FT | “There are a lot of questions that must be answered by Dr Fauci,” said Donald Trump, the former president whom Fauci served as an adviser, following the release of the emails. Trump’s supporters, many of whom accuse Fauci of having exaggerated the severity of the pandemic, have gone further. Josh Hawley, the Republican senator from Missouri, on Friday urged Fauci to resign.
Fauci himself admits to being worried. Not about the blowback, however, but about what it says about America. “It worries me about what it says about this country,” he told the Financial Times. “The emails show someone who is always assessing the data as they evolve. But people are selectively pulling emails out to distort what the reality is.”
The 80-year-old Fauci is one of America’s best-known and most well-respected doctors. Having advised every president since Ronald Reagan, he achieved renown in the scientific world for his work on HIV in the 1980s when he was one of the first public medics to sound the alarm about a strange new disease identified among gay men. He won the respect of gay activists after helping to change the way medical trials were run so that more people could get access to potentially life-saving treatments.
“Tony revolutionised how clinical trials are done for HIV,” said Michael Osterholm, director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota and a longtime friend of Fauci.
“He is a great medic, but he is also a natural leader, and knows how to get things done.” Fauci played a prominent role in the American responses to Sars, Mers and the Ebola outbreak of 2014-16, when the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention came under fire over its response.
“There was a time when CDC was being attacked unfairly,” said Tom Frieden, who was CDC director at the time. “Many people in that situation would have stood by or even quietly piled on, but Tony did exactly the opposite. He stood up for us internally and he stood up for us, publicly. He is a mensch.”
Fauci has been one of the most prominent faces of the US Covid response. He has become famous for frequent television appearances in which he discusses in plain terms and in his broad New York accent the seriousness of the pandemic.
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