Dr. Anthony Fauci on battling COVID-19 in a divided U.S.

The way to counter misinformation and disinformation is to do your best as often as possible to provide correct information. The White House's chief medical advisor speaks about

covid

. Public health leader for decades, a key figure in the fight against AIDS and. Ebola and a man who in recent years has gone from being a celebrated icon and hero to someone so targeted by hate that he worries that violence will stalk him even as he plans to retire, so we talk. I, Adrian, it's a pleasure to be with you about what this moment and these fears have really changed my life.

Personally, I have received very credible death threats and very serious harassment towards me, my wife and my three children, constant, not punctual, but constant almost daily, so I have to have armed federal agents with me all the time, something unprecedented and almost strange for a public health official because the only thing I've said is that we should get vaccinated, we should wear masks when appropriate and we should observe good public health practices and how to do it. Those threats come across without getting too far into the weeds, but I mean, you're on your way to fill up your car with gas and someone approaches you?

They don't do that now because I'm surrounded by agents, so, but what they do is they with modern technologies they know your home address they know your work address they know your cell phone number they know your home phone so they communicate and send very threatening messages uh and they know my children's phone numbers and where they work and where they live and they do the same thing to them it's disconcerting for a young woman, Lai, my daughters, to suddenly receive everything from emails sexually explicit to violent threatening emails, letters, notes and things like that, it's really very bad and then you can stay with these armed guards.

Yes, they will be with me for a while. I wonder what the moment was when you realized that attitudes had changed. You know it was right in the first months of the Trump administration when I was put in a position that was very uncomfortable for me. I didn't like having to publicly contradict the president of the United States when he said things that simply weren't true and that were misleading and that he just couldn't stand. there and not comment when things were said that certain medications worked when they didn't. I said yes, I would like to, I would like to take it, a lot of people are taking it a lot of Frontline workers are taking hydroxychloroquine, hydroxychloroquine is not effective in treating coronavirus disease or covert 19. or when this would just disappear like magic when we knew it was going to get worse once I started doing it, that engendered in the people who were the president's devotees that I was the bad guy in the room and suddenly I became the bogeyman you should attack.

Is there anything that, in retrospect, you think you need to own around messaging? I don't run away from owning anything. It's not perfect. I haven't done everything perfectly. If I had to do anything differently, I would have put more effort into trying to explain the uncertainty of the situation and not make it seem like when I say this today, it will absolutely never change what happened. that you didn't see the multiple waves of variation coming that we would have never imagined through any tabletop exercise that you were going to have a virus that had a big explosion and then all of a sudden you had Alpha Beta Delta Omicron and even today we are talking about Omicron sublineages, We've been doing this for three years now, no one would have imagined that would be the case.

I was in high school at the time when you were doing your work on AIDS, people were protesting. fire fouchy was a phrase that, you know, we heard in the 80s, it must have been a very different experience, it's the difference between night and day between then and now. I never received any threats of physical harm from AIDS activists. The AIDS activists were right and what they were saying made a lot of sense. The well-intentioned but somewhat rigid process of conducting clinical trials was not suitable for that type of disease and they wanted input. That's when I did something that's probably the most important thing.

What I've ever done is say, let me bring you in instead of keeping you out, that's completely different from people who are actually telling lies that aren't true, who are trying to create conspiracy theories and other things and who actually They are stimulating a world far away. group in society that really wants to kill me we should live free. I think I know enough about you now to know that using the r-word in terms of retirement is a really bad idea and would probably make you roll your eyes. your head, uh, 50 years of public service not only stops you, just don't head to the beach, but what are you doing?

I am 81 years old. I said at my age, what do I have to offer my country and my society? and I thought about the benefit of my experience in very difficult times of emerging and re-emerging infectious diseases dating back to the beginning of HIV in the early 1980s Ebola, Zika, the pandemic flu, the anthrax attacks and now this unprecedented historic outbreak of

covid

, um, what I What I have to offer is maybe some ability to advise or provide some wisdom to people with less experience. Dr. Fauci, thank you for everything, not only for the work you have done but also for your accessibility to people like us here.

It is a pleasure for me to be with you. thank you so much