Did you travel by subway? My father went to Columbia, so I thought it may be a good idea to go to Columbia. So he was in New York, and I was in the studio down at wherever C-SPAN was North Capitol Street. Some of the things were off base they werent making any sense. The infectious disease expert and chief COVID-19 advisor to both Presidents Trump and Biden is the subject of a new . Im going to go to the beach. He helped tackle the AIDS, Zika, and Ebola. When you went there and learned that, that became part of your personality, that you were striving for excellence always. Could you tell us how that came to be? You know, amazing psychology of it; I mean its a lesson that in many respects is beautiful. Anthony Fauci: Its free. We understand your education, up until medical school, was entirely in Catholic schools. Because I would stay at work until 8:30, quarter to nine, get home I live in Northwest D.C., so it takes 15, 18 minutes to get to the NIH. Rather than insulating himself from his critics, Dr. Fauci opened his doors to the AIDS advocates and built personal relationships with many of them, including his harshest critic, Larry Kramer. Anthony Fauci: I was born and raised in Brooklyn, New York, in the Bensonhurst section of Brooklyn, at a time when there was a lot of community I wouldnt say segregation, but division where the neighborhood of Bensonhurst was almost exclusively an Italian-American neighborhood: people who were either born in Italy, and moved to New York, who then had children who then had children. I didnt clear it with the FDA. The thing you get concerned about is an outbreak of an infectious disease thats respiratory-borne, that has a high degree of morbidity and mortality, such as a pandemic influenza. Although President Reagan appeared reluctant to address the issue directly, Fauci built a strong relationship with Reagans vice president, George H. W. Bush. But I loved every aspect of medicine. So when I came to the NIH, I had a mentor named Sheldon Wolf, who was an amazing person in that he gave me, at a very young age, a group of patients to work with him and figure out how we can study them. Within 20 years of taking the reins of NIAID, Dr. Fauci had secured a thousandfold increase in the institutes funding. Dr. Fauci has received numerous prestigious awards for his work. So I decided that I was going to say, Hey, I made a lot of accomplishments here. New York City has some extraordinary schools. Dr. Anthony Fauci has announced that in December he will step down from his positions as chief medical adviser to President Joe Biden and as head of the National Institute of Allergy and. Back then it was very common for calling up the pharmacy or getting a prescription done, and you would deliver it to the house. If you all of a sudden vaccinated the whole country again, you would wind up given the unlikelihood that youre going to have a bioterror smallpox attack that would not allow you to then vaccinate around the people who were infected I think the weight of the waiting, getting a stockpile, is infinitely better than just feeling better about vaccinating everybody. These latter diseases were called vasculitis syndromes, and many were uniformly fatal. Tell us about Regis High School. Im going to go to the Copacabana. Be careful because hes very demanding. So she had heard that I was a very demanding person. So I really enjoyed that. So they were trying to figure out what this was, and they found out that theres an enzyme that no one had ever identified before. You had an interesting relationship with the first President Bush. He subsequently completed an internship and residency at The New York Hospital-Cornell Medical Center, New York, NY. Whos the boss here? And they said, Its this guy Fauci. He helped pioneer the field of human immunoregulation by making important basic scientific observations that underpin the current understanding of the regulation of the human immune response. So yes, it keeps me up at night that one of these days that might happen, and you really want to be prepared for it, and one of the ways to be prepared is for an investment in basic and clinical and translational research. Usually, at times like that, I dont even eat. 1996 - 2023 American AcademyofAchievement. You distinguished yourself from the beginning with some pioneering studies of the human immune system. Youre going to get home, youre going to eat, and youre going to do this, and then youre going to get up, and then youre going to do the next thing. You had to have a very organized life, which seems now, retrospectively, a little nuts for a young kid to have to do that, but it was great training. Anthony Fauci was born and raised in Brooklyn, New York and received his M.D. So you had to have been put forth as the representative of your elementary school. You need to elevate your legs. You need to do this and you need to do that. Anthony Stephen Fauci was born in Brooklyn, New York. Not rare but unusual diseases polyarteritis nodosa some of the other autoimmune diseases. Dr. Fauci was a key advisor to seven Presidents and their administrations on global HIV/AIDS issues, and on initiatives to bolster medical and public health preparedness against emerging infectious disease threats such as pandemic influenza and COVID-19. from Cornell University Medical College. And then, almost like a quirk of fate, I was duly trained as an immunologist, which now I had been doing immunology clinical immunology for a while. Also, today when a person takes anti-HIV drugs and brings down the level of virus in the body to below detectability by sensitive assays, the infected person cannot infect his or her uninfected sexual partner. What I did when I went there and retrospectively, it was a really good idea for what I do now in life and the kinds of things I have to deal with it was a pre-med course which had this strange, almost oxymoronic name of Bachelor of Arts Greek Classics Pre-med.. He has held both posts ever since. And then the directorship of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases opened up, in 1984, because the current director went down to become dean of the medical school at Emory. I think maybe Ive been fortunate. I think were doing better now. Back then when I was an intern, and a couple of years of residency, and then a chief residency we were on every other night and every other weekend. I really enjoyed that. One of those things is whats called a universal influenza vaccine. And thats where my mother and father grew up. So he listened to the data; he listened to the data. And that was, Were scientists. Theyre completely unanticipated, and you have to have the training and the insight and foresight to see that maybe this is an opportunity. I was very good at that at the time. What future prospects or threats keep you up at night? So we got the idea that, if we could somehow give a cancer drug at a low enough dose but monitor the immune function and the white cell function of the people enough to kind of titrate the dose, could you turn the disease off without any of the secondary complications? Anthony Fauci: I was. I remember when the NIH was invaded, as it were. Ill be a hero for 15 minutes, and thatll be the end of our access to the White House., So anyway, I became very good friends with the then-president, and he would come to the NIH multiple times. Anthony Fauci: Yes. Anthony Fauci: Right. I was fascinated by the intricacies of how the immune system was regulated. He streamlined the process for testing new drugs and successfully lobbied the Food and Drug Administration to make AIDS drugs more widely available. And he said, You know what we really need to do to gain attention? So when she heard that, she said, Oh my goodness, somehow he found out that I lied to him. It was the atmosphere of having around you an extraordinarily diverse group of kids who were picked purely on their academic ability. Wait a minute. In April 2020, an email from the director of the National Institute of Health, Francis Collins, nudged Dr Fauci with the subject line "conspiracy gains momentum". As we were getting ready junior and senior year our coach, who was a really great coach, would have the varsity, and I made the varsity in my sophomore year. And it happened that, in the National Cancer Institute which was two floors away from us in the old building where I would go up there all the time as the infectious diseases consultbecause they were getting immunosuppressed and they were getting infections. Government agencies were slow to respond to the crisis. I love Rick Atkinsons books on war. My mothers father and mother my grandmother on my mothers side was a dressmaker and a homemaker. We used to sit down in my deputys Capitol Hill townhouse, and we used to sit down and have a meal and talk about, How are we going to reconcile these things? Organizations are springing up, there are talks of emergency medical funds, infrastructure is being built in different places. Fauci's permanent pay raise was to . But to say that anybody who takes care of an Ebola patient automatically is quarantined, nobody would ever want to take care of an Ebola patient, and you would immediately drain the people who would be brave enough to go and do that. But balancing that, I surround myself with the very brightest people I could find because I dont want to necessarily be the smartest person in the room all the time. It was long days, and with basketball practice, particularly if you had to go up which we did often we used to go up and scrimmage in the Harlem Boys Club up on Lenox Avenue and 114th, 118th Street, go up to the Bronx and play. Despite calls for his replacement, Dr. Fauci stood his ground and remained in his post throughout the administration of President Donald Trump. He got it, and Scooter got it, and Carol got it. It was not in Brooklyn. What do you mean by that? Dr, Anthony Fauci, one of the top US experts on infectious disease, has led the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases since 1984. There was one figure who was sort of like the grandfather or the father of the activist movement, named Larry Kramer, who was a very well-known Academy Award-nominated screenwriter, a playwright, an author. He made many contributions to basic and clinical research on the pathogenesis and treatment of immune-mediated and infectious diseases. Sometimes you just cant Lets go home and have dinner! type, it doesnt work. But multiple media outlets quote the National Institutes of Health as saying . But the core thing that they wanted is that they wanted to be heard about designing something that wasnt so rigid. Why dont you go to Africa, look around, talk to people, see what you can do, and then come back with a plan.. But when you make it really clear that heres where were going, then in the middle of the anthrax attacks which, we didnt know whether the next attack was going to be something that would wipe us out I would say I spent more time in the White House in the Situation Room during that fall of 2001 because the anthrax came, remember, right after 9/11, that, those few months, that I literally lived in the White House and before congressional committees and on television, trying to calm the public. If youre lazy, youre sloppy, you dont pull your weight, youre going to have a problem with me. When Vice President George H. W. Bush was vice president, he was preparing to run for president, and he came and asked the NIH director who was Jim Wyngaarden at the time I really want to learn a little bit about HIV. And their motto is it was only men then it was Men for others. So what you do has to be guided by something that would be better for mankind. Your own wife has said that when she first got to NIH, you were away on a trip to China and shed heard all these horrible stories about how strict you were. He has never revealed a party. So it goes backwards. Let me worry about it. I think were starting to see that things are evolving at a global level, where you have the global health security agenda, where we get other countries to have enough surveillance and transparency and collaboration so that when there are outbreaks in different parts of the world, you dont start from scratch. Dr. Fauci continues to serve as Director of NIAID and as chief medical advisor to President Joseph Biden. Fauci continued his work through subsequent administrations, gradually gaining insight into the precise mechanisms of immune dysfunction in AIDS. There was a lot of push around from some Christian groups and others about What are we going to do for the developing world? So the president, in my discussions with him because by that time, now, we had been through anthrax together, we had been through H5-N1. Its called reverse transcriptase. Rather than shrinking from his critics, he met with them face to face. As the public face of science and the medical profession in addressing the pandemic, Dr. Fauci was subjected to severe criticism by those in the press and government who favored a less aggressive strategy in containing the spread of the infection. At a certain point in his life, his father, my grandfather who was, as I mentioned, from a financial standpoint, reasonably well helped finance him buying a pharmacy, which he did, and he owned the drugstore where we lived. They have different names now in New York, and I dont even know what they are. Anthony Fauci: When I came down to the NIH after my residency, in 1968, it was a period of time when we were just starting to get insight about the human immune system. Anthony Fauci: Its a combination of prioritization, and when you get a certain amount of experience, you know what you really do have to spend time on and things that you can just blow off. You die or you get better, that kind of thing. I mean he sometimes acts a little weird; hes got the passion that really does it. So thats why she thought I was this really bad guy, but I wasnt because if you were really good, and you did your job well, we were great. Then, as now, many cancers were treated with drugs that killed cancerous cells but also destroyed the bodys immune system because the required high doses of the drugs impaired the patients ability to respond to infections. We had maybe 85 percent, 90 percent priests in scholastics, and the scholastics were young Jesuits-in-training and a few lay teachers. Former NIAID Director. And just as a stroke of fate, I always had this nagging feeling about wanting to do something that is involved fundamentally in infectious diseases, that involved things that were broadly impacting globally. Im going to dance. And you talk to people now: Why would a pre-med want to do this? metaphysics, ethics, philosophical psychology, all those kinds of things that I still cant remember at all what it was all about back then. Youre going to do this on the way back. Thats Harolds subtle sense of humor saying an iron fist. What Harold meant was that, as the leader of the institute, I expect everybody to put 100 percent in. When Fauci took charge of NIAID, its annual budget was only $320 million. The Jesuits have a very wonderful way of being highly academic and intellectual about things, always asking you to question things, and always consider what it means more globally than just for yourself. wisconsin hockey team roster, can you have local anaesthetic when pregnant nhs,