FAUCI DIARY ARCHIVE — Tuesday, December 15, 2020 https://faucisdiary.com/diary/2020-12-15 Text below is verbatim from the released PDFs, with the original line breaks. ============================================================================== DIARY ENTRY — Tuesday, December 15, 2020 Source: Tony's Diary Package, pp. 534–537 of 2026.07.24_Tonys-Diary-Package.pdf Words: 924 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Global – 71,400,000/1,600,000; USA – 16,300,000/300,000 Brian Morgenstern is the new White House media person who seems to have taken over from Alyssa Farah. He has been OK with getting me out there, but there was a recent issue where Jon Karl (ABC) has been asking for me a lot and not getting approved. Jon is rather pissed. Jared Kushner called to congratulate and thank me for our efforts to develop safe and effective vaccines for COVID-19. PRESS: ABC - Good Morning America with George Stephanopoulos; NPR “Morning Edition” with Rachel Martin; VOX (Online TV) – “Today Explained” with Sean Rameswaram; Nature’s 10: ten people who helped shape science in 2020 • Anthony Fauci: Science’s defender A storied US doctor became his nation’s conscience on COVID-19 even as detractors threatened his life. By Heidi Ledford Credit: Al Drago/Getty In his more than 40-year career as an infectious-disease researcher, Anthony Fauci has been hailed as a hero and damned as a murderer. His most dedicated fans have created baseball cards and bobble-head dolls in his likeness, whereas others have issued death threats and harassed his children. As head of the US National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) in Bethesda, Maryland, Fauci has guided six presidents and an anxious nation through fears of bioweapon attacks and outbreaks of HIV, Ebola and Zika. Now, his role advising the government and communicating to the public during the coronavirus pandemic has made him the nation’s doctor. He has offered guidance on the US response to the outbreak, often in conflict with the wishes of President Donald Trump, and he has made time to treat individuals with COVID-19 and HIV in the clinic. “Seeing the patient really gives you a different feel for what the disease is,” says Fauci, who works 18 hours a day, 7 days a week. The scale of the COVID-19 pandemic — and the politicization of the public-health response to it — has forced Fauci to go far beyond anything he’s done before, says epidemiologist Michael Osterholm, director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis. “He has been a very key part of trying to help the public understand what the science means and what we can do about it — and that includes, of course, our elected leaders,” says Osterholm. Those efforts were met with resistance, but Fauci is no stranger to friction. At the height of the AIDS epidemic, in 1988, playwright Larry Kramer called Fauci a “murderer” and an “incompetent idiot” on the cover of the San Francisco Examiner magazine. Kramer and other AIDS activists felt that the NIAID’s clinical trials for HIV drugs were moving at a glacial pace while thousands of people were dying. When a group gathered outside his office to protest, Fauci invited some in for a chat. Over time, he built a relationship with them that would lead to changes in the way people with AIDS got access to experimental drugs. It was a revolutionary approach at a time when people with a disease had little say in the science aimed at treating them. “That was a tough period,” he says. “There were many scientists who thought that I was caving in”. Warm but blunt, with a pronounced Brooklyn accent, he has often worked well with political leaders. Former US president George H. W. Bush called him a hero for his work on AIDS, and Fauci worked with his son, former president George W. Bush, to design the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR), a global programme to provide treatment for people with HIV. But this year, his staid and steady advocacy for public-health measures to slow the spread of COVID-19 earned him stiff criticisms from President Donald Trump and others who were eager to play down the severity of the pandemic and get the US economy restarted. Trump has suggested that he might fire the scientist, and a stream of vitriol has poured from some of the president’s followers. Steve Bannon, a former Trump adviser, said that he would like to see Fauci’s head on a pike outside the White House. Fauci now has federal guards overseeing his security. The threats made him “more pissed off than afraid”, he says. “I’m out there trying to give a public-health message to save people’s lives.” But some researchers were also frustrated with Fauci’s public performance. He often stood next to Trump during press briefings as the president repeatedly misrepresented the severity of the pandemic. Although Fauci sometimes contradicted Trump, he did not directly confront the president. Such briefings stopped in April. Fauci has since become more outspoken, says Mark Harrington, executive director of Treatment Action Group, a New York City think tank that focuses on the treatment and prevention of AIDS, tuberculosis and hepatitis C virus. “He’s been speaking truth to power for the last few months in a way that none of the other people in the task force or federal government have been doing,” Harrington says. Fauci, who turns 80 in December, has no plans to retire soon. He has agreed to stay on at the NIAID and to serve as president-elect Joe Biden’s chief medical adviser. Osterholm says he expects Fauci to continue to have an active role in front of the cameras. But Harrington is looking forward to the day when Fauci can focus his attention again on other pressing concerns, such as HIV and hepatitis C. “He needs to be able to do his day job,” he says. “It’s a big job.”