Original subtitles

How are we doin'?

Starting route to National Institutes of Health.

Sorry Cliff, I'm trying... I'm trying to get the right security

to get into the right entrance.

- This is a whole new life here. - Yeah, I know, I...

It is just before 7:00 in the morning

and Dr. Fauci is beginning one of his 12-hour days.

It is a schedule he keeps six days a week.

Ten seconds. There you go. It's always ten seconds.

Tony Fauci has not been elected to anything.

He's had the same job for nearly 40 years.

That means the majority of American voters never even indirectly picked him.

Yet, in the last four months,

Fauci has become one of the most powerful people in the world.

For more on what we know about the coronavirus,

we're joined now by Dr. Anthony Fauci.

He's Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.

Dr. Fauci, how concerned should we be?

For a while,

life is not gonna be the way it used to be in the United States.

We have to just accept that

if we wanna do what's best for the American public.

How does this compare to anything that you've ever dealt with?

You always almost have a fog of war about it.

It's not that different than the very early years

of the HIV epidemic.

Fauci is the Director

of the National Institute of Allergies and Infectious Diseases

and is the Commanding Officer

in the nation's scientific war against AIDS.

He is also a target of critics who charge the government's response to AIDS

- has been one of confusion.

The only people in charge of AIDS are incompetent hacks.

I mean, what the hell are these people doing?

They're not producing drugs.

Fire Fauci! Fire Fauci!

Do wear a mask, don't wear a mask.

Don't worry about the coronavirus.

Never reopen schools until we have a cure for coronavirus.

Dr. Fauci has been at this for 50 years. He is an icon.

He is the most published researcher in the world.

I think Donald Trump is the sixth president he has served.

He was very involved in the early AIDS epidemic, Ebola...

You name it, he's been there.

Did he get ventilators prepared?

Did he get masks prepared? Did he get gloves prepared?

No. No, he did nothing.

He should be fired, indicted and thrown in jail

and it's time we have a revolution in this country.

I'd actually like to go back to the old times of Tudor England.

I'd put the heads on pikes as a warning to federal bureaucrats,

either get with the program or you're gone.

God help us. God help us!

Hmm.

- Can you hear me? - Yeah, you're good.

So, they're turning down TB requests for vaccine research?

- Correct. - Unbelievable.

I asked specifically "Who said 'no'?"

and it was the White House. So, I guess we're back at our stalemate.

And, you know, I didn't know when I pushed back on it,

the answer I got was that they want the focus to be on the economy.

I don't get how talking about vaccine isn't important about the economy.

If you get a vaccine, the economy will open.

So, what's the problem?

- Yeah. - I don't... I don't get it.

People are tired of hearing Fauci and all these idiots,

all these people, these people that have gotten it wrong.

Fauci's a disaster. I mean, this guy, if I listen to him...

Right now, a lot of people think I'm the bad guy.

Every time he goes on television there's always a bomb.

If we listen to him, we have 700, 800,000 deaths right now.

So if there's a recorder on, you can have it just the way it's done.

I mean, I'm the bad guy to an entire subset of people...

because I represent something that is uncomfortable for them.

It's called the truth.

I tell the President exactly...

- I don't doubt that. - what the scientific data is

and what the evidence is.

Secretary of State Pompeo is extremely busy.

I'd like him to go back to the State Department

or, as they call it, the Deep State Department. You know, Mike.

I'd like to have him go back and do his job.

So, does anybody have any questions?

I know I shouldn't be touching my face, but...

I'm so good at my job. How can he be so bad at his?

So the protests don't increase the spread of the virus?

I didn't say that. You're putting words in my mouth.

Is somebody born a craven partisan hack or do you become one?

I grew up in Bensonhurst, which was a somewhat tough neighborhood

in Brooklyn. You know, everyone was striving.

Nothing was taken for granted.

There wasn't a lot of head hanging in those days, you know?

Part of the culture back then when you were a kid

is that you didn't get intimidated by a lot of things.

Or, as we used to say, "You didn't take any shit from anybody."

I don't want to hurt him.

He's been there for about 350 years. I don't want to hurt him.

Anthony Fauci, this fraud?

This swamp creature?

And who is now forced to go on his power walks

with a security detail, because he's received death threats.

My job is to do whatever I can to get us out of this outbreak.

My weapon, in addition to the science, is speaking to the American public.

What keeps me grounded is the enormity of the problem.

And just a very deep sense of responsibility...

that calls for all of the things that I've been trained for,

dating back to when I was going to school.

In high school, I had this early cultivation of public service.

Regis High School was driven by these guys

in black cassocks called Jesuit Priests.

The Jesuit philosophy is men for others.

You think about what you can do for society

and what you can do for other people.

It's what drove me to go to medical school.

There wasn't a minute that I really didn't treasure at Cornell Medical School.

I loved clinical medicine.

Every single cell in my body was, like, focused in this.

It was the first time in my life that somebody's life is my responsibility.

At the end of my junior year, it was the Vietnam War.

And every physician is automatically drafted.

But you had some choices. You could do public health service,

Navy, Army or Air Force.

So, I put in public health service first.

Second I put Navy, then Army, and then Air Force.

And, sure enough, I get a call from the National Institutes of Health.

The NIH was and is really the mecca of biomedical research.

Here in the laboratories at NIH, much of the research is basic.

Clinical medicine is practiced at NIH because it contributes to research

rather than because of the patient's need for medical attention.

Virtually everyone

who was anyone in academic medicine in this country...

had spent some time here.

And it was like entering into a magical world.

When I first came down,

what I really wanted to do was do three years,

bingo, and go back to New York

and become the Chief Resident at the New York Hospital.

Back then, that was your ticket to a private practice on Park Avenue.

You know, I was a kid from Brooklyn

and Brooklyn to Manhattan is like New York State to Rome.

But as I got to learn more about myself, the idea of discovery,

the idea of having an impact on a lot more people...

trying to figure out diseases that people were dying from,

that's what really captured me.

So, I became the Senior Investigator at the NIH.

I met Tony very shortly after I came to the NIH.

Tony was a Lab Chief at that point in time.

He was a long-term single guy. Totally dedicated to work.

He worked more hours than almost anybody I've ever known.

My wife and I would sometimes tease Tony.

Because he had several female companions through the years.

I'd go on a date every once in a while,

but I was completely buried in my work.

I actually remember very vividly,

and hearing this from other people as well,

if you're working with one of Tony Fauci's patients,

you'd better take good care of that patient

because he will demand it of you.

All of this discussion of vasculitis is merely academic.

At the time,

I was focused on vasculitis which is an inflammation of blood vessels

that leads to kidney failure, lung failure and things like that.

There was a patient who was a senator from Brazil.

He didn't speak any English and I said,

"Well, I can't have a conversation with this guy,

so who speaks Portuguese around here?"

So they called this nurse, this Christine Grady,

into the room, um...

and she stand by the bedside and I looked at her, I says, "Wow!"

"Who's this?"

I had just spent two years in Brazil

and so my Portuguese was then pretty good.

And we had this meeting in the patient's room

and I said, "He would like to go home."

I said, "Okay. That's fine to do that,

"but he's gotta understand, these ulcers are not completely healed.

"He's gotta keep his legs elevated

and he's gotta change the dressings frequently."

So, he speaks Portuguese back.

I'm, sort of, sitting there waiting to hear.

The patient said to me... "There's no way I'm going to do that.

I'm going to go to the beach every day." He lived on the beach, near the beach.

"And I'm going to go dancing at night. I've been in the hospital for months

and you expect me to go home and sit with my leg in the air?"

And I, sort of, gulped and thought, what the heck am I going to do now?

She turned to me and looked at me

and said, "He said he's gonna do exactly like you said."

I said, "Good. You can go."

A day later, I saw Dr. Fauci in the hallway,

who said to me, "I'd like to see you in my office."

And I was certain that I was caught

and going to be either reprimanded or fired.

So, she comes into the office with a great deal of trepidation.

She sits down and I look at her and I say,

"Would you like to go to dinner?"

So, that was the beginning.

When we got to know each other really well, she says,

"You know, remember that conversation that we had in the room?

Well, I actually told you a white lie."

I think Tony came to the NIH young and ambitious

and looking for a challenge, I think, and found it.

I was sitting in my office and I saw this... article...

in a publication called MMWR.

Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report. And it reported five men...

curiously all gay men, who developed a very strange pneumonia

called pneumocystis pneumonia.

And, being a busy young investigator at the time,

I took it, I put it in my desk and I said, "This must be a fluke.

It's gonna go away."

One month later, another MMWR appears.

This time, 26 gay men...

who not only had pneumocystis pneumonia,

but had Kaposi's sarcoma, a tumor, a cancer,

seen in people whose immune system is remarkably suppressed.

And I remember looking at that and going, "Oh, my God.

"There's no way that this is a fluke.

This is a brand new disease."

I actually got goosebumps.

So, I made a decision that I was going to completely change

the direction of my research.

He had lots of critics on the NIH campus.

They thought he was making a mistake. That he was taking on a disease

in an area of science that was going nowhere

and that he was gonna ruin his career basically.

So, I wrote an article in 1981...

saying that if we think this disease is gonna stay confined

to a very discreet group of people,

that it's not gonna explode, we're kidding ourselves.

I submitted it to a major journal.

They rejected it because one of the reviewers said

I was being too alarmist.

So right away, he had to fight... Not fight but push back on,

you know, people who said, "But wait a minute,

you can't put money into this and take it away from other things."

And he said, "But we have to,

because we have to learn about this disease."

I recruited young people to work with me.

Henry Masur, who was on the junior faculty at Cornell,

Cliff Lane had just finished his fellowship

and the three of us became the Three Musketeers of HIV

here at NIH.

Our focus at the time was the adult human immune system.

There weren't a lot of groups that had that as a focus.

You just knew you had to do something.

Because you thought you could do something.

Scientists at the National Center For Disease Control

in Atlanta today released the results of a study

which shows that the lifestyle of some male homosexuals

has triggered an epidemic of a rare form of cancer.

Researchers know of 413 people

who have contracted the condition in the past year.

One third have died and none have been cured.

How many friends have you lost to this disease?

Twenty.

- Twenty? - Yes.

And you have still more friends who are sick?

Very ill.

Jane, can you imagine what it must be like if you had lost 20 of your friends

- in the last 18 months? - No.

- And you don't know why? - No cause, no cure.

Investigators have examined the habits

of homosexuals for clues.

That I was in the fast lane at one time in terms of the way that I lived my life

and now I'm not.

A-I-D-S. AIDS.

The most frightening initials in America today.

A medical mystery that destroys the immune system

and leaves our bodies defenseless against unusual and deadly infections.

I was going out and meeting people,

trying to find a lover.

I didn't know that, you know, that there were things out there

so secretly hidden that it was gonna destroy my life.

I had been trained as an infectious disease doc...

and as an immunologist.

If ever there was a disease that I was made for...

it's this disease.

Dr. Fauci, can you tell us what do we know?

What are the best clues you've got?

We do have some clues that it may be a viral agent

that is likely infecting immune cells that are necessary to fight

certain types of infections...

We didn't know what it was. We strongly suspected it was a virus.

There is, right now at the present time, no known cure for AIDS.

We don't even know what the agent is, much less how to cure it.

Like ink spreading on a blotter,

AIDS has now been identified in over 35 states

and 16 foreign countries.

It was an evolving picture...

rapidly and frighteningly.

For the first time North America,

the world's leading experts on sexually transmitted diseases

meet to share the latest research data.

From the National Institutes of Health, Dr. Anthony Fauci,

who directs the research on how AIDS affects the body's immune system.

From what we know now, once you get the underlying immune defect,

you do not recover from it, which is a very, very important thing.

A small army of dedicated medical warriors

is trying to combat this killer.

In the laboratories, researchers are scrambling for a cure.

In the hospitals and doctors' offices,

the front line soldiers face a losing battle

and must content themselves with the little victories for now.

You know, every once in a while when you're involved

in a difficult situation you get bad news,

bad news and then sometimes encouraging news comes along

to make you feel a little better.

It was all bad, bad, worse, bad, worse, bad, worse.

It was just so unbelievably... frustrating

when you're used to... being able to fix things

and you're just not really fixing anything.

It is very difficult to work with young people who you care for,

become quite attached to and in some cases even identify with

and to watch them overtime get sicker and die.

It is not just one patient, but one after another after another.

And I had had jobs prior to this one where people were very sick

and many of my patients had died, but this was different...

because everybody was, sort of, at the prime of their life.

Back then, when you got sick you were gone fast.

Seven, eight, nine months and it was horrible deaths.

It was a time when all of us were very scared

and there was very little that we could do.

I found out in late '85, November 1985...

I was 24.

I didn't know anything about the politics of AIDS.

I just knew that it was all of a sudden this terrible scare story

and the country was in a panic about it and that it was 100 percent fatal.

I was living in the Bronx

with my lover Jeff, who was diagnosed with Kaposi's sarcoma.

For me, the AIDS epidemic started then.

I went to my doctor and the minute he put the needle in my arm

I knew I was positive, I knew it. And then I avoided his calls.

For three and a half weeks, I was able to avoid his calls...

and then he found me and he said that I was HIV positive.

I said, "Well, what's the prognosis or..."

He said, "18 months."

Breathe in and out with your mouth open.

You know, one of my patients who had cytomegalovirus retinitis.

Cytomegalovirus is a virus that chews up the retina.

And he was gradually losing vision.

He would walk in, he'd say, "Dr. Fauci, how are you?"

He was always upbeat. He'd walk in.

I would smile. You know, he'd make comments,

"I love your smile. You have a great smile."

And I'd go in every day and morning, afternoon, evening

and then, one day,

we walked in in the morning and I walked in and went up to the desk

and he said, "Who's there?"

And it was clear, you know, that he gone completely blind.

And it was like...

And we were standing around the bed saying, "Now what?" you know?

And it was... it was terrible, because he lost his vision completely.

Yeah.

It's affecting you now.

- Yeah. - Why?

Uh, post-traumatic stress syndrome.

That's what it is.

My early understanding of what my dad was doing was...

there's something happening that's affecting people,

that's hurting people, that's killing people.

When I think about my dad growing up, I certainly think about that seriousness,

that intensity and working hard and wanting to do the right thing.

That's his compass.

At the same time, I also think about a person that I think

very few people get to see.

Which is someone who is funny

and weird and really playful.

This is a record for the month of July, 1988.

We've been over 100, so how many days in a row?

- Several. - Too many.

Well, we're just sitting here hanging out by the pool on a Sunday...

Sunday morning.

Jenny and Daddy are gonna go swimming!

Are you gonna go swimming? Are you gonna show everybody

how you could stay up straight in the water?

- Show Mommy. - Come on.

Yeah. You've got water in your eye?

When Chris and I were knee deep in responding to this historic pandemic.

We wanted to and did raise a family.

- Now you've got us all? - Yeah.

Okay, Nan.

- Here we are. - Here we are.

Here's Jenny and her baby sister. Jennifer, Mommy, and Daddy.

Jennifer and her baby sister Megan.

Hi, Megan.

- Oh, don't you look pretty! - Look, it's coming off.

It's March 30th, 1989...

and Megan is getting herself a bath.

Jenny first and Megan, then Alison.

- Hi, Momma. - Are you the audience with me?

Yes.

Merry Christmas.

Whoa, don't fall!

January seventh, the blizzard of 1996.

Probably the largest snow storm in the history of Washington, D.C...

A foot. It's a foot and it's gonna be two feet.

When our children were little, he used to work all the time.

And there were times when they wouldn't see him

for a couple of days sometimes.

I wouldn't say I neglected the raising of the children,

but I did not sacrifice professional things...

as much as maybe I should have.

I was not going to every soccer match,

every track meet, every swim meet.

- Yes. - Whoo! Yeah.

Chris did everything.

But we did something that I think physically is a little unhealthy,

I don't recommend it for people, but it worked.

We decided that we were gonna have dinner...

together every night no matter how late the dinner was.

He would come home from like a 12 or 13-hour day of work

and he would come in the kitchen and start dancing with my mom.

I'm like, "Dad, we want to eat dinner. Please come and sit down."

But we understood that when he's working, which is all of the time,

he's laser focused.

Rather than name each and every one of these,

why don't I just talk about asthma analogy,

I'll mention transportation, autoimmunity, vaccine developments, skip cancer,

go to immune mediated disease and then end up with AIDS.

AIDS brings a new level of pressure and public attention to NIH,

and especially to Dr. Fauci,

who already manages three full time jobs at NIH.

Administrator, physician, research scientist.

Pardon my eating, I'm having my lunch before the hearing,

so if I'm eating in your ear, don't worry.

We don't have the answer. We're trying to get the answer,

but we're letting the science take us where it's taking us.

Researchers believe that they have made

a monumental breakthrough in the fight against AIDS.

The deadly disease that attacks the body's immune system.

US Government scientists announced in Washington today,

they have isolated a virus they believe causes AIDS.

The breakthrough came at the National Institutes of Health,

where a way was found to mass produce the AIDS virus,

study it and most importantly, to test blood for it.

- Fauci? - F-A-U-C-I.

We found that we had a virus. It was really quite transforming.

Now I have it in my hand, I know what the hell it is.

You know, I have it in a test tube. It's not like this thing

that's floating around that we have no idea what it is.

There is an inherent fear... built into viruses.

The lives of millions of Americans

are being severely disrupted by the coronavirus pandemic.

Schools, work, even iconic institutions like Broadway and Disneyworld

are shut down. Experts say...

When we hear about one that is taking off...

it really rings all of the alarm bells.

Seeing a vibrant city like New York

resembling a bit of a ghost town was a moving... feeling for me.

Very emotional...

because, you know, I grew up as a kid roaming around Manhattan.

And to see it empty was just very, very shocking

in many respects.

But community spread was rampant

and we had to make a decision to shut everything down.

The tri-state region now topping

90,000 confirmed cases of COVID-19 and more than 1,500 deaths.

Hospitals are reeling with New York City's mayor,

warning they will run out of supplies by this weekend.

Okay. VRC.

Sure.

As soon as we heard

that in Wuhan these cases apparently appeared,

we had no idea if it was gonna turn out to be bad.

We just knew it is conceivable that this could turn out to be a pandemic.

My group here in the Vaccine Research Center said...

"As soon as we get a sequence, let's go for it."

The sequence came out, I believe, on the ninth.

We had the meeting on the tenth. By the time we got to the 15th,

we were already in the process of making it

and then 63, 65 days later, we were in a phase one trial.

Scientists all across the world are now racing to find a vaccine

that can help combat the coronavirus in the future.

The National Institutes of Health

and a Massachusetts company Moderna

are behind the record speed clinical trials.

We've been hearing a lot about the Moderna vaccine,

that's an mRNA vaccine.

This is different from other vaccines.

It uses mRNA to basically teach the body how to fight the virus.

But never before have we seen a successful mRNA vaccine.

When we were confronted with this virus,

there are a lot of very smart people at the NIH who put their heads together

and realized that mRNA vaccines could be a real option.

If it works, it's a potentially safer and faster path.

Shortening the development process from decades to years.

Even though we didn't all know about it, there was a lot of research being done

for many, many years with the NIH towards making mRNA vaccines.

- I think it's gonna work. - I do too.

I mean, I really do.

We had been priming the pump for years before

with the platform technology, in this case mRNA.

So, as soon as we found out that we were dealing with a brand new virus,

we said, "This what we do. We make vaccines. Let's do it."

This is a very exciting technology at the mRNA vaccines

and it's extremely exciting,

but I don't believe a single one of them has ever reached market.

It's incredibly impressive

that they made that call, because it's a bold one.

It took some amount of courage to move forward with something

that you know isn't an absolute certainty.

I talked to Tony Fauci yesterday,

the Head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.

A vaccine is in the works, but it's a couple of years away.

The fastest we had ever developed a vaccine before that was for mumps

and that took four years.

And so, we're able to move very, very fast,

so as soon as we get the phase one dose out of the NIH,

we'll be able to start phase two right away.

You're talking over the next few months you think you could have a vaccine?

- Correct. - With phase two.

Yeah. You won't have a vaccine. You'll have a vaccine to go into testing.

Testing, yes.

Well, you have the greatest companies in the world sitting around the table.

I mean, Johnson & Johnson and Pfizer and all of the companies. Gilead.

Uh, you have all of these great companies and that's what they're saying,

so I think that...

Would you make sure you get the President the information

that a vaccine that you make and start testing in a year

is not a vaccine that's deployable.

So, he's asking the question "When is it gonna be deployable?"

and that is gonna be, at the earliest, a year to a year and half,

no matter how fast you go.

I met with the President and with Tony and a few others in the room

on a couple of occasions.

Oftentimes it was Tony who was seen as the main proponent

of the unpopular view.

You take a solid flu vaccine, you don't think that would have an impact

or much of an impact on corona?

No, no. Probably not.

Can you talk about your early meetings

with the President and your impressions of him?

Is that something that you're willing to share?

Yikes!

How deep do you want to get?

We had task force meetings very regularly.

First, a few times a week and then, almost literally every single day.

We're live now at the White House in the briefing room,

where moments from now President Trump will hold a news conference

talking about his administration's response

to the coronavirus outbreak.

We had press conferences that were a hybrid of a press conference.

It wasn't totally dominated by the scientists.

Thank you very much.

The President would get up with his style

and... for reasons that none of us could understand,

it was always confronting the press.

What do you say to Americans who are watching right now who are scared?

I say that you're a terrible reporter. That's what I say. Go ahead.

Because of that, the public health messages

got a bit muddled.

The President might get up, and out of nowhere, say something

that we would all go, "What's that all about?"

President Trump's been touting an anti-malaria drug

that he says could help treat the coronavirus.

So, how beneficial is hydroxychloroquine?

My next guest says doctors are already using this treatment

in the United States successfully.

For me, I'm absolutely convinced this is what saved my life.

It was the typical example that we scientists shudder at.

Joe Jones tells you that I did this and I got better, therefore, it works.

And it was very clear that there was no evidence whatsoever

that hydroxychloroquine... worked.

And that's when things got complicated.

Yes, John.

A question for Dr. Fauci, if I could.

Dr. Fauci, it was explained yesterday there has been some promise

with hydroxychloroquine,

this potential therapy for people who are infected with coronavirus.

Is there any evidence to suggest that, as with malaria,

it might be used as a prophylaxis against COVID-19?

No. The answer is no and the evidence that you're talking about, John,

is anecdotal evidence.

That was the first time that publicly, with all the cameras rolling,

I just had to get up and contradict him.

But the information that you are referring to specifically

is anecdotal. It was not done in a controlled clinical trial,

so you really can't make any definitive statement about it.

When I stepped back from the podium,

I remembered the advice that I got decades earlier by my good friend

who said, "Whenever you go into the White House, you should assume

"that there's a possibility that you're not gonna get asked back,

because you might have to tell somebody something they didn't want to hear."

And as I stepped back I said, "Well, this may be it."

I think... without saying too much,

I'm probably more of a fan of that than... maybe than anybody.

He was so much in his own world that... I don't...

He didn't react in a way of saying

how dare you contradict me I'm the President?

It was like, I'll say what I'm gonna say, you say what you're gonna say.

Let's see if it works. It might and it might not.

I happen to feel good about it, but who knows?

I've been right a lot. Let's see what happens.

- John. - Can I come back to the science

- and the logistics? - You ought to be ashamed of yourself.

The units that were ordered, are they for...

It just was a remarkable sort of back and forth

between someone who's using their gut instincts,

not scientifically based, not evidence based

against, you know, a venerable scientist who kept

sort of, on the fly, it seems, trying to fact check the President.

I just had never seen anything like it.

I think Tony Fauci probably has one of the hardest jobs in America right now.

Communication is not ancillary to fighting an epidemic.

Communication is central to fighting an epidemic.

I'd like to provide some basic but important facts about Ebola

and its transmission.

During the crises that we faced in the Obama Administration,

it was particularly Dr. Fauci who brought this extraordinary sobriety...

and rationality and fact based, evidence based leadership to the table.

The Centers for Disease Control

is closely monitoring what's become the largest Ebola outbreak in history.

Ebola has been ravaging West Africa since March

and shocked disease specialists when it hopped a border by plane.

The moment Ebola began spreading in cities,

we were at the edge of an abyss.

From the front lines of West Africa

to the front door of America, an all-out push to get ahead of Ebola.

I think we've got to let the science guide us.

The outbreak that the President said

was unlikely to come here is now here.

Our nation was really wired into a frenzy of anxiety

about whether this is gonna sweep across the country

and take us all with it.

Right now we have a devastating epidemic in West Africa

and we're having an epidemic of fear in the United States,

so we've got to continue to try and educate people

about what they need to or do not need to be afraid of.

Dr. Fauci clearly understood and clearly conveyed

that there was a wise, scientifically driven way

to deal with this and a hysterical way to deal with it.

The reason we are having this very difficult situation

in the African countries

is because they don't have the system to be able to contain it.

If they had the system, we would not be seeing

all of this suffering and dying in West Africa.

If that's the case and if it's one case in the United States now,

as we know it is...

why are we having news conferences like this

and why are we all so afraid?

Ebola is a terrifying virus.

It causes you to bleed through your orifices.

It's transmissible through bodily fluids.

It's not, therefore as easy to catch as a COVID-19 or a flu virus

because it's not airborne.

But it is much more deadly.

The American part of dealing with Ebola here in this country

took basically a 90 degree turn this weekend.

A nurse in Dallas becomes the first person

to contract Ebola in the United States.

Just moments ago, Nurse Nina Pham left the city for an NIH facility.

I believe that it's Nina Pham.

It looks like she's walking off the plane there, Don.

- Yeah, very slowly. - When we were called upon...

to care for one of the nurses who got infected, Tony led that charge.

She came here at 11:54. All of us have been up all night.

We haven't learned a lot about the virus yet.

We're taking care of the patient.

Even some of our staff and our community

were a little reluctant to go near the doctors and the nurses

who were taking care of Ebola patients because they thought

we were going to infect people in the community,

which was impossible. That was not gonna happen.

So, when Nina completely recovered,

we decided we would publicly discharge her.

As we were waiting in the lobby, I was saying,

"Maybe I should do something here that could change around the stigma."

Our patient Nina Pham is free of Ebola.

Nina?

I wanted people to see

that I was not afraid of hugging someone who was completely recovered.

I mean, it was, like, click, click, click, click all over the place.

- We love you, Nina. - Yeah.

To be able to turn that around and say,

"Here's somebody who had it and she's fine,"

it's a counter to that visceral fear of contagion.

Tony has an ability to deal with fear

and a really serious understanding

of how to speak about... uncertainty

and threat... to a terrified general population.

The AIDS problem in America is only getting worse

with every passing day and there is no sign

that it will get better any time soon.

The National Academy of Sciences

is warning of an AIDS catastrophe

unless the government is willing to spend big money for education and research.

Had this disease afflicted children or members of the chamber of commerce,

I'm sure the Reagan Administration would have been breaking down

all doors in order to deal with it.

As the numbers increase, so does something else. Fear.

The AIDS hotline.

Most of the callers besieging

the country's AIDS hotlines are heterosexuals,

panicked at the realization that they too could be at risk.

I personally will tell my child if someone has AIDS, stay away from them.

At the time,

people were very concerned about transmission.

We knew how this was transmitted, but there was still this crazy stigma.

Even though I was a researcher and a physician scientist,

I really wanted to get out and address that.

One of the nation's outstanding researchers on AIDS

is Dr. Anthony Fauci.

Dr. Fauci, thank you very much for coming in today.

Anthony Fauci, MD, National Institute of Health,

make us feel better about these anxieties.

It appears that the transmissibility of AIDS is through repeated sexual contact

and/or in IV drug users in sharing needles.

There is absolutely no evidence at all that AIDS can be transmitted

by casual contact, by touching,

by any kind of normal social interactions that you might have with anyone.

So, I think that the fears may be understandable,

but they're not scientifically sound.

One of the issues I had to push back against

is that this was kind of somebody else's disease.

Do you think that maybe the guilt

that the gay community has been dealing with

could be a reason for the breakdown of the immune system?

No.

What is your response to those who say only a small, unsavory group of people

is affected by it?

Therefore, it is not something that those who lead the straight and narrow life

should be as concerned about there.

To say because someone has a particular lifestyle

that they're unsavory, I think is objectionable.

These individuals who are infected,

be they homosexuals or IV drug abusers, are people.

People who deserve compassion, who deserve care and who deserve concern.

We need to distinguish between unfair discrimination

- and fair discrimination. - Oh!

And they are reservoir of a host of contagious diseases.

I'm gonna have to remove the mic and we'll move on down this way.

In the light of that extraordinary outburst,

I think, from a scientific standpoint,

it should be really established so that everybody understands

that there's nothing intrinsic about homosexuality

that has to do with AIDS, and her response was a very good example

of the kind of discrimination that we're talking about.

There's only one source of the AIDS plague,

the homosexual community is committing genocide

and we are not speaking and telling the truth to them.

There's religious groups claiming this is God's revenge

and HIV gave them the excuse to increase their level of hatred

and their level of discrimination.

Some people have been evicted from their homes,

either by their roommates or by their landlords,

because of people's fear of contamination

through their kind of casual social contact.

If one is against the reservoir of the disease,

then he's got to be against the reservoir of the disease,

whether it's cows or monkeys or homosexuals.

The risk for AIDS is not being a homosexual man

and the risk for AIDS is not any of the other groups.

The risk is the behavior. That's a very important thing.

It was an important experience, because it got me

to see beyond the individual patient...

beyond the research and development of the drugs...

what this disease was doing in society.

With some 40,000 reported cases

and 20,000 dead or dying, AIDS remains the gay plague.

There's some similarities with this pandemic

in the sense that people naturally want to look for someone to blame.

We had the greatest year

and then, we got hit with the China plague, right?

We got hit with the China plague.

China has put 40,000,000 Americans out of work and killed 100,000 Americans.

It's really convenient for politicians to have a scapegoat like that,

because if they can blame another country, if they can blame another group of people,

then they can absolve themselves of responsibility.

Tensions over when and how fast to reopen

dominate American life. States and cities weigh two overriding factors.

Economic devastation

and nearly 84,000 deaths in the United States.

When you pull back and the virus is doing this,

it's only gonna do that. It's not gonna turn around and come down.

Some people may think it's gonna be like a light switch,

on and off. You know, we're either out and we're in.

It's just not gonna be that way.

I don't think you're the end-all,

I don't think you're the one person that gets to make a decision.

We can listen to your advice, but there are people on the other side

saying there's not going to be a surge

and that we can safely open the economy and the facts will bear this out.

I have never made myself out to be the end all and only voice of this.

I'm a scientist, a physician and a public health official.

I give advice according to the best scientific evidence.

This phenomena of just telling the truth, you know,

has made him both, an enemy and a rock star, you know, all at once.

I want people to know who they're getting in Tony Fauci.

The head and the heart that comes together in your body is the real deal.

You're on socks, you're on mugs. There's Fauci Friday.

Yeah, the National Institutes of hotness! Just try to stay six feet away.

The man is out there fighting to keep people healthy

and everyone is just, like, "Drop you pants. Show us that PhD."

It's been totally surreal to walk past a bookstore

in my neighborhood and see, like, a candle with my dad's face on it.

It's like, I don't know that that will ever feel...

um, not totally disorienting and strange.

Excuse me, don't go outside without your mask.

Called it Fauci Spring and people kinda freaked out

about this one.

I've just found him very honest, trustworthy. Kind of like a super hero.

It's amusing, it's interesting, but you can't take it seriously,

because then you'll start thinking that you're something that you're not.

However, built into that... are some fun things.

We welcome Dr. Anthony Fauci.

Fauci's throw was just a bit outside.

Unfortunately, it turns out the man, like all of us,

has a flaw.

There's a campaign to make you

the People Magazine Sexiest Man of the Year.

- Why is this happening?

I have become "a symbol for something that isn't really me."

It's something that has been created.

Which, I'm fine with that, as long as it helps people.

But they need to realize that when the world gets back to normal,

for sure, I am not the sexiest man in the world.

In the US, before this pandemic,

if you pushed someone to name a scientist, I bet they couldn't have.

And now they can say Tony Fauci.

But, along with all of this attention and fame came the criticism.

Anthony Fauci is doing blogs,

he's doing Steph Curry's podcasts.

Can't he get on a lab coat and make some progress?

He's running for something. Does anybody know what?

Because, above all, you must never mock

the sainted Anthony Fauci.

Tony's been criticized for a lot of things during this pandemic.

Some of those he deserves, like the mask guidance.

I think that was confusing for people.

In March, Fauci told 60 Minutes

there's no reason to be walking around with a mask.

Well, there was.

He felt he was going by the best of what science offered at the time

and he's obviously been beaten up about it quite a bit.

But it still is something I wonder about.

Early on, the White House Coronavirus Task Force

was told we really have a shortage of masks.

And we didn't know at the time

that there was a lot of asymptomatic spread.

We didn't know that.

Under those circumstances I said, "We shouldn't really be wearing masks."

And then when we found out that 50 percent of the transmissions

occur from someone without symptoms, then it became clear,

holy smokes, we really should be wearing a mask.

There's been questions over the past couple of weeks,

where is Dr. Fauci?

Dr. Fauci's role minimized.

Yeah, apparently he hasn't spoken directly with the President since June second.

We're seeing uptakes again and nobody's hearing from you.

Yeah.

Do you still feel you have some positive influence

through the Task Force or is it just a waste of time now...

- Well... - From the exterior,

it seems like a waste of time and Trump is on a very different direction.

Well, I think you just nailed it there,

because right now everything is about opening the economy

and opening all the states.

To my mind, that's why the turning off

of your voice is such a tragedy.

You know, tell me to shut up... because I keep blogging it...

but if you had a Twitter account, you'd get literally millions of followers

- within the first 24 hours. - So, let me ask you a question.

What does having a Twitter account actually mean?

You've got to type some stuff in and just send it, is that what it is?

Do you got to respond to things? I don't have any minutes.

No, you don't have to respond to anything.

I don't have any minutes in the day.

You're gonna get a million responses...

and you ignore them all

and then you start delivering your classic public health messages,

avoiding politics...

but you've got millions of people listening to you

and it's something the White House wouldn't vet,

as long as you didn't cross into the political realm.

Right.

Here's the bad part. When you do testing to that extent,

you're gonna find more people, you're gonna find more cases.

So I said to my people, "Slow the testing down, please."

So, Dr. Fauci, do you agree with that?

It's the opposite.

We're gonna be doing more testing, not less.

When you want to give the American people confidence

that they can trust the knowledge and the wisdom

coming out the US government. It behooves us to put the scientists

and the doctors front and center.

We're going in the wrong direction.

If you look at the curves of the new cases,

clearly we are not in total control right now.

Well, Dr. Doom himself, spreading more COVID panic

and undermining Trump's agenda.

Honestly, I think Trump needs to send him back to his office

and shut the door and say, "Very nice.

"Thank you so much for your thoughts. We're moving on."

As a country, we went up, came down,

but instead of going all the way down

we plateaued at around 20,000 cases per day.

Trade advisor Peter Navarro wrote this Op-Ed saying,

"Anthony Fauci has been wrong

about everything I have interacted with him on."

What I've been trying to do is to get people to realize

how important it is to do the fundamental public health measures,

because if we don't do that,

we are afraid things could actually get worse.

Why on earth would your Administration be involved in a campaign at this point

to discredit Dr. Fauci?

Because we're not.

If one man from my Administration doesn't like him

because he made a few mistakes.

Look, Dr. Fauci said, "Don't wear masks,"

Dr. Fauci told me not to ban China, it would be a big mistake.

Fire Fauci!

Fire Fauci, fire Fauci, fire Fauci!

Of course he was disturbed by any way

in which these attacks muddied the message

or created a distraction from the real set of issues,

but the more personal stuff that was upsetting to me

and my sisters and my mom.

He, as best as he could and I don't know how he did it,

just put that off the table.

When someone attacks I don't immediately fight back.

That's not my style.

I don't get into the fray.

And over the years, which became decades,

that became my mantra.

Using the Godfather as the great book of philosophy,

it's nothing personal, it's strictly business.

We'll never be silent again.

- We'll never be silent again. - Fight back.

Nineteen thousand people a day.

If 19,000 grandmothers or boy scouts or 11 boy scouts had died,

we'd go bananas in this country.

Murder! Murder! Murder!

The only people in charge of AIDS are incompetent hacks.

You know, the rage is so intense,

what do you do to make a government fight to do something

to save 40,000 people?

My first evidence that there was anger out there...

at the government's response to HIV-AIDS was an article

which had the headline, "An Open Letter To Incompetent Idiot.

"I Call You A Murderer, Dr. Anthony Fauci."

And went on saying just what a complete disaster I was.

I didn't know what I was doing. I was this, I was that.

And I said, "Oh, my God, what did I do to this guy?"

Dr. Anthony Fauci is God in AIDS research.

He's just been inhumane, I guess, is the only thing I can say.

It was written by a man named Larry Kramer,

who was a firebrand that was leading a group called ACT UP.

Act up! Stand tall! It's time for action, City Hall!

If you go ACT UP to a scientist they go...

You know, ACT UP, my God. You know, run away from ACT UP.

The demonstrations are the work of ACT UP.

A group which believes that with 76,000 Americans

already dead as a result of AIDS,

it is imperative to get the message across,

even if people are sometimes given to outrage because of the message.

As the deaths mounted...

there was a realization that if we didn't do something,

we were all going to die and the country would just let us die.

I'll never forget the first meeting.

It was in the West Village. And I went in and there was this energy.

It was just like, it...

It was indescribable. And I felt hopeful for the first time.

None of us had a background in science.

I was a lawyer, somebody else was a graphic designer,

somebody else studied Russian poetry.

Science was not where we came from, but we began to learn.

And... we started having questions about the studies.

I'd probably come over Fauci's name during my own research,

but it hadn't really clicked yet,

but all of a sudden we were talking about Tony Fauci at ACT UP meetings.

Tony Fauci was... the enemy.

For me, I had just lost my partner. I was...

in grief and we needed drugs. We needed them yesterday.

ACT UP's focus was always drugs into bodies.

That's what the motto was.

Make sure that we could find treatment

for HIV and AIDS for people

and make sure that it was accessible to everyone.

AIDS patients breaking the law, in a desperate battle

to save their own lives.

Many are now treating themselves

with medications not yet approved by the government.

We were fighting with the FDA over access to an experimental drug

to treat the pneumonia that was the leading cause of death

amongst people with AIDS.

It was an approved drug already for cancer patients

that had immune suppression and it worked for them.

And Tony said "No, we're not really interested in that.

"We're interested in this drug AZT

and that's where we're gonna put our resources."

About a year later,

I think 16 or 18,000 people with AIDS died of PCP pneumonia.

And we accused him of causing those deaths.

This government isn't equipped to put 10,000 people into a trial.

It is so disorganized.

There are so many committees.

But it could be equipped.

If Tony Fauci were courageous enough to whisper...

I want to stay away from the politics.

In President Bush's ear let's do something about this plague.

It was a little confusing because I, who had been knocking myself out,

trying to do the right thing, was the object of the anger.

But then something happened within me and I said,

"You know, something's going on that I'm missing here."

And that's when I started to really reach out.

It was pretty much the first and only time, I think,

in ACT UP's early history where anybody in government came to us.

ACT UP REP 1:

We invited him to come to an ACT UP meeting.

He knew that he was gonna face an audience that was hostile and distrustful.

ACT UP MEMBER 1:

It was quite a scene. I went up there to listen to them

and to try and explain to them the rationale

for why we were doing what we were doing, even though they did not agree.

ACT UP MEMBER 2:

The criticism, the hostility, it didn't really seem to phase him.

My first impression was that we're dealing with Brooklyn here.

He got a complete grilling and continued the conversation.

We didn't agree on everything in that first meeting,

but their instincts were right.

And that started a series of dialogs

that did not stop the demonstrations.

It's a lie, it's a sham, it won't work!

It's a lie, it's a sham!

Although we were making progress

in coming to some rapprochement, as it were,

they still thought that something wasn't happening quickly enough.

He did not want to do anything that was considered rocking the boat

about scientific norms and the scientific establishment.

If you don't forge ahead, you get accused of being too slow.

I'm just gonna have to do what's right and do my job

and know that this is the right thing for biomedical science,

the right thing for the health of this country.

How you design a clinical trial and how you evaluate those results,

the time it takes to go from the beginning up to the time it actually gets approved

were what you would refer to as sacrosanct processes.

Rigidity was perfection.

The reasons I can't get any of these drugs is because the leadership in this country

has failed to come up with a plan of action.

Bottom line.

The government's AIDS research effort, which he is supposedly in charge of...

isn't producing.

The Federal Government's AIDS research program is flawed.

So, we're going to have a small but tasteful little gathering

at the National Institutes of Health on May 21st.

Storm the NIH.

I called Tony and I said, "We're coming."

And it was game on.

Every 12 minutes someone dies.

A group calling itself ACT UP

wants changes in AIDS research.

Asking for wider and faster testing of AIDS fighting drugs.

Here's your money, NIH! Here's your money, NIH!

Mounted police and others wearing rubber gloves

confronted about 1,000 AIDS activists.

They won't test any of these drugs

that will keep people alive. No Peptide T, no Compound Q.

Anthony Fauci, I piss on you.

The NIH is lying! Women with AIDS are dying!

Their decisions for our women, children, people of color is always no.

Dr. Anthony Fauci and a lot of other hotshot scientists

are having conferences deciding research priorities.

We think we should be deciding the research priorities.

These are the people who know what's going on

because they're dealing with it every day.

I started to put myself into their shoes

and finally I realized what they really wanted

is to be part of the process.

I have a disease. I'm gonna be dead in X number of months.

You've just given me a plan that something is gonna happen

in three years.

Thank you very much, but I'm gonna be dead.

So we need to do a little bit more about that.

Typical day at the NIH watching people die!

And I started to feel,

and my staff thought I was completely nuts...

almost an affinity... to them.

I pulled a banner out of my backpack and I'm starting to tape it up

and then all of a sudden, all these cops are lifting each other up.

They're angry that they've been fooled.

And they lower me down into the arms of all the other cops.

And the commander says, "Take him through the building."

Halfway down the hall I see a very familiar sight.

A short man in a white coat.

And, uh, he goes... "Peter?"

And Peter looks me in the eye, he says, "Tony, I did it. I got arrested.

"I told you I'd get arrested."

And the cop looks at me and says, "What the shit is going on here?

"Who is this guy? He's your friend?"

Because he knows this is the Director of the Building

and, like, "Who the hell is this guy I'm arresting?"

We completely befuddled the police.

Tony understood that what we were doing was political theater

to move an issue along.

He never stopped being open.

He never said, "The way you treated me at that demonstration,

"I'm never gonna talk to you people again."

Instead, it was exactly the opposite. It's "We need to talk more."

There was a lot of push back on the part of some of my own staff,

that I was compromising the scientific process.

You can't have activists involved in our meetings

where we discuss the design of a clinical trial.

By that summer, with the International AIDS Conference

about to happen in San Francisco,

the relationship between the scientific establishment

and ACT UP was at a breaking point.

About 100 protesters have already been arrested

at the International AIDS Conference that began today in San Francisco.

Researchers feel that they're undervalued.

If they feel that they're gonna be demonstrated against,

they'll just get out and do their work in cancer

and Alzheimer's disease and heart, what have you.

You can beat them down by this constant harassment.

Larry Kramer called for riots. It was getting out of hand.

And then the organizers of the conference tried to placate ACT UP.

They said "If you want to speak, it's yours."

Exactly 30 days ago, all of us here in the front

stood up for what we believed in and vocalized our commitment

on the beautiful grounds of the National Institutes of Health.

When we make mistakes, what's the fallout?

Some people become offended and begin to hate ACT UP.

Whereas, when government or scientific community makes a mistake,

thousands of people can die.

It became patently clear to me that they were making absolute sense.

It gives me great pleasure to welcome Dr. Fauci.

It's an honor to have him here.

AIDS in the 1990s has revolutionized the relationship

between the public and scientists.

The politically charged nature of the epidemic has put researchers

under an extraordinary degree of public scrutiny.

They are confronted with the accusation by some that they are not doing enough

and that they are moving too slowly.

I'm not finished.

The scientific process is often seen as overly restrictive

and even an impediment to solution.

The most vocal, provocative and articulate groups among these

are the AIDS Activists.

Some of them are better informed than many scientists can possibly imagine.

Yet they are sometimes incorrect.

Believe it or not.

However, in the interactions

between physicians, scientists and activists,

mistakes have been made by both sides.

Activists are mistaken when they assume that scientists do not care about them.

This is devastating to a physician scientist

who has devoted years to AIDS research,

particularly when they themselves

see so many of their own patients suffering and dying.

On the other hand, scientists cannot dismiss activists

merely on the basis of the fact that they are not trained scientists.

Activists bring a very special insight into the disease

that they can actually be helpful

in the way that we design our scientific approaches.

We must join together, for together we a formidable force

with a common goal.

We must never lose sight of the fact that the people whom we serve

are the HIV infected people throughout the world. Thank you.

During that speech, I'm saying something

and you have the activists clap.

Then I say something and the scientists clap.

The beauty of it is that... at the end of it, everybody was clapping.

The AIDS activists went from being the adversaries

to actually the people who were sitting down

at the table with us discussing what is happening.

And that is a huge shift. That changed everything.

We were able to redesign clinical trials for HIV.

Black people, Brown people, pregnant women,

young people were included.

I'm putting myself at your disposal now. If I don't have an answer for it...

And your thinking, has it changed your approach

to research on life threatening disease?

Rather than a real abrupt change, I think it's an evolution.

You try harder to put yourself into the position of a patient.

This whole notion of understanding that we have a value

in those discussions

changed the shape of clinical research and drug development.

And it went well beyond AIDS.

- What do we want? - A cure!

- When do we want it? - Now!

Now it happens in cancer and it happens in Alzheimer's

and it happens in all these different disease areas.

Science has realized

you need to include these voices in the process

because it makes for better science.

And Tony is the one who opened that door.

We're the ones who knocked on that door and pushed that door

and barged our way in.

But Tony understood the value of it early on.

The difference now is that divisiveness

is dominating COVID-19.

I don't see them ever clapping together.

I think we're gonna get through it.

But we're gonna get through it in spite of this divisiveness

and this politicization.

We're not gonna get through it because of it.

- Peter! - Hey. How are you?

Oh, I'm all right.

These fucking dark web people

- are really, really getting bad. - All right.

They're really, really harassing Chris.

One of them called up... with violent threats,

like eight times today on her cell phone

until she figured I've got to just change my cell phone.

You know, they're harassing my daughters constantly,

which it really bothers me more than anything else.

Remind her that almost all of them are cowards.

- Yeah. - All just...

Well, that's what my Secret Service detail says.

- They say... I mean... - Yeah.

Because they have a lot of experience with this.

And, you know, they don't want to make light of it,

but they say that most of them are just a bunch of fricking cowards.

They want to scare you all.

- Right. - They want you to back down.

Right.

When COVID hit, at first, it was like, oh, my God,

give Tony space while he does his thing.

Uh, don't overwhelm him.

Let's try to figure out what's going wrong.

And then when he became this target,

I just kept checking in.

For me and my sisters this was really, really new territory.

We heard about what he went through in the HIV AIDS pandemic.

Like seeing signs, you know, "Fauci is a murderer."

And I remember asking him, like, "Is this what it was like?

"Was I just not old enough to understand, but this is actually what it was like?"

And, you know, his response is something like,

"You can't even compare the two. This is so beyond the beyond."

The whole atmosphere...

strains your concept of what normality is.

You know, and just when you think everything is okay,

I was sitting at my desk and I opened up a letter

and a puff of powder came up.

It was on my shirt, my tie, my pants, my hands and my chin.

The first thing I thought of was,

"Holy shit, why did I open up this letter?"

And then the options started to crystallize in my mind.

One, it's a hoax.

Two, it's anthrax and I'm gonna get sick,

but I'm gonna take Cipro and I'm gonna be okay.

Or three, it's Ricin and I'm freakin' dead.

Fortunately, it turned out to be a hoax.

My sisters and I were really worried.

And that was...

It continues to be really disturbing, really unsettling.

I don't understand the hate that people have.

And the hate that leads them to do something

that could hurt somebody or kill somebody.

I mean, it sort of... reduces my trust in humanity

in a way that is probably impossible to measure.

But certainly, I felt it.

I never, for a moment, thought that I should resign.

I just never thought about it.

I just said to myself...

focus on what you're trying to do.

Is what you're trying to do more important than all of this other peripheral crap?

If it is, just focus like a laser and go for it.

Okay.

I just realized that I haven't had a good night's sleep

in a very, very long time.

I'm waiting until the first person enters into the phase three trial...

and then, I'll have a good night's sleep, so.

That will be Moderna, mRNA.

No, no. I know that, but I'm holding my breath

until that happens.

It must be something psychological.

I keep waking up at 2:30 'til quarter to three in the morning.

Despite this extraordinary divisiveness...

it was very clear we were dealing with a common enemy

and the common enemy was the virus.

I really do hope that somehow or other there is a realization

that we can't go on this way,

because it's a lesson that will be, I think, important for us

to adequately respond to the next outbreak,

which inevitably will occur.

Maybe not in my lifetime, maybe it will, but it will occur.

My dad said on TV, on the radio, to me, to my mom,

to my sisters, like, "We're gonna get through it."

And he's held that with him through this whole thing,

when so many people, the whole country,

so many of us have struggled to think, are we ever gonna get through this thing?

- Are you all set? - I know.

Somehow he's been able to hold onto that

because he's lived in times where it felt like a thing couldn't end.

The search for an AIDS vaccine...

that hope now has dimmed.

More than a decade into the AIDS epidemic, we're still nowhere close to a cure.

Since the late '80s, we've seen

pretty splashy reports in the media

about drugs that worked well in the test tube

and then find out in a few months that they did not work in people.

This is the bitter new reality of AIDS.

There are more drugs around to prolong patients' lives,

but their deaths are more excruciating than ever.

The biomedical research community is suffering,

for not having solved the problem.

Our country says, "Why can't you guys do this?"

It is conceivable that we will never get a vaccine.

I think we have to face that reality.

People sometimes hesitate to talk about that

because it gets taken out of context and people say well, they're giving up.

No-one is giving up.

There were a number of studies that were going on

that were funded by my institute.

We had gradual progress...

but never the home run.

And then, in 1996, there are a couple of studies

that incorporated protease inhibitors as one of three drugs

that were given in combination.

On Close Up this morning,

reports of possible new treatments for AIDS.

AIDS drugs known as protease inhibitors

may actually eliminate the AIDS virus in human tissue.

I'd had the pneumonias and I was getting skinnier...

and I didn't have much fight left in me.

And I got down here with NIH in 1995

and I was one of the first people in the country

that was given the cocktail.

And seven days later, my numbers had started to change.

And my T cells started to rise and...

my viral burden started to go down.

I just need a second. Uh...

Um...

That was the moment that changed my life.

I started getting better.

Immune systems are restoring back to normalcy,

the virus is disappearing.

It's gotten to levels so low, it can't even be found.

It's called the AIDS cocktail.

And the success of the cocktail is the first real sign

that the AIDS epidemic may not be invincible.

It really was, like, the most amazing thing

to go from a physician to terminally ill patients

to a physician who could prevent people from dying.

It's the best we've seen thus far with any drugs.

The effects are profound.

I'm certain they're going to be translated into positive clinical benefits.

I no longer feel as though I'm dying, I no longer crave it.

I don't have contingency plans to end my life.

I'm not in that mode at all. I'm back among the living.

I'm a grandmother, but that's only one grandchild.

I still have two other children that don't have children.

You know, I want a house full.

And if I keep taking my medicine I'm gonna be here

to rock every single one of them on my lap.

It's nice to have new things down the road to look forward to.

Yeah, I feel like I'm 16 again, it's great.

Every birthday since I've been 35...

there isn't one birthday, not one,

that I don't thank him for what he has done for me.

My dad turned 80 this year and it was the first birthday,

Christmas Eve, Christmas that we weren't all together.

Since I was a little kid,

I've often taken the role of...

you know, telling him, like, "You have to take a break.

"You have to slow down. You have to take care of yourself."

But I saw that as long as the COVID pandemic

was happening, he was gonna be all in.

So, I tried to be there for him in a different kind of way from afar.

Checking in with him, calling him, sending him text messages of birds,

sending him pictures of my dog. Something to keep him going.

Right now, what I'm going through...

is kind of like a diabolical repeat...

of what went on back when they were children growing up.

But now they're adults and they see what I'm going through...

and what Chris is going through.

And... they are just amazingly supportive

and proud.

- Hi, Ali. - Hey, Ali, babe. Hey, Jane.

- Megan's there too. - Hey, Megan D.

Hi, sweet thing. I love you.

- I love you too. - Take care.

I wish you guys were here.

As much as I've given my dad a hard time my whole life,

I'm so grateful to see an example of what it means

to stay committed to who you are and stay committed to what you believe in.

With HIV AIDS,

when we finally nailed down the triple combination

that brought down the level of virus to below detectable,

it was close to euphoria.

People were going back

to what turned out to be a semi normal existence.

But that then shined a bright light on the disparity

between the developed world and the developing world.

Inequality raises its head in many different ways in our world.

HIV AIDS, it was very clear...

we could get those pills for those people or not.

What would that cost to give patients the drugs that they need?

Six hundred US dollars per month.

And a man like this, how much would he make a month?

Maybe five, ten dollars.

The perspective was, we'll never be able to do that in Africa,

for all sorts of crazy reasons.

Not enough money, people wouldn't take medications,

it's impossible.

These drugs have to be administered during a certain sequence

at a time during the day

and when you say, "Take it at ten o'clock."

People will say, "What do you mean by ten o'clock?"

If you've traveled rural Africa, you know this.

This is not a criticism, just a different world.

People do not know what watches and clocks are.

They do not use Western means for telling the time. They use the sun.

Early in my Administration, Condi Rice said "Mr. President,

"are you aware there's a pandemic destroying an entire generation of people

in the continent of Africa?"

I said, "We need to do something about it."

People in my Administration whose judgment I trust said, you know,

"Unleash Fauci."

Tony Fauci doesn't come in the Oval Office and say,

"I'm gonna make you look good politically."

He's not a politician.

Tony Fauci says, "I think we can solve this problem.

"Here are the facts,

and here's my recommendation for a way forward."

So, President Bush told me, "Go to Africa

and scout it out. See if there's something that we can do."

In Uganda, what we saw was, I believe,

what many people think would not be able to be effected...

and that is groups of volunteers on motorcycles and jeeps

going into the very, very rural areas, into the homes of people

and delivering drugs.

I remember going into a thatched hut.

"How are you doing?" "Fine."

"You're taking your medicines?" "Yes, I'm taking them very regularly."

"You understand what the medicine is doing?"

"Yes, it's blocking the virus that's killing my CD4 cells."

Like, what?

All of this stuff that people were saying,

that Africans don't have whatever it is it takes

to understand the importance of taking their drug regularly

was clearly, you know, unmitigated bullshit.

We put together a model that was a phenomenally expanded version

of what Peter Mugyenyi was already doing.

He had people delivering drugs that weren't even nurses

on motorcycles into the bush. You know, hundreds of miles away.

And people would take the drug.

They knew what they were doing. You could get their viral load down.

All you needed to do was to give them the drugs.

So, I put forth to the president a 15 billion dollar program called PEPFAR.

The President's Emergency Plan For AIDS Relief.

I ask the Congress to commit 15 billion dollars

over the next five years,

including nearly ten billion dollars in new money

to turn the tide against AIDS in the most afflicted nations of Africa

and the Caribbean.

Fifteen billion dollars. Boom! It was just the most magnificent moment,

uh, because I knew what that really meant.

We're talking about preventing seven million infections.

In other words, seven million people who otherwise would have gotten infected

and with no therapy would have died.

PEPFAR was a huge milestone,

this, you know, miraculous AIDS intervention

that... continues to save tens of millions of lives.

It's the largest bilateral program in health

ever created anywhere

and Tony was an early architect of it and it changed the world.

Tony's been made the size of the tasks he takes on.

He becomes the size of the challenge he faces each time.

AIDS is one of the most devastating scourges in human history.

The US President's Emergency Plan For AIDS Relief has done heroic work

in making AIDS drugs available to those who need them.

Striving for universal access to AIDS therapies

is a public health and moral imperative that should be embraced by all.

I mean that, to me, is, you know, one of the great success stories

in all of medicine.

When you have a global pandemic,

you absolutely need a global solution.

To think that you can take care of yourself

without taking care of the rest of the world is just folly.

What the NIH has accomplished, can accomplish and will accomplish,

to me, that's the embodiment of the American spirit.

The experience that you can do anything if you put your mind to it, anything.

- Hi, Dr. Azar. - Hi, guys.

- Hi, Dr. Fauci. - These are out health care workers.

- Good morning, Dr. Fauci. - How are you doing?

- Good. How are you? - And one behind us here.

I'm good.

And I have to take one with you. My daughter will kill me if I don't.

Having lived through this extraordinary, historic experience,

it just confirms it's always the sustained investment in science

that rises to the occasion.

It is fitting that we gather here today on NIH campus

to administer vaccines designed to battle COVID-19.

The young people in medicine really need to understand

what is possible

when the biomedical research community of this country and the world

decides that they're going after a problem in a very serious way.

Next we have Dr. Tony Fauci.

Many in our nation are saying

if Dr. Fauci gets the vaccine, I'm gonna get the vaccine.

So, tell us a little bit why it's important?

Well, to me, it's important for two reasons.

One is that I'm an attending physician here on the staff

at the National Institutes of Health Clinical Center

and so I do see patients. But, as important, or more important,

is as a symbol to the rest of the country that I feel extreme confidence

in the safety and the efficacy of this vaccine

and I want to encourage everyone who has the opportunity

to get vaccinated so that we can have a veil of protection over this country

that would end this pandemic.

Thank you, Dr. Fauci for coming today.

- Any last minute questions, concerns? - No.

Thank you so much.

Bye, Dr. Fauci.

Dr. Fauci, you know him well,

getting this vaccine, saying how important it is

to show the American people it is safe.

What a moment for the man who played such a role

in developing this vaccine, to get the vaccine himself.

Excellent.

In March 2020,

when we were first envisioning vaccines for this coronavirus,

nobody thought that we would have them by the end of the year.

How do you feel, Tony?

Nothing. Feeling good.

- Feeling good. - Excellent.

There have been many times in previous administrations

where people have not wanted to fund the NIH quite as much

because they thought, "well, this is just a bunch of scientists

doing lab work. How does that help the regular person?"

This is how it helps the regular person.

Thank you.

A public servant is somebody who gives their skill,

their intellect, their experience to the people of the United States.

You don't do it because you want to make money,

you don't do it for the glory. You do it because you care.

The two most devastating pandemics

in the last 100 years

are, sort of, like bookends on my career and my life.

When you're involved in a race to stop a horrible disease...

you always feel you're not doing things quickly enough... or well enough.

You know, it just reminds me so much of when we were struggling

to develop effective therapies for HIV.

If we had just gotten it

a day earlier, a week earlier, a month earlier...

these number of people would not have died.

One of the most mysterious aspects of our universe

is how viruses have transformed our civilization.

There was a Nobel Prize-winning bacteriologist

named Joshua Lederberg, who says, "It's a never-ending battle

"between viruses' spectacular genetic capability,

"and our wits."

As someone at my age and my stage in life,

it's natural to look ahead and say,

"What are my children gonna be faced with?"

And the one thing I can hope for... really hope for,

is that emerging infections don't inevitably become pandemics.

I am optimistic that the lessons that we've learned

will prevent that from happening.

I hope that if historians look back...

if they ever would wanna look back...

at what I've done, and my life.

Maybe somebody says, "Hey, that guy was pretty good."