Speaker 1: Bloomberg Audio Studios, Podcasts, radio news.
Speaker 2: You're listening to Bloomberg Business Week with Carol Messer and
Speaker 2: Tim Stenebek on Bloomberg Radio and Television.
Speaker 3: It is Bloomberg Business Week.
Speaker 2: Well.
Speaker 3: Doctor Anthony Fauci became a household name during the COVID pandemic. However,
Speaker 3: his journey to becoming the top infectious disease doctor in
Speaker 3: the US started decades before, and really to his childhood
Speaker 3: in Brooklyn, New York, living with his family above his
Speaker 3: dad's pharmacy, Fauci Pharmacy.
Speaker 1: He was a basketball player in high school, went on
Speaker 1: to become a doctor, graduating top of his class at
Speaker 1: Cornell Medical. Spent fifty four years at the National Institutes
Speaker 1: of HEW thirty eight as a director of the National
Speaker 1: Institutes of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. During that time, he
Speaker 1: advised seven presidents on various diseases including AIDS, Ebola, SARS,
Speaker 1: COVID nineteen, and more. He writes about it all in
Speaker 1: his memoir It's Just Out on Call, a Doctor's Journey
Speaker 1: in Public Service. Doctor Fauci is also a Distinguished University
Speaker 1: Professor h Georgetown, and he joins US Night Right Now
Speaker 1: on Bloomberg BusinessWeek in New York City. Doctor Fauci, nice
Speaker 1: to have you here with us. How are you.
Speaker 2: I'm well, thank you, thank you for having me.
Speaker 1: Well, it's great to have you here. We've all been
Speaker 1: talking about your book, and you know, there's a lot
Speaker 1: about COVID, but there's a lot more about AIDS which
Speaker 1: we want to get into. But the first thing we
Speaker 1: want to get into is you kept a lot of notes,
Speaker 1: and I'm curious, we are curious what it was like
Speaker 1: going through that those notes, putting this book together, going
Speaker 1: back to you know, your notes on the AIDS crisis,
Speaker 1: or STARS or COVID for that matter, anything anytime in
Speaker 1: particular that made you stop, that really took you back
Speaker 1: in a big way.
Speaker 4: Well, you know, when you remember things in your mind
Speaker 4: forty years down the pike, and you go back over
Speaker 4: some of the notes that you made back in very
Speaker 4: stressful times, like those those terrible early years of HIV,
Speaker 4: when I was spending most of my time taking.
Speaker 2: Care of desperately ill, mostly young, otherwise previously healthy gay
Speaker 2: men who were suffering terribly and then almost inevitably dying.
Speaker 2: It really brings back, you know what I've described, and
Speaker 2: I mean that, honestly is almost a post traumatic stress
Speaker 2: feeling of my goodness, I went through that, and I
Speaker 2: had to suppress all of those feelings. And then when
Speaker 2: you start to write your memoir, in order to write
Speaker 2: it properly, you have to go back and re examine
Speaker 2: those experiences and re examine those feelings. So, you know,
Speaker 2: what I went through was a journey, But writing the
Speaker 2: memoir was itself a journey for me.
Speaker 3: You know. I want to stay on this topic here
Speaker 3: because I think it's fair to say there's a generation
Speaker 3: out there that really has no idea about the AIDS
Speaker 3: health crisis, and we should remind people there have been
Speaker 3: more than eighty six million HIV infections throughout the world,
Speaker 3: forty million deaths. Some news today about Guiliad Sciences experimental
Speaker 3: twice yearly shot preventing one hundred percent of HIV cases
Speaker 3: in women and adolescent girls in Africa. It's the first
Speaker 3: successful big trial of what's hoped to become a powerful
Speaker 3: new drug regimen for fending off the virus. There's a
Speaker 3: part in your book where you write about a visit
Speaker 3: to the White House in nineteen ninety six, nearly thirty
Speaker 3: years ago, when then President Clinton asked you why there
Speaker 3: was no HIV vaccine. Why is an HIV vaccine still
Speaker 3: so elusive.
Speaker 2: Well, it's a very unusual virus in which the body,
Speaker 2: for reasons we still don't completely understand, does not make
Speaker 2: an adequate immune response to protect from or even clear
Speaker 2: the virus from the body. Most every other pathogen that
Speaker 2: we get infected with mankind civilization, even things that have
Speaker 2: a fair degree of mortality like smallpox and measles and
Speaker 2: then the crypt effective polio. At the end of the day,
Speaker 2: most people clear those viruses from the body, and the
Speaker 2: body's immune response serves as a model for how you
Speaker 2: should make a vaccine to protect a person who's uninfected
Speaker 2: from getting infected. But we don't have that kind of
Speaker 2: a situation with HIV because once a person's infected, there
Speaker 2: are virtually no instances that are documented of someone who's
Speaker 2: actually spontaneously cleared the virus. There's a very small percentage
Speaker 2: of elite controllers who can control the virus, but there's
Speaker 2: no real evidence of anyone actually on their own, through
Speaker 2: their own immune system, clearing the virus. That's a very
Speaker 2: high bar for a vaccine to be able to do
Speaker 2: because you want to do better than what even natural
Speaker 2: infection does. And that's the reason why, among all the
Speaker 2: difficult diseases, we just don't yet. I think we may
Speaker 2: get it because science will figure out a way to
Speaker 2: do it, but it's been very difficult because of the
Speaker 2: unique nature of HIV.
Speaker 1: I'm always amazed at doctors who are in very difficult
Speaker 1: situations and then but stay very level headed and stay cool.
Speaker 1: And you have to, I would assume, But I do
Speaker 1: think about your time with HIV and AIDS. You know
Speaker 1: victims ultimately, you know, because you write your book, you
Speaker 1: think of the years from eighty two into the late
Speaker 1: nineteen eighties as the dark years of your medical career.
Speaker 1: I mean, you got to know a lot of these patients.
Speaker 1: How I just can't even imagine how difficult it was.
Speaker 2: Well, it was terribly difficult, I mean, and it was
Speaker 2: even made more difficult by the contrast with what I
Speaker 2: had been doing in the prior nine years before we
Speaker 2: started seeing individuals with HIV, before it was even known
Speaker 2: to be HIV in nineteen eighty one, My career had
Speaker 2: been quite successful, you know, parenthetically in developing therapies for
Speaker 2: inflammatory diseases and order immune diseases, and we developed some
Speaker 2: protocols that had diseases that were formally fatal have ninety
Speaker 2: ninety three ninety five percent remission rates. So we were
Speaker 2: on a real high, as it were, for accomplishments, and
Speaker 2: then all of a sudden, you devote the rest of
Speaker 2: your medical career of taking individuals taking care of individuals
Speaker 2: to a disease. For the first several years, essentially all
Speaker 2: of our patients died with very very few exceptions. And
Speaker 2: you're right, you do get to know them, you develop
Speaker 2: a really good patient physician relationship, and you really care
Speaker 2: about them. I mean, you know, part of the art
Speaker 2: of the art and science of medicine is to care
Speaker 2: for your patients, not only care for their medical issues,
Speaker 2: but to about them. And that was very tough, and
Speaker 2: it was several years because remember we started I did
Speaker 2: started taking care of persons with HIV in the fall
Speaker 2: of nineteen eighty one, very soon after the first cases
Speaker 2: were recognized, and then we did not get truly addic
Speaker 2: with therapy until nineteen ninety six. We got the beginnings
Speaker 2: of some therapy which kind of slowed the disease down.
Speaker 2: Starting in nineteen eighty seven with AZT, But it wasn't
Speaker 2: until the triple combination cocktail that showed that you could
Speaker 2: durably suppress virus to below detective level. But that wasn't
Speaker 2: until nineteen ninety six, So those were really difficult times.
Speaker 3: We're speaking with doctor Anthony Fauci, who's now a distinguished
Speaker 3: university professor at Georgetown. His new book out now. It's
Speaker 3: called On Call, A Doctor's Journey in Public Service.
Speaker 1: Doctor Fauci. In the book, you write about how former
Speaker 1: President Donald Trump would ask, maybe after a tense moment
Speaker 1: or maybe an argument, are we okay? You know, and
Speaker 1: would message, you know, messaging would come back from his
Speaker 1: team or even Vice President my pensis team too, that
Speaker 1: they love you, you know, again, after maybe some tense moments.
Speaker 1: You've served seven presidents during your tenure, starting with Ronald Reagan,
Speaker 1: as we said earlier, all the way to President Biden.
Speaker 1: Are all presidential relationships complicated or was just that one
Speaker 1: in particular? Yeah?
Speaker 2: No, No, this was a very and as I mentioned
Speaker 2: explicitly in the memoir, this was a complicated relationship, very
Speaker 2: unique relationship when you compare it with the relationship with
Speaker 2: other presidents. Because we did in the beginning. I mean,
Speaker 2: even though right now the people who are in the
Speaker 2: Trump camp, you know, are very hostile to me. I
Speaker 2: had a very good relationship with President Trump, and we
Speaker 2: related well to each other. I describe it in the memoir.
Speaker 2: I don't know whether it was the rapport that two
Speaker 2: people you know, who grew up in New York City
Speaker 2: to me in Brooklyn, and him and Queens had that
Speaker 2: kind of New York swagger relationship with each other. And
Speaker 2: it really was fine until I had to because of
Speaker 2: the fact that he was starting to say things that
Speaker 2: were just not correct from a public health and a
Speaker 2: scientific and medical standpoint, and I was put in a
Speaker 2: very difficult position, which I did not like, but I
Speaker 2: had to do it to preserve my own integrity as
Speaker 2: well as fulfill my responsibilities to the general public. To
Speaker 2: have to contradict him in a public way when I
Speaker 2: was asked publicly, is it going to go away like magic?
Speaker 2: And does hydroxychlorican work? Which it doesn't and it can
Speaker 2: actually harm you. That's when the relationship started to fray.
Speaker 2: And even when it did start to fray, I don't
Speaker 2: think that he wanted to have conflict with me, nor
Speaker 2: did I want to have conflict within.
Speaker 3: Well, speaking of inflict for better or for worse, You've
Speaker 3: become certainly a lightning rod in the dialogue about public
Speaker 3: health and in the dialogue about COVID. And I'm wondering
Speaker 3: if you have any regrets about your time at the
Speaker 3: as the nation's top doctor, in recommendations, in recommending school closures,
Speaker 3: anything like that in hindsight, given what we know now.
Speaker 2: Well, first thing, that we were dealing with a historic
Speaker 2: catastrophic pandemic that ultimately killed one point two million Americans
Speaker 2: and more than seven million and probably closer to twenty
Speaker 2: million worldwide at the time, that we had to have
Speaker 2: that physical distancing and that's slowing down it. We used
Speaker 2: to call it flatten the curve when the recommendations, and
Speaker 2: you know, most people, because I was the communicator of that,
Speaker 2: because I had been communicating with the public for four
Speaker 2: decades about outbreaks that I was communicating with the public,
Speaker 2: there was the misinterpretation, understandably that I was making all
Speaker 2: the policy about doing things like shutting down and having
Speaker 2: physical distancing. I think at the time, when you make
Speaker 2: those decisions, you do it because you want to save lives.
Speaker 2: What the perfect decisions, No would you like to have
Speaker 2: done a better job. Of course, none of us did
Speaker 2: it perfectly, but the idea about at least slowing down
Speaker 2: and closing things for a while was the right decision
Speaker 2: with masks, with shutting down with schools. The issue that
Speaker 2: we need to re examine importantly is how long you
Speaker 2: did that. And I think that's what we need to
Speaker 2: re examine, because if you look back, I was the
Speaker 2: one that said we should open the schools as quickly
Speaker 2: and safely as we possibly could, because there is collateral
Speaker 2: damage when you keep schools closed for a long period
Speaker 2: of time.
Speaker 1: We only have about a couple of minutes left here.
Speaker 1: I am curious what you think the big health crisis
Speaker 1: will be the US Surgeon General is warning about, you know,
Speaker 1: or what's put a warning on social media? For example,
Speaker 1: you know we're talking about flesh eating bacteria in Japan.
Speaker 1: What do you think is the next big health crisis
Speaker 1: and are we prepared for it?
Speaker 2: Well, you know, there are health crisises that are infectious diseases,
Speaker 2: which is my lane. I still think that we have
Speaker 2: to be very careful to be prepared better and prepared
Speaker 2: to respond to the inevitability of another pandemic of an
Speaker 2: infectious diseases, because history has taught us that we've had
Speaker 2: pandemics since before recorded history, and we've had it in
Speaker 2: our own lifetime with COVID, and one hundred years ago
Speaker 2: we had it with the nineteen eighteen pandemic of influenzas.
Speaker 2: So my feeling is that the thing that would be
Speaker 2: most abrupt and surprising would be another pandemic. But you
Speaker 2: can't predict that because pandemics are not predictable. But there
Speaker 2: are a lot of other health see, some of which
Speaker 2: you mentioned yourself. I mean, I think the epidemic of
Speaker 2: obesit in this country. I think the mental health crises,
Speaker 2: the issue with fentenol and other narcotics that are killing
Speaker 2: so many people. Those are the things that we need
Speaker 2: to address.
Speaker 1: Well, doctor Fauci, I appreciate getting some time with you.
Speaker 1: Thank you so much, Doctor Anthony Fauci. His new memoir
Speaker 1: on Call, A Doctor's Journey in Public Service not new,
Speaker 1: it's his memoir. It is just out