Anthony Fauci, Then and Now

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The New Yorker

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4.3 • 3.9K Ratings

🗓️ 11 October 2020

⏱️ 13 minutes

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Summary

At the moment that Donald Trump was leaving Walter Reed Hospital, not yet recovered from a case of COVID-19, Dr. Anthony Fauci sat down with Michael Specter to discuss the coronavirus and its impact on America. For the President—and those of us counting on a vaccine to miraculously deliver us back to normalcy—Fauci offers a reality check. “Let’s say we have a vaccine and it’s seventy per cent effective. But only sixty per cent of the people [are likely to] get vaccinated. The vaccine will greatly help us, but it’s not going to eliminate mask-wearing, avoiding crowds, and things like that.” Specter, who covered Fauci’s work in public health during the AIDS crisis, asks him about his relationship with activists in the nineteen-eighties and today. “The [AIDS] activists never threatened us in a serious way, they wanted to gain our attention,” he says. “Their motivations were all pure.” Opponents of masks and lockdown, he believes, intend to do harm. “The threats that we get now are real. Threats on life, harassment of family. . . . That requires our needing security.”

Michael Specter’s audio biography “Fauci” is available from Pushkin.

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Transcript

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0:44.0	Things people love.
0:46.9	I'm Dorothy Wickenden.
0:48.9	On today's Politics and More podcast, the New Yorker's Michael Specter talks with Dr. Anthony Fauci. They'll discuss the
0:55.9	medical community's work to develop a vaccine for COVID-19 and how Dr. Fauci's experiences during
1:02.5	the HIV epidemic have informed his view of the coronavirus. Donald Trump's absolute disregard for scientific reality, whether it's the coronavirus or climate change, has been a signature of his presidency.
1:19.6	His open contempt for putting on a mask was a threat from the first to the countless Americans who choose to emulate him.
1:26.7	It endangered, in the end, the president's own life
1:29.7	and the lives of everyone around him. Last week, just as Trump was leaving Walter Reed Hospital
1:35.7	after a stay of three days, Dr. Anthony Fauci sat down for a conversation with the New Yorker's
1:41.6	Michael Specter. Fauci is the head of the National
1:44.5	Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, which is a branch of the NIH. And he's really the
1:50.1	most public voice in this country for medical reason. Michael is a longtime staff writer
1:55.9	with the New Yorker covering medicine and the sciences. They spoke on Monday. As we are speaking, the president of the United States is scheduled to leave the hospital any minute,
	...

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