![]() They agreed to never meet with Fauci one-on-one, lest they be seduced. Activist Peter Staley says the group was wary about falling victim to what he calls the “Full Fauch”: being so charmed by Fauci that they would capitulate on their goals for changing the government’s AIDS response. (He died in 1997.) There were no effective HIV drugs at the time, and people with the virus were dying as they waited for the Food and Drug Administration to complete clinical trials that could lead to the approval of lifesaving medication. Hill was, unknown to the public, gay and HIV-positive. In 1989, he began meeting with activists at the home of his NIAID deputy, James Hill. There were many lessons gleaned during the AIDS crisis that would become invaluable to Fauci’s work. … If ever there was a disease that was made for me, it was this new disease.” There have since been 79 million cases of HIV worldwide. And sexually transmitted disease is going to spread globally, because if there’s anything that’s universal, it’s sex. ![]() It’s almost certainly sexually transmitted. “I was prescient enough to realize that it wasn’t going to just go away,” Fauci says. Mentors discouraged him from taking on what they felt was a niche disease contained to the population of gay men. This part of the story is famous: Three years before he became director of NIAID, Fauci read an article in a medical journal highlighting five cases of what we would later understand to be HIV, which became 26 cases. If Fauci had stayed in immunology, rather than switching to the splashier world of infectious disease, he says, his work “wouldn’t have been as much a global impact.” Then came AIDS. “Because you’re going to be so frustrated that you quit.” He was a rising star, but in a field where he was developing treatments for diseases that few people knew about. “If you expect it, you’re in the wrong business,” he says of those early successes. For the next few years, Fauci experienced something rare in medicine: eureka moment after eureka moment. “I look upon a pathogen, a virus, as an enemy.” There was the same comfort in the clarity of good and evil Fauci felt as a child when he saw films about Allied soldiers defeating the Axis powers.Īfter arriving in 1968 at the National Institutes of Health, the organization that encompasses NIAID, Fauci’s first triumph was discovering how to re-dose cancer drugs to turn a 98 percent mortality rate of the autoimmune inflammatory disease vasculitis into a 93 percent remission rate - an almost complete reversal of virulence. The field of infectious disease also carried a certain excitement. “It wasn’t like feeling uninhibitedly free.” For my mental health, I choose to believe the gathering of elders was the vector of infection.)Įven when momentarily straying from his duties, like walking with his wife, “it was always like I could never let it go completely,” Fauci says. (Several days later, he will test positive for the coronavirus, as will two others who also attended the reunion for the College of the Holy Cross’s class of 1962, which took place the same June weekend as the dedication of the school’s Anthony S. “No, it’s fine,” Fauci says with the resigned patience of a man who has dealt with many people who have made his life harder over the past few years. “I’m sorry I did that,” I say, uselessly. I manage to follow this guidance, but not to keep myself from extending my hand when I meet Fauci, which he shakes after one horrifying moment of hesitation. I would need to test negative three days in a row and wear a mask, even outdoors. So when I got covid two weeks before our interview, I obsessively parsed the guidelines from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention: As long as I waited 10 days after my first positive test, I could still meet Fauci in person, right? No, I was informed by Fauci, via a member of his communications team. I am also aware that it would be a moral crime to transmit the coronavirus to Fauci.
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