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On Call: A Doctor’s Journey in Public Service by Dr Anthony Fauci: It sets the enormity of the pandemic against the gravity of previous crises

Fauci reports that June 3rd, 2020, was when he ‘first experience the brunt of the president’s rage’. Trump was, of course, in the concluding year of his first term

The former chief medical officer to the president of the United States has been widely championed while becoming a perma-villain for an entire wing of the Republican movement. Photograph: Jason Andrew/The New York Times

Keith Duggan's face
Keith Duggan
Tue Jun 18 2024 - 19:00

For a professional who has over five decades striving in contented obscurity as a health service public servant, Dr Anthony Fauci has, in recent years, generated an astonishing number of headlines, through little choice of his own.

The former chief medical officer to the president of the United States has been widely championed while becoming a perma-villain for an entire wing of the Republican movement. On Saturday, Republican firebrand Marjorie Taylor Greene told a conservative conference in Detroit that Fauci had, through his role in the Covid-19 pandemic, committed “crimes against humanity”.

“They attacked the very core of our freedoms, all for a virus that they made in a lab in Wuhan, China,” she claimed.

Warming to a familiar Maga chant – “Lock Him Up” – she told the gathering: “I can assure you, if I have anything to do with it, we will lock him up. That man belongs in prison.”

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The presidential message, Fauci says, was spiced up with several expletives. Photograph: Alan Betson

The publication on Tuesday of Fauci’s book On Call: A Doctor’s Journey in Public Service serves as the perfect response.

Advance reviews describe it as a sombre, restrained account that falls somewhere between memoir and treatise. But with the vague rumour of the threat of an avian-flu threat floating around the periphery of election-dominated headlines, Fauci’s personal account is a timely reminder of the societal viral threats through which he has been in charge.

He has served under seven presidents. Since his appointment as chief of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases in 1984, he has been responsible for the policy advice to which those administrations responded to the Aids epidemic, to swine flu, the Ebola crisis and the anthrax threat. But it was his role in Covid-19 that pushed him to the centre of the United States’s response and made him a household name around the world.

Although he has come under relentless attack from Donald Trump in the years since they worked together, Fauci’s reflections on working with the Republican former president are nuanced.

In his book, Fauci reports that June 3rd, 2020, was when he “first experience the brunt of the president’s rage”. Trump was, of course, in the concluding year of his first term then.

“He said he loved me, but the country was in trouble, and I was making it worse. He added that the stock market went up only 600 points in response to the positive phase one vaccine news, and it should have gone up 1,000 points, and so I cost the country ‘one trillion dollars’.”

The presidential message, Fauci says, was spiced up with several expletives. “I have a pretty thick skin,” he says in the book, “but getting yelled at by the president of the United States, no matter how much he tells you that he loves you, is not fun.”

Fauci notes that as the White House administration grew frostier towards him through the difficult summer of 2020, the extremity and frequency of right-wing attacks seemed to increase. That August, he was mailed an envelope containing a white powder which he immediately feared was anthrax. The scare necessitated an FBI investigation. The substance turned out to be harmless, but it was an indication of the menace under which he was operating.

And there is no question but that he has a thick skin. Fauci’s recent appearance at a House of Representatives select subcommittee on Capitol Hill, which marked the end of a 15-month investigation, illuminated the degree to which the 83-year-old has been at once lionised and vilified by both sides of the House.

He was forced to deny Republican suggestions that he had covered up the possibility that the Covid-19 virus had originated in a laboratory, denouncing the accusation as “false and simply preposterous.” He backed this position by reading aloud an email, from February 2020, in which he advised a colleague to report his suspicions of a laboratory leak to the FBI.

Fauci claims to have had a cordial and productive relationship with all of the presidents he worked under until number 45

Fauci was authoritative and even feisty in some of his exchanges with Republican politicians but as Taylor Greene’s outburst demonstrated, he did little to change the minds of those who see him as responsible for the coronavirus.

The book, however, sets the enormity of the pandemic against the gravity of previous crises, in particular the Aids epidemic, which ravaged primarily gay communities in the early 1980s, describing the shock of activists when he asked to meet groups protesting over governmental indifference.

Aids research funding expanded after his appointment in 1984 and in the book, he describes gathering global health leaders in an Italian restaurant in Bethesda, the Maryland suburb of Washington, to informally walk them through a White House meeting in which the programme to increase HIV treatment and prevention across the world was agreed.

He claims to have had a cordial and productive relationship with all of the presidents he worked under until number 45.

He had believed the New York background he and Trump shared would be beneficial to them both. Had the pandemic not occurred, it is possible the Trump term in office would have passed without incident.

But he does recall the details of a conversation he had after the president had signed an executive order on the distribution of flu vaccines. Trump told Fauci he had never had a flu shot and when asked why, the medic recalls that the president replied: “Well, I’ve never gotten the flu. Why did I need a flu shot?”

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