Dr. Fauci Reflects On His 50+ Year Career In Public Health

After 50

year

s in government, Dr. Anthony Fauci is leaving

public

service, having served for seven presidents. Dr. Fauci has led the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases for 38

year

s. He worked hard through everything from the AIDS epidemic, when politicians wouldn't even say the word, to the From the Ebola outbreak that reached our shores to the coveted pandemic that left us broken, locked in our homes, and resulted in the loss of over a million Americans, this morning I spoke with Dr. Fauci um, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and head. medical advisor to President Biden Dr.

Fauci welcome back to the Sunday show thank you very much Jonathan It's a pleasure to be with you so during your last briefing at the White House you encouraged Americans to get their booster shots we have covid-19 , that is. There are still RSV viruses and the flu, they are all increasing and

health

officials are concerned about what they call, it was called triple demick because they shared common symptoms, what are the main differences that people should pay attention to if they are? not feeling well we can do things that were very important to mitigate at least two of those we have a flu vaccine get a flu vaccine kovid we know that the data is very clear about the differences when you compare a vaccinated person with someone who is not vaccinated and a booster vaccinated person with someone who is not vaccinated the severity of the disease leading to hospitalization and deaths are profoundly different the curves you do not need to be a statistician to calculate them deaths in hospitalization of the unvaccinated deaths and hospitalizations for vaccinated and vaccinated, given that we are now having a confluence of three, at least three different diseases that have respiratory components, we can definitely do something about at least two of them and something could also be done about RSV, I want I mean, if, for example, you're in a situation where someone is coughing or sneezing or has RSV wash your hands, you forget that we were talking about washing your hands all the time.

The sensational respiratory virus RSV is transmitted by droplets, so if someone coughs into their hands and then we shake your hand and then you touch your face with your mouth, that's what you need to be careful about, so there are things you can do for all three things and that's what we encourage people to do as we're getting into the colder winds of late fall into early winter, thanks for all the medical advice changing the subject, we need to get back to personal because this will probably be the last time we talk to you as a

public

servant, right? public servant for more than 50 years I am going to bring up the documentary Fauci there is a National Geographic you cried at one point in the interview you were telling a story about an AIDS patient who had gone completely blind and the The interviewer asked you why you you were so emotional and you said it was post-traumatic stress disorder, yes, disorder plain and simple, we will talk more about how your work has affected you personally, so you have gone through wave after wave. of many diseases, pandemics and epidemics that have affected this country, yes, well, what I was referring to Jonathan is that if you look at my

career

that began 54 years ago, when I first came to the NIH in which I was involved, fortunately and I was very fortunate to have been involved in the development of therapies for diseases of an autoimmune inflammatory nature in which the immune system reacts against its own tissue in a group of diseases called vasculitis and back in the late 60s and early 70s I developed an effective therapy, so for a brief period of time, not a brief period, you know, about nine years, my professional

career

was associated with having a disease that most people died from and so I developed therapies that put them at a very high level of remission, so everything was going well.

I felt good people would come. Thinking they were going to die, I would do this therapy that is now the standard therapy and it went well for them. Then came 1981 when the first cases of HIV appeared and from the beginning when I began caring for people with HIV until we had effective therapies for several years. Then I'm primarily a doctor, people who see me on shows like this, you know, look at the public

health

official, but I'm a doctor and I'm a scientist and I see patients and back in the early 1980s, the overwhelming majority of my time I spent it taking care of very, very sick patients, mostly young gay men who are otherwise healthy, and when you're in a situation where every day you go in and take care of people that you know and like and depend on you and you see that each one of them dies or is going to die soon.

You have to suppress that because even though as a doctor you take a very professional and somewhat detached approach in order to function well, you still feel the pain of people suffering and dying, so you suppress it and the story I told in the National Geographic film Faucier was that we developed a very strong relationship with this patient who was gradually going blind in front of us until it became very, very clear that he had gone blind. completely blind, so in order to function on the next patient I had to go to, I had to suppress it, so when the interviewer brought it up again and I had an emotional response, I used the word post-traumatic stress because I think that's what I and many of my colleagues, doctors and nurses who were caring for people with HIV back then, felt that because it was a terrible time, as a doctor you are trained to cure people and when you are put in a situation where you don't have the tools to do anything except comfort people, that becomes very painful, what do you think?

What would you have liked to have done differently in your more than 50 years of public service? If you could change one thing, what would it be? My God, so many things happened. I mean, you always say that maybe you should have responded to something sooner as it was evolving. You know, one of the things that goes back to HIV is that one of the classic principles of infectious diseases is that you don't give prophylactic drugs to prevent things because they might lead to drug resistance or whatever, so the scientific community From the beginning we were reluctant to give antiviral or antibacterial prophylaxis to people with HIV because we felt we could do more harm. well, so it took us a little while to realize that, you know, leave all that behind, you give them prophylaxis against pneumocystis, against CMV, against anything else and it turned out that it saved a lot of lives, so yeah we would have to do it again. and we would have been more aggressive in doing that at first and I thought you were going to interrupt, but the last question was very quick, your proudest moment, oh my gosh, there are several because I've had several hats, but but one of the things for The ones that I really feel very good about have to do indirectly with my scientific training and my achievements and my administrative competence was being able to work with President George W.

Bush, where he honored me by giving me the privilege of entrusting me with his participation as one of the architects of the president's emergency plan for AIDS relief and stimulus by now, 20 years later, has clearly saved approximately 20 million lives, so that's something I'm very proud of, but also honored and privileged that United States President George W. Bush commissioned me to do a project that truly saved so many lives, thank you.