'The biomedical research enterprise is under attack'
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Hi everyone, it's Meghna, and today we've got a special podcast-only drop for you featuring Dr. Anthony Fauci. Fauci spent a half century in public service at the National Institutes of Health and, of course, as a presidential advisor across multiple administrations, including as a COVID advisor for President Donald Trump and President Joe Biden.

In that time, Fauci was both celebrated as a clear-headed scientist who had to navigate the unpredictable behavior of a novel pandemic and a president. He was also hated and reviled by others for the advice he gave on vaccines, school closures, and lockdown. To this day, Fauci receives death threats.

He's written about that experience and about his efforts fighting the AIDS epidemic in a memoir called On Call, A Doctor's Journey in Public Service. Well, Dr. Fauci recently visited us here in Boston for the first WBUR Festival, a multi-day event featuring some of the most compelling thinkers in the country.

He sat down with me before a packed house to talk about everything from missteps he admits took place during the COVID lockdowns to what colleagues still at NIH are telling him about the Trump administration's total evisceration of scientific and health research in this country. And now you get to hear that conversation in full. I hope you enjoy it.

So, Dr. Fauci, we've had a chance several times to talk in the first couple of years of the COVID pandemic. Our conversations were me needling you about COVID policy. And then later on, after your book came out, we talked about sort of your life's journey. Today, I want to combine those two things because I'm seeking something specific from you. I feel like we are all in need of your wisdom, okay?

So let's sort of ease into that. And I would love to hear from you first. What was it about science or about medicine that in your younger years, or maybe in your earliest years, made you fall in love with it? Well, the arc of my career in science really did not start off, Magna, with my being a

consumed with the love of fundamental science. It was really started off from my childhood as well as my training. I went to Jesuit high schools in college and that was mostly a classical upbringing. Greek, Latin, Romance language, philosophy. So I was much more of a people type person. I wanted to

get involved in understanding humanity. When I got exposed to science, it was clear to me that that discovery and the fact that science is a mechanism to get to truth and understanding about things that are important

And that combination of the humanities together with science made me want to go into a scientific discipline in the form of a physician.

and a physician scientist. So it is a little bit of a different track where I came at it through the humanities and then took up the science as opposed to some young kid who really fell in love with science and then wanted to become a doctor. And the whole idea of science right now, as I know you're talking about a certain perspective that we're all having, is that science is a mechanism that

in my mind and in the mind of I think many people, of how you gather information, data and evidence ultimately to make the world a better place. If you're in the physical sciences, do you do things to understand the physical environment and make it a better place to live? If you're in the biological sciences like me,

as a physician and a scientist. It's to get evidence, data, and information to make the world a better place by addressing disease and trying to alleviate suffering and death. So the mechanism is all the same. It's what the ultimate goal is.

Whenever I talk to someone who's a brilliant scientific mind, I always think about my dad because he's a scientist too. And he used to tell me that the beauty of science and medicine is that it helps unlock one more little part of our human ignorance, right? It helps make sense of the world where it didn't before. With that skill set, how are you making sense of...

some of the things that are happening now. Well... I guess I don't need to say specifically what, right? Well, it...

Interesting and very relevant question. One of the things when you say now, what's happening now, and it's been going on for years, but very intensively over the past few years, is that we are now in an environment of what I call the normalization of untruths, where things that are patently untrue

are said and amplified by social media such that if you say something over and over again that's untrue, for a substantial portion of people,

who are not thinking critically, and I don't mean that in a pejorative way, but they're busy doing other things, so they're not thinking critically about every single bit of information that comes out, and they're very much steeped in the social media, which is not edited at all, that you wind up having things that are completely untrue,

being accepted as truth and reality by people. And that is permeating what we're seeing right now in our society. The issue regarding Meghna's question is that is antithetical to what science is. Because as I mentioned just a few moments ago, if science is a process to gather information, data, and evidence that is true, that are facts,

And when you do that, that's where you can come to whatever conclusion you come to. The thing that gets...

confusing is that science is a self-correcting process. So if you're dealing with a moving target where things change, you've got to look at the data that you have at a given moment and if you have to make a decision, a recommendation or a guideline, you base it on what you know now. If that information changes,

then the very nature of what science is compels you to use your information gathering to make a modification of guidelines, of recommendations. The people who are pushing the untruth in society say, "Look, look what science, they told you something in May, and then a year later, they told you something else." So it really becomes a discrediting of a process

that is really a pure process of self-correcting. Although, on the other hand, I do have a lot of sympathy. We'll put pandemic science aside for a second. I have a lot of sympathy for people who are like, last month there was a paper that says I shouldn't have wine once a day. This month, it's like wine is good for my heart. How do I know what to believe?

and and i i mean i don't mean to make light of it but i think this is something that the pandemic really revealed right is that our general popular understanding of this very process that you're talking about just isn't there and so when you know that that phrase of follow the science became popularized i think a good portion of americans

didn't understand that that meant follow the science as its understanding evolves, but follow the science to make final decisions. Right. Good. Was that a mistake then to popularize that phrase? Yeah, I know. I think in some respects it was because it was assuming or at least getting other people to assume

that the process is immutable and it isn't. There are certain facts that are immutable in the physical sciences. I say that when I'm trying to explain it in a probably overly simplified manner, is that in January of 2020, two plus two equal four. Now on May 31st of 2025, two plus two still equals four.

The coronavirus in January of 2020 and what we knew and understood about it then is much different than now. We had no concept that we would be dealing with the evolution of variants which would continue to evade immune responses. We had no idea at the time that the virus was spread unlike other respiratory diseases. 60% of the transmissions

or from people without any symptoms. That is very critical in your recommendations about wearing a mask, about physical distancing, about any of a number of things. So if you accept that you will act on what you know at a given time but keep a big open mind that this might change, then you really understand what the scientific process is.

But then we need to educate people at much younger ages for the scientific process is. That's a very good point. Our science education is not up to par with the economic level of our country. When you have other countries, even lower and middle income countries that have a better understanding of science literacy is something we... And again, people get it wrong because

That doesn't mean that if you don't understand that you're illiterate, that's wrong because that becomes pejorative. But we need to be able to get children in the educational process

to develop what we call critical thinking, to analyze things that not accept it purely on its face value. Because if people use critical thinking, then what you see getting spread on social media is the antithesis of critical thinking. You mentioned social media a couple of times. I have two questions on media in general. First of all,

And this still happens, right? Whenever you say anything, the Fauci straw man gets dragged around the stage of Fox News, etc., lit a fire, effigies, etc., metaphorically, I guess even sometimes literally. What has that been like for you? Not easy. It...

I have tried to, you know, I'm a pretty resilient person. So I... To say the least. I try to focus on what my fundamental goal is, was in the middle of the pandemic and to some extent is still now. I'm a physician and I'm a scientist and I'm interested and involved in public health.

That's me. That's my identity. So when I focus on that, my main purpose is to preserve and protect the health of the American public, both the individual patient that I see as a physician

And when I get involved in public health issues, the broader general population, which metaphorically speaking, is actually becomes your patient when you're a public health person. All that other stuff, as unpleasant as it is, you have to realize is just noise because if you...

focus on every time somebody gets up in Fox News and says, "I'm a murderer and I've created the virus and I made vaccines to make billions of dollars. So I made the virus so I can make a vaccine to make a billion dollars." I mean, that's what they actually say. So if you think about it, it's kind of ludicrous.

But if they say it enough times, there's enough people who think that. And then you get the threats by the people who listen to that and say, wow, that guy must be a really bad guy. So they start doing things like threatening you. Well, that's the part that has to be challenging. Yeah, well...

Okay, let me flip this on the... Let me turn this around then. Because, I mean, we could talk a lot and we will talk a little bit more about failures of the institution of government. And I want to be honest and say that I don't think the scientific establishment or the public health establishment was, you know...

batted a thousand through COVID, right? Mistakes were made. - Absolutely. - But I wanna actually get your very frank analysis of another institution that was vitally important. And that is the media.

Because in a pandemic, it's not just the spread of a virus, an actual virus that's of concern. It's, you know, how can the media either help or how is it detracting from the spread of good information? I've actually never asked you this. I'd love your assessment on how you think the media, which is a pretty big term, but did help.

You can take shots at On Point, too. No, actually, I'm going to give you my honest assessment, and the question gets asked by people who are in the media. So I'm going to immediately, for full transparency, saying my answer is not related to the fact that it's you. And that is...

that I think for the most part the media has done a very good job. But people need to understand the media is not a homogeneous entity. And that's the thing that I think gets

confused when people say media, you can't put everybody in the same bucket or in the same basket. When you have serious media that critically thinks and does their own fact checking and their own analysis, like yourself,

and that's true, and some of the other elements of the media, then the media does a really good job. They inform people, they give them proper information, they give them options about keeping an open mind, but there are some media that quite frankly are complete wackadoodles. And that's true. You read it...

And it's pure conspiracy theory. I mean, there's an element in some parts of the media that's pure, everything is a conspiracy. I mean, literally everything. I mean, I don't know how you could possibly function that way to think that everything is a conspiracy. But in general, bottom line is that the media in general that I've dealt with, you know, New York Times, Washington Post,

NPR, some of the cables, has, I think, done a good job. The more I talk to Dr. Fauci over the years, the more I've seen to understand where you get your resilience from, and a generous heart is definitely one of them.

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Let's shift gears a little bit and talk about NIH, right? Because you spent half a century there in service to not just science but the public health. While you were there, can you describe to me what the culture of NIH was? Well, the culture of it, I came to the NIH as a trainee, a fellow, after my medical residency.

in 1968 and I was there ever since I spent 54 years at the NIH and and the culture of NIH was one of

of inquiry analysis searching for the truth with the bottom line since it's the National Institutes of Health. It isn't a space organization or anything that has to do with the physical sciences. It's an organization in which research is directed at understanding, preventing, and treating disease.

And in the spirit of the science that Megara and I have just been talking about, it was open and the ability for the youngest person in my team of fellows or trainees to feel absolutely comfortable with

questioning me about a scientific fact. Because if I'm basing what I'm doing on truth and evidence, then anybody could question that in a collegial way to try to get down to what the fundamental facts are. So it was sort of a magical type of an intellectual academic atmosphere where a lot of people were working very hard and

In different subspecialties, everybody had the same goal. What can we do to further science to alleviate and prevent disease and premature death? And that just was an absolutely wonderful place to work. I'm going to presume you're still in touch with people who are at NIH. Oh, very much so, yeah. What are they telling you about what it's like now? Well, what has happened with NIH now is really unfortunate in that as part of...

the Doge effect that we all know about with Elon Musk there with his chainsaw, they have indiscriminately fired

a considerable number of people including some very productive scientists and even though when you ask them they say well no scientists have been fired that's total nonsense i could name several of them for you right now so and also they have pulled back on programs that we don't have any understanding of what strategy

or endgame there was to diminish programs like HIV vaccine research will now stop because there is the perception that there's no need for an HIV vaccine. You know, a disease...

that has killed about 40 million people worldwide, that infects about 1.3 million people worldwide, that infects about 30 to 40 million, 30 to 40,000 people in the United States every year. So I just don't understand what the rationale or what the strategy for that is. I don't understand why all foreign grants

are now being scrutinized and many of them are being cancelled when the work that we do not only is some of the most important soft power of making people appreciate the United States but it saves lives throughout the world including in our own country so right now the morale

at the NIH which was really over the moon when I was there. People just loved to come to work.

It's just gloomy. They feel intimidated. They feel threatened that anything they say that might disagree with certain people, they could literally get fired. And there are people that we're all aware of, my colleagues and I, who have spoken up and said, "Well, why are we doing that?" The next thing they knew, they get a notice saying, "Don't come to work tomorrow."

And that to me is so antithetical to what the spirit of what NIH was.

- Antithetical again is a very kind word. I mean, it sounds totalitarian, it's authoritarian. It's the destruction of a center of knowledge and authority that under normal times, a White House doesn't have control over. I mean, I feel like that's part of what's going on. We were talking about this earlier, the judiciary,

universities, scientific establishments. The thing that my colleagues at the NIH are pained and don't understand is there are certain things that the United States is unequivocally the best in the world at. And you take a few of these and look at what's happening. Biomedical research

And this is not in a bragging way because I'm talking about our country. I'm not talking about me personally. We are so far ahead of the rest of the world. If you look at the majority of Nobel Prizes in medicine, in medicine or physiology, go to the United States. That's not an accident. That's because of the profound amount of investment that we make in biomedical research.

So they're asking themselves, why are we deliberately trying to damage that particular effort when it is good for everybody? It's good economically. It's a tremendous economic driver. If you look at the drugs that have reached the market, virtually every one of them at some phase in their development has input scientifically from work that was done at NIH.

So the question that's ringing in everybody's mind is, what is the purpose of doing something that's actually degrading and damaging the NIH? And we can't figure that out. Because it may not be purposeful, right? I mean, it may not actually be the result of some kind of set of coherent thoughts. Right, right.

Well, because, I mean, I say this just like using pure logic, the example that you gave of the development of drugs and therapies that just about every American will rely on at least once, if not many times in their lives, has a connection somewhere to NIH. That fact alone, now I'm lecturing, I'm sorry, should be enough for any administration to realize that this is an important institution to preserve. But

But we have very good questions. I'm going to turn it over here to some of the audience questions, because you mentioned the cessation of funding for an HIV vaccine. So then there's that plus PEPFAR as well regarding the support for ending HIV/AIDS in Africa. And someone just asks, do you see a connection with the attack on PEPFAR as an attack on you and your work?

I don't think that the attack on PEPFAR and the implementation of PEPFAR, and I'll explain that in a second, is a direct attack on me. I had the privilege of being asked by President George W. Bush to put together the PEPFAR program 20 plus years ago. And I put together the program and I started off by proposing to the president

that we have a program in 15 countries, mostly in Southern Africa, and that we aim to spend $15 billion over five years to treat 2 million people, mostly in Southern Africa, to prevent 7 million infections, and to treat 10 million people, including AIDS orphans, to care for them. The president, to his great credit, put that in effect in 2003.

Fast forward 21 or two years and you look at the result of PEPFAR, it now involves 50 countries. It spent about $110 billion and it has directly been involved in saving over 25 million lives, which makes it...

makes it the most important public health and the most impactful public health endeavor for a single disease in the history of mankind. It saved lives. In addition, it was one of the most important soft power enterprises for admiration for us here in the United States. Because if you go to Africa, you go to South Africa, you go to Kenya, you go to Uganda,

When they hear you're from the United States, they say, "Oh, the PEPFAR program. Thank you very much for saving our village or for saving our life." So again, that's a long introduction to Meghna's question. Why would anybody want to degrade that?

And about 60% of the drugs that get to South Africa, not only South Africa, but Southern Africa, through PEPFAR come through USAID. And USAID has essentially been just decommissioned. I mean, it went from thousands of employees to less than 100 employees.

So I don't think it was directly because I was involved as the architect of PEPFAR. I think it had to do with this feeling that

We're going to worry about America only and not anything outside of our borders, which is the reason why, in addition to PEPFAR being hurt, at the NIH, grants that go to foreign countries have now, many of them have been discontinued because of the feeling that we want to keep things in the United States. What I just think is very short-sighted, both from the standpoint of

of what we can do as a nation

to help, and President Bush said it, some people don't believe it today, that I believe we do have a moral obligation as a rich country to help countries who are faced with a disease that is threatening their life and their livelihood, that if you have a preventable and treatable disease, they shouldn't have to suffer merely because of where they were born. And I think that's why the United States has been such a great country.

And also out of sheer self-interest, diseases don't honor national borders anyway, right? Okay, so we have actually some follow-up questions to the culture of fear that you described within NIH right now. Someone asked, that sounds like terrorism, or at least a form of terror. What would you say to that? Well, it's a form of severe intimidation. I would know if you, like, terror has other things, but it's intimidating scientists. They're

Never was in the half century I was there, was anyone afraid to say something because they thought they might lose their job if they said something.

That is very severe intimidation, I think. So here's another one. To what extent do you see the resemblance of the purported idea of nationalist American science to that of Germany or Imperial Japan during World War II? Well, yikes.

We're blending the humanities and science. No, I mean, I just, I think there are things that are troubling. And it isn't me seeing this. It's obvious to everyone. You see the universities are under attack. The biomedical research enterprise is under attack. The law firms are under attack. The press is under attack. That can't be good for us. Let me just stop there.

What would you say to foreign scientists who are now looking at the USA in a different light? Do you think the United States will still be a good place to do science? I hope so. But if you look, I mean, if I put myself in the shoes of a brilliant, or maybe even not necessarily so brilliant, but a committed foreign trainee scientist...

who wants to come to the United States and do with so many of that foreign person's family, friends and colleagues have done over years is to come to the United States, train at a university in the United States,

and then make a contribution to our own culture by the extraordinary enrichment that occurs when you get input from so many different sources. If you look at

Harvard University right here in Boston, you know 27% of their student body is foreigners. That is a very rich source of positive input and enrichment of our own society. So the idea of

threatening them to either go to a different university or go back to their country. If I were a foreign scientist now thinking about coming to the United States, I certainly would have pause to worry about what the stability of that decision would be and whether it would endanger me to make an investment to come over and then find out that I might get sent back to my own country.

The thing that's also on the other side of the coin is that American scientists now who are seeing the assault on some of the research support for the NIH, the proposal for the budget is to decrease the NIH budget from $47 billion a year to $27 billion a year. That would be catastrophic.

for the biomedical research enterprise. So if I were a United States American budding scientist and decided I want to go into science, should I do it? I might say I'm not so sure that's what I want to do because of the

of the impending instability of the field. So it's almost a double whammy against science. If you're a foreign scientist, you might be hesitant to come here because of the threats on foreign scientists. And if you're an American who might want to go into science, you might say, is this the career that I really want to take? Yeah, I want to hold that thought in my mind because I want to come back to that in a second here. But...

Let me ask you, there's a feeling in terms of university admissions or perhaps even more broadly when we're thinking about foreign scholars coming to the United States,

One of the justifications for reducing that, that's come from the administration, is it's kind of describing the world as a zero-sum game, right? That foreign students are taking the place of American students or foreign scholars similarly. That there's Americans who can do that and who haven't been given the chance because of international folks coming to the United States. Is that how it works? No.

No. I know, it's like a softball, but... No, I mean, it's very simple. Let me rephrase. How would you describe how it works for someone who believes that it is a zero-sum game? No, that isn't true. The opportunities right now, I actually...

I'm trying to think of instances where I've heard of someone who didn't get into an institution. You may not get into institution of your choice.

And if you don't, and you see a lot of foreigners, they say, "Ah, I didn't get in because they gave it to a foreigner." But drop back a bit and look at the broad chance of your getting a really solid education in the United States. The fact that we have foreign students

in the United States is not an impediment to your getting a good education somewhere. It may not be in the school of your choice, but the school of your choice may have no foreigners in it and you still don't get in. So, I mean, I don't think you want to blame it on the fact that there are foreigners in the school. I think that's a false narrative. We have a lot of questions about trust.

And I'll sort of put them all together here about how can scientists, the medical community, what needs to be done to help rebuild trust in science in this country? That's a great question. And I think you have to start off with the premise that particularly in a very stressful time,

involving life and death that all of us have faced, particularly in the first couple of years of the COVID pandemic, that the public health and the scientific community didn't get everything right. And I would have been really surprised if they did get everything, if we did get everything right, because it was such a perplexing moving target that the one thing I can say

and speak for my colleagues as well as myself, we all tried our very best based on the information that we had. Now, I think we can regain trust by continuing to be humble enough

to admit that in fact we didn't do everything perfectly, but we are trying to do as best as we can. And I know that sometimes is a difficult thing to convince people of, particularly if they have a very firm preconceived notion that they don't trust scientists. The other thing that we can do, and I think that

We tried to do it during the early years of the pandemic, but we weren't as successful as I wish we could have been. And that is when you communicate science to try not to be

come across as being absolute and saying this is definitely the way it is, particularly if you know you're dealing with a moving target. You know, I tried to do that very early on in the outbreak, but the people who wanted to do the gotcha are easily able to distort words.

And I go back and look at YouTube of things I've said, you know, and someone asks you in the first week of or the second week of knowing that there was a case of COVID. Remember in Washington state, the first case was in Washington state. So we had two or three people in the country. And I remember a reporter asked me,

He said, should we be telling the American public, the man and woman in the street, to do anything different right now? And my answer was, no, I would think that right now, what would you want to do different? I wouldn't do anything different. Semicolon, however, comma, this could change and we might wind up in the middle of a pandemic. So we need to be prepared for it.

What happens is when people go back and say, ah, but you told us in January we shouldn't be worried about that. Why should we believe you now when you say wear a mask or get vaccinated? That's the definition of a gotcha, you know, because it just is distorting. So having said that, what we really need to do is try harder, we being the scientific and public health community,

to emphasize that semicolon, however, comma. Because when you're dealing with a moving target, you've got to let your audience know that you're giving them the information to the best of your ability of what you have now.

based on the data and the evidence. And this actually not only might change, it likely will change when you're dealing with a moving target. We just need to do that better. And we didn't do a very good job of that. - Well, I mean, the distortion machine will try to distort it no matter how you say it, right? That's just gonna happen 'cause that's the nature of the weird multifaceted media we have now. But I also kind of know a little bit about how it works and let me make a suggestion.

to anyone who's going to have a microphone put in front of them. If your true core message is based on what we know now, you start with that. Because I think what you just described, though, is exactly part of the reason why those snippets were the ones that accelerated through social media. Because it's just like, ah, we got that one sentence. But I mean, as a scientist, if you say...

The reporter might get bored, but that's their problem. If you say science is a moving target, we're gathering data every single day based on what we know now,

people, you know, might be okay, but that will change. You put it right in the middle, then they're going to have to work a little harder to get like those four words. But I'm saying that because in the rebuilding trust, like it can't just be said once, right? No. It's almost as if you're going to have to do that in every single interview you give. Something said once will always be forgotten. But it has to be part of the new MO of science communication in this country, I think. I agree completely. Yeah. Yeah.

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talk right now. I'm hearing you intellectually, but I'm also hearing you quite emotionally because so many of us looked to you as a person who was going to provide answers during the most intense days of the pandemic. And I still find myself listening to you and hoping that I hear the answers on how to

rebuild trust in science, right, on how to preserve the strengths that this country has in terms of biomedical research, how to push back against health misinformation. Do you think we've treated you unfairly as looking at you as the person who's going to provide those answers for us, or is that you just accept that as your fate?

It depends on what you mean by we. Okay, me. No, but lots of people, look, it's because we were all and continue to be desperate to listen to someone who we can...

You know, again, I don't want to evade the question, Meghna, but really it depends on what you mean by we, because it isn't a homogeneous group of people. There are those people who would just attack you no matter what you say. I mean, you could give all the caveats you want, and you'd still not be believed. I think for the most part,

There's a small segment of people who I think, I don't want to use the word, unfairly makes it seem like I'm a victim. I've been unfairly treated. I mean, I know what I'm getting into. I mean, I'm a big boy. I'm a resilient person. I can handle that. I was born in Brooklyn, of course. You know?

But I think there have been some distortions. You can make your judgment whether it's fair or not. But some of the conspiracy things that have made up, if you want to put that in the category of unfair, yeah, it's unfair. But it's also more a complete distortion than it is unfair. Okay, back to...

the less emotionally needy questions that are coming from the audience. How confident are you that we are prepared for another pandemic? I think some of the things that are going on right now is diminishing our capability and preparedness. When I got asked

You know, a year ago, a year and a half ago, what are the lessons learned from the pandemic? I divided it into two general buckets, the scientific bucket and the public health bucket. And I think from the scientific bucket,

We get an A plus because if you look at the fact that from the day that the sequence of the virus was made public on January 10th of 2020, 11 months later, we had a vaccine that had been tested in tens of thousands of people and was proven to be safe and effective.

That has never been done in the history of public health and science. It usually takes anywhere from five to ten years with an average of about seven years to get that done. If we hadn't gotten that done, millions of people more throughout the world would have died because if you look at the modeling studies that were done

about people who were saved because they were vaccinated it's anywhere about three million people in the United States and about seven to 15 million people worldwide were were avoided an unnecessary death by getting vaccinated so from the scientific standpoint we did well

My concern is if we diminish the scientific effort and weaken the NIH and weaken the CDC, which is happening, that would make us less prepared from a scientific standpoint. From a public health standpoint, we didn't do too well to begin with because somehow or other, we had a fragmentation of our public health response

One of the great things about our country is that we have 50 states and additional territories. And because of the diversity economically, socially, geographically, financially, that we have individualism in this country, which works great. It makes us a great country.

However, we didn't do things in a uniformly effective way throughout the country when it came to public health, namely identification, isolation, contact tracing, physical distancing, wearing a mask, why red states were less vaccinated than blue states, why red states had more hospitalizations and deaths than blue states.

Those were public health things that we really need to do better. We've got to pull together as a country and remember that the common enemy was the virus, not each other. And we kind of acted a bit that in the middle of an outbreak, we were kind of fighting with each other from an ideological standpoint instead of saying, let's get together the way we would in a real war

You know, what happened in 9/11? Everybody got together and realized we had to crush the terrorists who'd done that. World War II, we all got together and said, "We've got to fight the common enemy." We should have been able to do that with the virus, but it seemed that there was so much divisiveness, we didn't do that very well. What was your toughest moment in the course of trying to help the nation navigate the pandemic?

You know, my toughest moment was something that my adversaries think I took pleasure in and I really didn't. And that was when I had to, when I was in the White House in the Coronavirus Task Force, when the president was saying things that were just not true. When he was saying that the virus would disappear like magic, when I knew epidemiologically that would not happen. When that was clear that it would not happen,

he was evoking magical elixirs like hydroxychloroquine is going to be the answer or ivermectin is going to be the answer. So when asked by the press, I didn't proactively do it, but when it got asked by the press, do you agree with the president? I had to say no, I'm sorry, but I don't.

And I have a great deal of respect for the office of the presidency of the United States. And I had no malicious or any negative feeling towards the President Trump when I was in the White House, not at all. And even though some people think I did. So it was very painful for me to have to publicly get up and speak

against what the president was saying. The people who attack me now think I did that because I wanted to undermine him. The last thing in the world

that I wanted to do was to undermine a president of the United States because of the respect that I have for the office. So that was very, very difficult. It cost me dearly because it unleashed a tsunami of negative vitriol against me, which is still present to this day. So I mean, it's like four years later and it's still there. So it was one of the most difficult things that I had to do. And I'm unfortunately seeing the result of that is prolonged to today.

What about a best moment? Oh, the best moment was I described in the memoir when we were developing my group at the NIH was the NIAID Vaccine Research Center. So together with the pharmaceutical companies, we developed

the immunogen, which is the business end of the vaccine, which when put in the platform, which is the mRNA platform, gave us the successful vaccine. So we were testing the vaccine and my clinical trial units were involved in doing it. And we were hoping that we would get a 50% effective vaccine.

if we were really really lucky we might squeeze it to 65 to 70 percent and the trials were on and they started in January and then they went to the end of November and I remember when I was sitting in my back deck eating we were as I know many of you do we were eating outside because you didn't want to eat inside if you wanted to have guests

so anytime you had guests over your house you would eat outside when the weather was 35 degrees so i was out there with my gloves on eating my calamari and drinking my my my pinot grigio and i got a phone call from albert borla who was the ceo of pfizer which was one of the companies that was using

the vaccine and and he called me up and he said Tony are you sitting down and I said oh my god he's going to tell me that the vaccine failed and he said we got the results of the vaccine just now and it's 93 effective and that was an amazing feeling still is yeah what gives you hope now if anything

You know, it's obviously a very tough time now. I mean, there's no running away from that. But I have always had, throughout all the things that we've been through with the various outbreaks that we've had to deal with and all the other challenges that we've had in society, I have an abiding faith in God.

the goodness of the American people, you know, that the better angels are ultimately gonna prevail. And even though it seems like we're dealing with a phenomenal amount of polarization,

I believe that so many of the people who are on those polar ends are not really bad people. And I think that we can ultimately come together, you know, as a unified country with diversity of opinions. We can't say we all have to be homogeneous. That's ridiculous. But you can have diversity of opinions.

center, center-left, center-right, far-left, far-right, without having profound divisiveness. I don't think deep down people really want to be divisive. So what gives me hope, maybe somewhat naively, I don't think I'm naive, but maybe a little bit too hopeful, but maybe not, that we're going to come together as a country much better than we are right now.

I need to hear a little bit more about this because I actually agree with you about the fundamental decency of the American people, but there are countervailing forces to that decency, many of which have been directed at you for five years now. And having been there sort of at the heart of the storm, serving in Washington for as long as you did,

Do you think that this basic decency that you're talking about is enough to push back against the forces that would keep us apart? If the will of the people want to have a different kind of a government, then they will get that government and will have another opportunity within a reasonable period of time of making changes.

So I look at you, Dr. Fauci, and of course you're an extraordinary human being, there's no doubt about that, highly intelligent, totally devoted to public service. And at the same time, and take this the right way, you are also an ordinary American, right? You're one of those decent people that you were just talking about whose life path through your hard work and your intelligence has thrust you into extraordinary circumstances. I also think that today,

university campuses, in labs, hospitals, wherever we find people who love science, who love medicine, who love public health, they too are ordinary Americans who in their sphere have been thrown into an extraordinary circumstance because of the attack on science that we're seeing in this country right now. So, and especially for the younger ones out there, tell them. Tell them how to persist. Well,

Give them that same hope that you have. No, I mean, I say this all the time, that what we're seeing right now is an aberrancy. It is. It is a degree of divisiveness that's an aberrancy. This is not the normal way that we should be interacting with each other. And I particularly tell people in my own field, I encourage them, they say,

Why should I get involved in science? Why should I get involved in medicine or in public health? And I tell them, now more than ever, you need to do it because now more than ever, we need people, particularly young people who are committed

to really the kinds of principles that we're talking about in medicine and science. So, I mean, it is rather than be discouraged, just, you know, dig deep, gather your strength and persist because we're living through very difficult times and it's not going to last. It's not. We're going to normalize. We will. I promise you. On a day-to-day basis? On a day-to-day basis, though, I mean...

Like when they get up in the morning, what do you want them to think? What do you want them to do? No, you know what you got to do? Like right now, when I was an intern in medicine and we had dozens of sick patients coming in and you used to think, oh my God, I can't do this. You know what you say to yourself? You know what? Suck it up and do it. You know? Okay.

Well, with that, Dr. Fauci, every time we get to talk, it is such a profound honor and a pleasure. And I know everyone here feels the same way. So Dr. Anthony Fauci, everybody. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you so much. Dr. Anthony Fauci in conversation with me at the first WBUR Festival.

Thanks for listening. I'm Meghna Chakrabarty. This is On Point. Did you know using your browser in incognito mode doesn't actually protect your privacy? Take back your privacy with IPVanish VPN. Just one tap and all your data, passwords, communications, browsing history, and more will be instantly protected. IPVanish makes you virtually invisible online. Use IPVanish on all your devices, anytime you go online at home, and especially on public Wi-Fi. Get

IPVanish now for 70% off a yearly plan with this exclusive offer at IPVanish.com slash audio. Support for this podcast comes from Is Business Broken? A podcast from the Mehrotra Institute at BU Questrom School of Business. Listen on for a sneak preview of a recent episode with J.D. Chesloff, President and CEO of the Massachusetts Business Roundtable. I do think it's instructive

to think about the philosophy behind this current environment. And I think philosophically, what is driving it is an attempt to reverse or address globalization. And I think that's an interesting opportunity for a debate. Do we acknowledge that we're in a global economy, or do we want to be more insular? When we were down in D.C. last week, we were having a conversation about this, and someone said to us,

You know, we were talking about the uncertainty that tariffs are creating in each of our states. There are probably, like I said, 17 or so state roundtables down there. And the response was, look, if our country is beholden to another country, if they control our supply chain, if there's a trade imbalance that's in their favor, then they could impact the supply chain and our economy at a moment's notice. And that is what the proponents of this current policy

policy, terror policy, are trying to address, right? There is uncertainty there, is what we were told. And that uncertainty is something we want to address. So it's a different philosophy. And so if you are looking to be less active in globalization and a global economy, then yeah, I think what they're doing makes some sense. If you don't believe that and you believe we are a citizen of a global economy, then perhaps it's not the right strategy.

Find the full episode by searching for Is Business Broken wherever you get your podcasts and learn more about the Mayrothra Institute for Business Markets and Society at ibms.bu.edu.