Dr. Anthony Fauci, former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, addresses the audience during a Richmond Forum appearance at the University of Richmond on Saturday.
P. Kevin Morley
Dr. Anthony Fauci spoke Saturday, March 16 at the Richmond Forum.
Dr. Anthony Fauci led successful efforts to save lives during the AIDS and COVID-19 pandemics.
But unfortunately, there’s no vaccine for the raging epidemic of misinformation and disinformation poisoning the minds of so many Americans. Fauci, in a Saturday evening conversation titled “For the Greater Good,” told a Richmond Forum audience that this condition is hazardous to our nation’s health.
“We’re living in an era now, like it or not, where we have the normalization of untruths. Where there’s so much misinformation and disinformation out there that the general public understandably but tragically shrugs their shoulders and say, ‘You know, we don’t know what’s true,’” he said. “And when nothing is true and facts mean nothing, that’s the first step toward the dissolution of our democracy.”
Fauci, the former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), knows about the normalization of lies. Despite five decades of public service combating public health emergencies, he has been vilified to the point of receiving death threats. This vitriol reinforces the notion that the pandemic triggered a mental health crisis or resurfaced latent viciousness embedded in the national psyche.
During his brief speech and much longer Q&A with Dr. Danny Avula, commissioner of the Virginia Department of Social Services, Fauci — who has advised seven U.S. presidents — stressed that he is apolitical and nonpartisan.
Then-President Ronald Reagan, in the early years of his administration, “probably could have done much more to use the bully pulpit of the presidency to galvanize the public about the threat of this emerging pandemic,” he said. Instead, Reagan “didn’t mention the word AIDS until his second term.”
In contrast, he praised the compassion of then-President George W. Bush, whose billions of dollars of assistance to AIDS-ravaged Africa saved millions of lives, Fauci said. “That tells you what the leadership of a president can do.”
He amused the audience in describing a weary then-President Barack Obama — amid outbreaks of an earlier flu pandemic and the Ebola and Zika viruses — saying, “Tony, you know I’ve got ISIS, I’ve got children at the border ... and you’re giving me all these diseases. Enough is enough.”
“And we all know about COVID and President Trump,” Fauci said dryly and succinctly.
A mentor advised him long ago that each time he walked into the White House might be his last “because I might have to tell the president or the people around him or her an inconvenient truth.”
For Fauci, 83, the truth has become inconvenient to his numerous detractors.
He recalled demonstrations by gay activists during the early years of HIV in his roles as the National Institute of Health’s AIDS coordinator, prior to being appointed as the first director of the NIH’s Office of AIDS Research.
But Fauci, a Brooklyn native, noted that he “never for a moment felt unsafe going into Greenwich Village, into the gay and lesbian community center alone with a hundred hurting, angry, fearful gay activists, because I knew they knew I was trying to help them,” he said.
“Fast forward to the COVID years, when the amount of conspiracy theories, ad hominem attacks, making up things about me that if they weren’t so crazy, they would be ludicrous, there’s a big, big difference.”
Fauci’s talk focused a good deal on the ill health of our discourse and democracy. The talk, at times, brought to mind an image of him pressing a stethoscope against our body politic and frowning at what he hears.
Or as he said: “A catastrophic event like an outbreak shines a bright spotlight on some of the weaknesses in our society.”
Indeed, what he describes as our “period of profound divisiveness,” beyond making Fauci a target, hindered a coordinated public health response. As a result, 1.17 million people have died of COVID-19 in the U.S., a per-capita death rate worse than almost every other country in the world.
It’d be silly of us to think that public health is the only aspect of American life imperiled by this divide, which has gone beyond healthy difference and debate toward irrational self-destruction.
“I’ve seen what it did in the middle of a historic health crisis. So that could be kind of the metaphor of what could happen in other areas of our society,” Fauci said, adding: “We can’t have a viable society when we don’t even talk to each other.”
The virus shined a spotlight on our society’s inequities, including access to health care and the foods and diets that promote healthy outcomes and prevent obesity, diabetes and hypertension, he said.
Unfortunately, it’s difficult if not impossible to have a rational conversation about equity, which the political right has reduced to a four-letter word.
But inequity continues to ail and kill us. The worst of the pandemic is behind us. But last Friday, there were 432,000 new COVID infections in the U.S., Fauci said.
He was circumspect about the origins of COVID-19. He did not rule out the theory that it emerged from a Wuhan, China lab.
But, “75% of all new infections are zoonotic,” he said. The HIV virus that causes AIDS moved from chimpanzees to humans; influenza moved from birds and pigs to humans; the Ebola virus moved from bats and nonhuman primates to humans.
“Does that mean that COVID was not accidentally made in a lab? I don’t know. But all I can say is that, if you don’t know, you keep an open mind and you try and reject a conspiracy theory one way or another.”
In the meantime, he stresses preventive measures in both wet markets and laboratories, for the U.S. to replenish its stock of personal protective equipment, and continued investment in basic and clinical biomedical research, in preparation for the inevitable future pandemic outbreak. “The only way to address a perpetual challenge is to be perpetually prepared,” he said.
Fauci said it’s important for us to think about lessons learned “that might help us not only with the possibility of another outbreak, but maybe some of the things in our society that we need to scrutinize a bit more to make us a better society.”
America, it appears, will survive this virus.
The lies infecting our nation are a graver threat.
40 photos from The Richmond Forum through the years
1975 Ronald Reagan
1987 Diane Sawyer and Brent Scowcroft
1988 Oprah Winfrey
1995 Dave Barry
1996 Neil Armstrong
2000 Desmond Tutu
2000 John Glenn
2001 Benjamin Netanyahu
2002 Colin Powell
2002 Dick Clark
2002 James Baker and Madeleine Albright
2002 Ken Burns
2003 Cal Ripken Jr.
2003 Queen Noor and Benazir Bhutto
2003 Rudy Giuliani
2006 Rick Wagoner
2007 Alvin Toffler and Malcolm Gladwell
2007 B.B. King
2007 Vicente Fox
2008 Michael Douglas
2009 Neil deGrasse Tyson
2009 Smokey Robinson
2009 Terry Bradshaw and Howie Long
2010 Condoleezza Rice
2010 Steve Forbes
2011 Laura Bush
2012 Quincy Jones
2013 Bill Clinton
2013 Gabrielle Giffords and Mark Kelly
2013 Jane Goodall
2013 Tony Kushner, Steven Spielberg, Doris Kearns Goodwin
2014 George W. Bush
2014 Martin Short and Steve Martin
2015 Robert Mueller and retired Gen. Keith Alexander
Martha Stewart, Coach K and other speakers are headed to Richmond for the 2024-25 season of The Richmond Forum, organizers announced Saturday …
Dr. Anthony Fauci, former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, addresses the audience during a Richmond Forum appearance at the University of Richmond on Saturday.
Dr. Anthony Fauci was interviewed by Dr. Danny Avula, commissioner of the Virginia Department of Social Services, at the Richmond Forum on Saturday night.