standing up, heckling you. But there was no internet, there was no social media back then. Do you think that's been kind of the big driver of this? Oh, absolutely, absolutely. You know, what you can do is that if you get 10 people who love you and one person who doesn't like you, that person isn't heard by very many people. But when that person amplifies their effect in social media and sending things on the internet and likes and non-likes and things like that, before you know it, the impact and the damage

that one troll person can do is enormous. And it looks like it's much bigger than it is. And you get this impression, wow, look at all that chatter on the end. People like clickbait. People are not going to click on something that is, oh, you. you know, we had an interesting time and people said hi to Dr. Fauci and said thank you. Yeah. But when somebody threatens to kill you, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click.

That's what happens. And that's the completely negative aspect that social media amplifies so many things that are negative. When it comes to COVID, what did some of the, I guess, so-called cooks get right? Did they get anything right? Even if they got it, broken clock is right twice a day style. Did they get anything? Did they happen to be right on anything? Oh, yeah. I mean, the fact that we were not perfect in what we did, we did the best we can for the purpose of saving lives. No response under such difficult circumstances is going to be perfect. And that's why you have lessons learned to reflect on what you've done. I think there were several things that I think we need to think about. Shutting down when you were having three to four to five thousand deaths per day was the right thing. to do. Our hospitals were getting overwhelmed. We had freezer trucks in front of hospitals because you couldn't accommodate all the bodies in the morgue. The real issue that we should examine now

as retrospective lessons learned is how long should we have kept the schools closed? I, for one, very early on, after a few months, said we should try as best as we can to us safely and quickly get the schools open. But yet you saw there were some schools that were closed for a year or more. And there were going to be deleterious collateral effects. So as you said, the people who complain, there was a kernel of truth in some of that. Also, the potential negative effect of mandating. I mean, you had a mandate in the beginning, but the idea when you mandate in a divisive society, that sometimes has the counter effect of people not wanting to do it. So we've got to re-examine the whole issue of mandates.

There was a positive aspect in that it saved lives, but we've got to look at what the negative aspect is and says, what was the balance between the positive and the negative aspect? There's no doubt it saved lives. There's no doubt. But we need to carefully look at what some of the negative consequences are. What happened early on with the mask guidance? I think that's sort of one of the reasons that people got tripped up and made a lot of folks suspicious.

It looked like it's really hard to get to what even happened because it looked kind of like flip-flopping in a way because it was confusing. You know, it certainly was confusing, Jordan, but it wasn't really flip-flopping because when you have a moving target and inflammation is evolving before your very eyes, the scientific process, which is a process to gather information, data, and evidence, and then make your decision based on that. In the very early months of the outbreak, what was not appreciated was that the virus was spread essentially by asymptomatic people, and that aerosol was important. And what we thought in the beginning was that, first of all, there was a shortage of masks. So to take masks away from the health care providers who really needed them, it was felt ultimately incorrectly that we didn't want to tell people they had to wear masks in January because the health care providers needed it. Number one.

Number two, there was no evidence that masks outside of the hospital setting were protective. And thirdly, there was this lack of appreciation that there was. were people who were spreading it asymptomatically. And so we said, you don't need to wear a mask. Very quickly, when it became clear that, A, masks do protect. B, there's no shortage of masks. And the virus is not just spread by people sneezing and coughing. It's spread merely by talking to somebody or singing. So that's when it became clear. Now, given the evidence we have now, weeks later, a month or two later, that's when we said, you've got to be wearing a mask in an indoor setting. That was interpreted by some people as flip-flopping. What it really was using the data

that we had in February and early March, which was different than the data that we had in January. Yeah, I think when things move so quickly, it's very hard to really, any sort of change in the, in direction seems like flip-flopping, especially if you are not following the real science, quote-unquote, every single day, which is your job, but for a lot of people, like, you know, me sitting here with my parents, it's like, well, wait a minute, didn't you say last month we shouldn't do this? Now we got to buy these and they're not available. And that was kind of scary, I think. And when people get scared, they make these emotional knee-jerk decisions in large numbers. And that was kind of a disaster. Yeah, there was one other thing about masking, Jordan,

that was also a problem, is that when the CDC finally said, we should all wear masks in an indoor setting, the president gets up and says, the CDC recommends you should wear a mask in an indoor setting. Me, I'm preferring not to wear a mask, which immediately politicized masking. And masking should not have been politicized. So if you wore a mask, you were interpreted as being anti-Trump. If you didn't wear a mask, you were interpreted as being pro-Trump. So the ridiculous situation of all where masking became a political statement. And we know that. You see people fighting with people who were wearing masks that don't come into my store with a mask or don't come into my store without a mask.

It became a political football, which is so ridiculous because mask is an intervention that is known to save lives. There's no doubt about that. Yeah, there was a lot of masking going. For example, in Asia, if you have a cold, it's kind of just one of those things where people with good manners will just pick up a mask and go, I got a stuffy nose. And so I'm going to wear this today on the subway or in the train, you know, at work. There was kind of a culture of doing that when you're not feeling well. So they didn't have this same issue.

And, of course, they weren't maybe as tuned into the day-to-day drama that we have here in the United States. I know during COVID people thought you were the one making the policies. And I guess I admit I was probably one of those people, but you're just more of a communicator of those policies. Is that correct? So the history prior to COVID is that I had been communicating to the American public for decades, on HIV-AIDS, on pandemic flu, on Zika and on Ebola. I was the constant because other directors of CDC or directors of FDA or other government people, they came and they went. They came and they went.

I was there for a half a century and the director for 40 years. So the natural thing is that when you wanted to articulate to the American public, what one should or should not do, I became the voice of and the communicator of these policies. And as you said, immediately everyone incorrectly thought that I alone made these policies. And you could see it from the responses from some of the congressional figures, where they would put me before a committee and say, when are you going to give us our freedom back? Like me? I mean, when did I take away your freedom? You know, I was just communicating what the policy of the CDC and what the policy of the coronavirus task force was. I wasn't making that policy in a vacuum. It seems like from everything that I looked at, and there's obviously a metric ton of information on this. In 2020, we just didn't have sufficient evidence to see where COVID-19 could have come from,

just weren't sure. But unless I misunderstood you, it sounded like, in the congressional hearing, it sounded like you suggested it would have a natural, or sorry, you were restating this in the congressional hearing. But back then, it sounded like you suggested it would have a natural origin. And that was the thing, right? The bat at the wet market and yada yada. Why not back then just say, hey, we don't know, especially once China started to block international investigations and look like they were kind of covering things up. To some people, they probably think you put your finger on the scale towards this not being a lab leak. No, I mean, I mean, if you really listen carefully, I've always had an open mind. Yeah. But I've said it is more likely,

because there's no evidence at all that does a lab leak. It's just circumstance. There's no concrete evidence. Does that mean it didn't happen? Oh, of course not. We don't know what it is, and that's why we keep an open mind. But when you look at what the evolutionary virologists, not just people in the United States who worked for the government, people from Australia, from the UK, from the European Union, from Canada looked at it carefully and said with an open mind that it isn't definitive, so we keep an open mind, but we think the actual virological, geospatial, and epidemiological data strongly suggests but don't prove that it's a natural occurrence. But having said that, since it isn't proven, you have to keep an open mind that it could be one or the other.

So is there potential possibility that gain of function research at the Wuhan lab is to blame for COVID-19? That's the question everybody keeps asking you. Yeah, but that's because, you know, gain of function is a meaningless term. Okay. You know, what do you mean by gain of function? Tell us what it is. I think a lot of people to know. Yeah, I mean, because gain of function is a generic term that doesn't tell you anything.

I mean, you make a vaccine for influenza. You use gain of function. You get the virus to grow better in eggs. You make insulin from recombinant DNA technology. That's gain of function of an E. coli that's spitting out insulin. It's when something is done that has the capability of enhancing the potential of a pandemic pathogen to spread more readily and to cause more harm. Now, that could have been done somewhere in China.

But the place that it wasn't done was in the lab that the NIH indirectly funded through an indirect grant to a New York firm, because when you look at the viruses that was studied under that grant, they were the word phylogenetically, which really means precursor-wise, was so different than what SARS-CoV-2 turned out that no matter what you did to those viruses, they would not have become SARS-CoV-2. But yet in the beginning, people said, well, the NIH was funding a small grant, $120,000 a year in China, that's the lab that the virus came from. With absolutely zero proof of that, it was just stated that that was the case. So I know I'm going to sound like somebody at the congressional hearing, and I'm trying

to rephrase the question in real time, but here we go, do you support an investigation into the lab leak theory, or is it kind of a waste of time at this point? No, no, no, no. I think you've got to keep both possibilities open. Absolutely. Absolutely. I mean, we have good data about not definitive, but good data that it likely was a natural occurrence. The only way you're going to find out about LabLeague is you've got to have open transparency with the Chinese. And given the degree of hostility and confrontation that we have right now, I'm not sure that we'll ever get that kind of cooperation. Yeah, I think, again, I'm paraphrasing. You said something like, even when they're not hiding anything, they've not been that forthcoming. Oh, absolutely. Yeah. I mean, it's a whole idea of saving face. I mean, for example, when COVID became apparent, they went into the market and got rid of all of the illegal animals that were not supposed to be there. That gives you a big clue. Yeah. You know, as to, wait a minute, hold on here, folks. Why did you do that? And even, you know, if you go back to 2002 and 2003, when the first

SARS became available. We were aware of it in the Qongdong province of China. They were saying it's just an unusual flu because they didn't want the embarrassment of a brand new pathogen coming from their country. Right. Which, you know, there's nothing to be embarrassed. That happens just the way the 2009 swine flu came from an area in the border between Mexico and California. Those things happen. But in order to essentially shy away from that, they were denying that it was a new virus until it got to Hong Kong and then it spread through the rest of the world. But that's just the way they are. They're very secretive about things. Yeah. Do you see the Chinese Communist Party as a danger when it comes to pandemic precautions and international cooperation? You know, I can't comment on that because I don't know what they are doing or what they're not doing. So it would be difficult to me. I mean, what you use the word Chinese communist. I mean, obviously,

that's a negative thing, you know, Chinese communist. We're not exactly strong allies of that kind of ideology. I just don't know what's going on with them. And that's why I say, keep an open mind, because I don't have any idea what's going on in other labs in China. So that's the reason why you've got to keep all possibilities open. What do you make of the World Health Organization seemingly in the beginning, at least not putting much pressure on Beijing to come clean about to cooperate with a real investigation. Does that concern you? Well, you know, anytime there's lack of cooperation in a transparent way, that bothers me. I mean, I'm not so sure what WHO could have done. You know, WHA is not a very powerful organization. You know, they're at the

mercy of the member states. So it isn't as if they have any direct authority. Certainly, we would have loved for them to have put more pressure, but I'm not sure that we're not sure that would have made any difference. All right, time for a quick word from our sponsors, the spike protein of capitalism. We'll be right back. If you like this episode of the show, I invite you to do what other smart and considerate listeners do, which is take a moment and support the amazing sponsors that keep the lights on around here. All the deals, discount codes, and ways to support the show are searchable and clickable over at Jordan Harbinger.com slash deals. And if you can't remember the name of a sponsor, you can't find a code. You're not sure if it exists. Shoot me an email, Jordan at Jordan Harbinger.com.

I am happy to surface that code for you. It is that important. important that you support those who support the show. Now for the rest of my conversation with Dr. Fauci. There's a fellow by the name of Peter Daschik, and he sort of smokescreened, in my opinion, the world by, first of all, he immediately dismissed the lab leak and then sort of says, hey, the virus didn't even start in China. It seems like, were we just supposed to take that guy's word for it, despite the surmounting evidence and research and the World Health Organization got stifled for like a year before a proper investigation? I don't know. Are you familiar with that, this guy? Yeah, I mean, obviously, he got himself into some trouble by things that were perceived

or really a conflict of interest in some of the things that he said. And he has gotten himself into some serious difficulty, as you know, his institution and himself had been debarred from NIH funding. Yeah, it's, anyway, do you ever think we will find the source of this virus, given the environment and the time elapsed since its origin? I don't know much about how you investigate these things, but it seems like it's long gone. You know, I don't know. We would hope that if it's an natural occurrence, we'll be able to figure that out. You know, it wasn't until more than 10, 15 years after the discovery of HIV did we find out that it actually originated in a chimpanzee. So it's not unusual not to find the origin for years and years, years later. One of the things that

is going to essentially mitigate against that is the fact that the Chinese went in right away and cleaned out that market. So maybe the evidence that was there, if it was there, if it was there, is gone now. Would you say that COVID was the most challenging time of your career, or do you think it was the AIDS thing? I know there's a recency bias, but I'm curious what you think. You know, I think in some ways you can compare and others you can. So when you say challenging, you know, from a public health standpoint to have 1.2 million people in the United States die is tragic. But in HIV AIDS, I was personally. every day taking care of desperately ill people.

Yeah. For years, watching them die. And, you know, as I described in the book, probably getting accumulation of post-traumatic stress from trying to do a good job, caring for your patients. At the same time, it feels like you're putting just a Band-Aid on the hemorrhage

instead of actually stopping the hemorrhage. That was personally very painful for me, so. Yeah, I was looking for headshots. was looking for headshots for you for this episode where we have our artist draw you afterwards. And some of the, they were like, you want us to use this one? And there was one where you're about my age. And you're checking out this guy who's an AIDS patient. And he, it just looks like you're handling an African child who's emaciated and malnourished, except it's a grown man. It's really kind of terrifying. Yeah. There were hundreds of those, Joe.

I mean, that's just one. Yeah. Being literally hands-on with. that would just be quite terrifying. What do you think you would have done differently with respect to COVID, just knowing what you know now with the benefit of hindsight? Well, I just mentioned the few of them. I mean, you know, if I knew in the beginning what I know now, there would have been much more of an emphasis right from the get-go about masks. I'm not so sure it would have been accepted because I say, yes, we would have done it in January. Could you imagine if we had said when there were two or three patients that have died and maybe 20 that were infected, that by the way, we want everybody to wear a mask. I mean, they would have looked at us like we were crazy.

Yeah. But that's something that we probably would have done earlier. And then also to re-examine the amount of restrictions we put on, not only the amount, but the duration of the restrictions, I think that would have been done differently. What keeps you up at night knowing that a pandemic, especially a respiratory pandemic like this, is happening or was happening? Just because COVID, well, I guess we're technically still in one. It's just not as sort of urgent, but it doesn't mean the next one won't be a month from now.

Well, you know, Jordan, it's interesting because let's go from the beginning and go backwards before COVID. For literally decades, people, journalists, radio hosts like yourself, a number of people would be asking, Dr. Fauci, what keeps you up at night? What's your worst nightmare? Yeah. And I'm on record for saying this hundreds of times. What keeps me up at night is the emeritus. of a brand new virus likely from an animal reservoir that's respiratory born, that is high degree

of efficiency of transmissibility, and has a degree of morbidity and mortality that can have a major impact on civilization. And sure enough, COVID was the answer to my nightmare and my worst possible nightmare. Now, you're asking me, what keeps me up night now? It's the same thing. It's another respiratory-borne outbreak that's highly transmissible and that has a degree of morbidity and mortality that can be very, very disruptive and painful. Because when you're talking about pandemics, it's got to be something that easily is spread from person to person. And the easiest way to do that is through the respiratory route. I don't know when that next pandemic is going to occur, whether it's going to be two years from now or 50 years from now.

that's one of the real dicey elements of preparedness, because you've got to be perpetually prepared for something that you have no idea when it's going to occur. And that's a pretty high bar to ask people to be constantly on edge for something that might not happen in your lifetime. How prepared are we then for the next pandemic, in your opinion? I think we're better prepared now, because there have been some lessons learned. than we were with COVID. I think scientifically we're quite well prepared. I think we still have a way to go to tighten up that public health system and get it to be

less fragmented. So I think we have a ways to go in the arena of public health, but I think we're doing quite well in scientific preparedness. I know some people, I was looking at this and it was almost comical. People were saying, oh, well, Fauci colluded with Mark Zuckerberg on Facebook to censor speech. related to COVID, and there were some emails or something that were redacted in the pile that we saw in this FOIA, this Freedom of Information Act request. I don't know if this is something you're even able to say, but what's redacted there? Because I know the stuff is that,

that redaction is out of your hands. And people focus on that like, oh, it must be something super bad if it's blacked out. You know, Jordan, it's ludicrous. Yeah. Because what the email was essentially Mark saying, how about I have you on a podcast and see if we could help encourage people to protect themselves by getting vaccinated and doing things that they can to intervene and protect themselves in their family. It was pure altruistic. Somebody somewhere started redacting things like email addresses and words that were harmless words. So all of a sudden, that got construed in a fantastical way that I was trying to influence social media. to say things that I wanted them to say, which was, you know, if it wasn't so stupid, it would be funny.

But that's the source of this trying to influence social media. Yeah, I think that's kind of how it comes across when you look at it and look at the context. It was just very curious about that because I would normally not ask somebody what's redacted because it's redacted. However, it didn't really seem like important things were actually could possibly have been redacted. made no sense. I know. And that I think, you know, and I've said this to the Congress, I mean, I think that in some respects the government is their own worst enemy. When they redact things that are harmless, you immediately incite suspicion that you're redacting something

that is incriminating when it's like a silly word. Right. It's like, I'm going to meet you at blank and we're going to handle the blank. And what it is is like pizza shop and lunch. Yeah. And it's like, just leave it in there. You're making us look terrible. You have no idea. I don't want people to know where we eat lunch. Yeah, it really comes across. There's a whole world of possibilities.

And at some point, the American public is just assuming the worst. Well, large numbers of us are assuming the worst. And it's just like it turns into some sort of television drama. Indeed. I mean, it is fuel for conspiracies. So this isn't really your problem anymore, I suppose. But it seems like we're always a few dairy workers or farm workers, away from another pandemic. And by the way, I'm not blaming dairy workers or farm workers.

Those people work their butts off. I'm just saying they're on the front lines of this and they're working with animals all the time. So is this kind of just media hype or should we be doing more to make sure we're not incubating the next pandemic and at some dairy farm in the U.S.? You know, Jordan, it's my opinion as an outsider person now that we really need to be testing the farm workers more for asymptomatic infection and find out the extent of spread. It's understandable why they don't want to be because the farm owners, the dairy cow farm owners, don't want the federal government coming in, telling them what their business should be. But there comes a time when what happens on the farm could impact what happens in the rest of the

country. So they're leaning now towards giving them resources to do the kind of testing themselves, maybe in an anonymous way so that you don't, because many of those workers, you know, are fearful that they're undocumented and they're going to wind up, you know, getting into trouble. Oh, yeah. If somehow they get identified. And that's one of the reasons they don't want to be tested. So we've got to figure out a way to alleviate fears and concerns, but get the appropriate public health information that we need.

Yeah, I hadn't really thought about that. I'm looking at H5N1, that's kind of the thing that I'm worried about coming down the pipeline. Can you tell us a little bit about that? Because I honestly don't know much about H5N1 or why it's dangerous. Yeah, H5N1 is an influenza virus, influenza A. It infects chickens and is highly pathogenic to chickens. You know, it goes back to 1997 when the first H5N1 was in Hong Kong and they had a call every single chicken in Hong Kong to get rid of it.

Then it came back, you know, in 2003 and 2013, et cetera, it just keeps on coming back. The somewhat alarming aspect of it is that it has maybe there been 900 cases in individuals, humans, over a couple of decades. So it's really very unusual for it to jump species. I don't know what the number is 900 or 90. I'm not quite sure. But there's a number of cases that jump species from a chicken to a human. It doesn't spread at all, or it's certainly not efficiently, from human to human.

But when a human is infected, the mortality is close to 50%. Oh, wow. So that's scary. Yeah. So right now, H5N1 has gone and infected another species. Interestingly, dairy cows. It makes them ill temporarily with a mild illness, decreases the production of milk, and then the cows apparently recover, but farm workers spread it among the cows and back and forth.

So what the concern is that if it keeps spreading in that circuit between farm workers and cattle and cats on the farm and chickens on the farm, that sooner or later it's going to mutate to be able to efficiently go from human to human and at a high mortality. That's what the concern is. Yeah, that is scary. And we don't have a vaccine for that or there's no reason to make one yet or what? No, we do, but we only have about 150,000 doses, but we have the capability of getting 150 million in about six months. So, you know, this dates back when I was the director of the Institute, we made a stockpile of H5N1 vaccine that's still available. It isn't perfectly matched to the current virus, but enough to have some cross-reactivity. right now there's over 100,000 doses that we could use right now.

If you were running things, is it a good idea to vaccinate those farm workers with supply of vaccines? Or how does it work? Well, that, you know, Jordan, that's a good question. That gets to the point of why I think it's important to do widespread testing of them. Yeah. Because if it's spreading beneath the radar screen, then you might want to vaccinate them. If it's only three out of, you know, a thousand farm workers who've gotten a wild illness, you might say, well, maybe it's not necessary to do it. That's why it's very important to do zero surveillance, to get a handle around to what the extent of the spread is, not only among the cows, but among the dairy workers. Surveillance. That's something Americans love. Yeah, you got all the buzzwords today. Yeah. And of course, that means testing farm workers and people who are close to the animals, just

for people who are busy writing me an email. One thing I've heard from credible sources is that you've been offered jobs in pharma, private equity, I think, to earn something like 30 times your salary at the CDC. But you never took those jobs, even though you've probably had those offers for decades. Why? Well, for what I was doing for that half a century that I was at the NIH, and for the almost 40 years that I was the director of the institute was something that I think is priceless, Jordan, and that is getting involved in being the leader of a great group of people. You don't do it alone. You're just leading a team that did things developing life-saving drugs for HIV, to put the PEPFAR program together, to develop vaccines for RSV, to be part of the team that developed a life-saving

vaccine for COVID. I mean, to me, the gratification that you get out of saving essentially millions of lives and being part of the team, that's worth any kind of millions of dollars of salary doing something else. So I would take a government salary any day and have the experience that I experience rather than making $5 million a year doing something that's good, but not at the level of gratification that you get when you're saving people's lives. It sounds like having that meaning is very important to you. It's one of your core values from the outside looking in. Absolutely. Absolutely. What do you want your legacy to be in so much as you actually have a choice in the matter? Well, I like the way you put that. Others will decide my legacy whether or not what I did was

valued to humanity. I think it was, but let others judge that. What I want to be remembered for is that in the 54 years that I was doing this, that every single day, without exception, I gave it 110 percent. And I always left it all out on the court. And if you remember me for that, I'm fine. The legacy issue, fine. Let others figure that one out. Are you ever going to retire?

I mean, you said you're a young 83, but now you're what, a professor at Georgetown? Well, I don't know. I'm still energetic. Thank goodness. Yeah. I'm healthy. I'm still passionate about. teaching and about public health. And I just love being in the atmosphere of students on the

Georgetown University campus. It's just an experience I had not had before, because at the NIH, you're surrounded by physicians, scientists, and specialists, and people with multiple levels of degrees. But when you go to a university, you're dealing with 18, 19, 20, 21, 22-year-old people who have fresh ideas, thought-provoking, sometimes naive, sometimes off-base, but always exciting. I really like that. Yeah, I suppose that keeps you young, although it would make me feel old when someone says, yeah, I remember seeing you on TV when I was 13, and now they're in a class that you're teaching. Yep.

What do you think of being played by Brad Pitt on Saturday Night Live? I bet you never saw that coming. Oh, no, not even close. That was kind of funny. I've always been a great admirer of his acting capability, and the fact that he portrayed me was really sort of like, boy, this is really getting surreal here. Yeah, yeah, I bet. Before you go, there's an interesting leadership principle you talk about in your book where when you joined NIAID,

you said, I refuse to make any big sweeping changes until I really understand the organization. And I think a lot of leaders, they join an organization, and then they make big changes just to show like, hey, I'm in charge, I'm new here. I got to move some stuff around and put my imprint on this place so everybody knows what's what. You didn't do that. No, I think that's a really bad idea.

I mean, if you want to make meaningful changes and have the institution reflect your vision, you've got to really understand the institution. So for the first six months or more of my tenure, of that almost 40-year tenure, I got to learn every single aspect of the institution. every division, every program, every lab, every branch, travel around the country to our grantees to understand the granting process. And then once I really got my arms around it, then I started to figure out ways that we can do it better.

But I just felt very strong me to just parachute in there and say, okay, we're going to change this, this and that. I think that would have been presumptuous and likely, instead of being value added, it could be actually disresolved. destructive. Dr. Fauci, thank you so much for your time today. And I look forward to seeing you at the next Illuminati meeting. That's what everybody thinks when I talk to people of your stature. So might as well, might as well turn it into a run. All right, Jordan. Thanks an awful lot. Really great being with you. Here's a preview with the 26th National Security Advisor, General H.R. McMaster on the greatest

threats to the United States. War is this continuous interaction of opposites, right? You and maybe multiple enemies and adversaries inside of a complex environment. You have to understand strategic empathy to try to view these complex competitions from the perspective of the other. Do you think our divisions domestically right now are one of the greatest threats to our national security? Absolutely, George. They are. And our adversaries are doing everything they can to exploit them. I mean, Russia is masterful at this. When we were attacked on 9-11, you know, Al-Qaeda didn't target Democrats or Republicans, right? They targeted Americans.

I think it's time to really demand real reforms, you know, and if teachers' unions are an obstacle, we've got to tell them, hey, you can't strike reform anymore. And we need to demand it. The fact that we're driven apart from each other based on these divisions in our society, what social media is doing to us by driving us apart with these algorithms to show you just more and more extreme information based on your predilections, the fact that, you know, if you're of one political persuasion,

you watch one TV network, and somebody have a different political persuasion, watches a different one. You're creating two different realities. We're doing this to ourselves, George. We've got to stop. You know, we've got to stop it. So let's think about it.

Let's work together to make our republic better every day. And there are some who don't want to do that. They think that, hey, you can't even empathize. You're not even allowed to empathize. It's a real tragedy. For more, including General H.R. McMaster's thoughts on immigration and climate change, Check out episode 410 on the Jordan Harbinger show. All right.

Wow, that's one for the bucket list, I suppose. Now, I know some of you are disappointed. I didn't jump down Dr. Fauci's throat about COVID and masking, but it is my policy on the show not to treat people like crap. So I do hold people to account where necessary. I hope we've threaded that needle here a little bit. Frankly, a lot of that has already been said before, and I wanted to try to do something new and interesting.

I do expect to hear a lot from people who hate Dr. Fauci, although I got to say I find it ironic that the people who are supposedly the biggest proponents of freedom or liberty on both sides are both sides are on both sides are both sides. I don't think it's the ones who get the most triggered by speech that they disagree with. And this is not just a left wing thing. It's not just a right wing thing. I hear from both sides. Y'all are insane. This is not a political show. I don't think it's political to say that anybody with two eyes could see that you all know where I stand on the science of public health. And it does seem dangerous to make it harder for public health officials to tell us important things because they might get attacked literally by crazy people. trying to mail them anthrax. So thank you to Dr. Fauci for doing the show. Unfortunately, we couldn't do it in person

because I'm a security risk, but I acknowledge that. I'm here for it. All things Dr. Fauci will be in the show notes at Jordan Harbinger.com. Advertisers, deals, discount codes, and ways to support the show, all at Jordan Harbinger.com slash deals.

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