Anthony Fauci

Physician-scientist

• Born: December 24, 1940
• Place of Birth: New York, New York

Significance: For more than three decades, Anthony Fauci has conducted research and advised presidents on the threat of emerging diseases, including HIV/AIDS and COVID-19, as the head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID).

Background

Anthony Stephen Fauci was born in Bensonhurst, a neighborhood in southwest Brooklyn, on December 24, 1940, to Eugenia and Stephen Fauci. Both sets of grandparents were Italian immigrants (apart from one grandmother who hailed from Switzerland). Raised Catholic, Fauci went to elementary school at Our Lady of Guadalupe in Bensonhurst. Fauci’s father, known as Doc, was a pharmacist, and the family moved to the Dyker Heights neighborhood of Brooklyn when Fauci was in elementary school. There, Stephen Fauci purchased a pharmacy, and the family lived in an apartment above it. The whole Fauci family worked at the pharmacy; Fauci’s mother and sister helped customers, and Fauci made deliveries on his bicycle. Though it was a long commute from Brooklyn, Fauci attended Regis High School, a competitive Jesuit high school in the Upper East Side of Manhattan, where he was captain of the high school basketball team and studied Greek and Latin.

Upon graduation from high school in 1958, Fauci attended the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts, graduating with a BA in classics and pre-medicine in 1962. He returned to New York City and attended medical school at Cornell University’s Medical College, graduating in 1966 at the head of his class. Two years later, he completed his internal medicine internship at the New York Hospital–Cornell Medical Center.

Public Health Career

In 1968, Fauci signed up for the United States Public Health Service, a government agency whose health professionals work to fight disease in underserved areas around the world. He joined the National Institutes of Health (NIH), where in 1972 he began working as a senior researcher at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), led by Sheldon Wolff, who became his mentor. In 1980, Fauci became chief of the Laboratory of Immunoregulation—a position he continued to hold in 2021—where he pioneered many treatments and made important contributions to the field that studies the human immune response.

In 1981, Fauci took notice of the emerging reports of what would prove to be the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) and the disease it causes, acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS). Later that year he became one of the first researchers to write a paper on the disease, which was published in 1982 in the journal Annals of Internal Medicine. In 1984, Fauci, who by then was the lead government researcher of the HIV/AIDS epidemic, became the director of the NIAID. His time as director had a rocky beginning. In October 1988, AIDS and LGBTQ activists began protesting at the NIH and Food and Drug Administration (FDA) buildings in Maryland. Protesters believed Fauci was preventing lifesaving AIDS drugs from being approved in an expeditious fashion and was failing to work closely with the gay community. Rather than dismiss the protesters, Fauci invited them to meet with him, and those meetings spurred him to make changes. He worked to loosen restrictions on participation in clinical trials and form closer relationships with the gay community. By the early 1990s, he was lauded as a hero and praised for being one of the few government officials who changed his position to help save lives during the crisis. His work on the AIDS crisis continued into the early twenty-first century. In 2003, Fauci played a key role in the development of the US President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR), a global initiative to treat and prevent HIV/AIDS that has been credited with saving millions of lives.

Fauci has also played a lead role in other high-profile disease outbreaks worldwide. His administration dealt with the Ebola crisis in 2014, as well as swine flu, SARS, Zika virus, and various avian influenza outbreaks.

The Coronavirus Pandemic

In 2020, Fauci became involved in another public health crisis—the coronavirus disease, or COVID-19, pandemic. In January of that year, the administration of President Donald Trump established the White House Coronavirus Task Force to address the growing threat of the novel disease. As the pandemic spread widely and quickly, Fauci became the primary spokesperson for the task force. He was widely praised for his unflappable, science-based explanation of the emerging understanding of the virus, though his strong advocacy of social distancing and changing position on the wearing of masks made him a target of a conservative backlash.

In April 2020, the hashtag #FireFauci began circulating on conservative media and was retweeted by Trump himself—who often disagreed with or contradicted Fauci—though the White House denied that the president was planning to remove Fauci from the task force. The White House did, however, cancel several media events, and Fauci has said that because of his disagreements with Trump, he and his family were harassed and threatened.

Following Joe Biden’s win in the November 2020 presidential election, Fauci was asked to continue serving as chief medical advisor in Biden’s administration, in addition to remaining director of the NIAID. Under President Biden, Fauci continued to advise on the nation’s response to the pandemic.

Fauci's tenure under President Biden continued through an era of divisive partisanship. He continued to be a frequent presence on Capitol Hill as he was called to testify before various congressional committees. These proceedings were oftentimes confrontational as various lawmakers questioned his credibility and Biden administration strategies for addressing the COVID-19 pandemic.

This political divide was on display in June 2024, when Fauci was called to testify before a Congressional hearing concerning his handling of the 2020 COVID-19 outbreak. Republicans grilled Fauci about his actions in the early days of the pandemic, bringing up comments he later made that six-foot social distancing rules were not based on science. Fauci responded that the guidelines were provided by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and that the six-foot distance was arbitrarily chosen. However, he clarified that his comments reflected the fact there were no clinic trials performed beforehand, but the science of social distancing was valid. Fauci also defended his position on the origin of the virus itself. He said he believed it originated from animal-to-human contact, but he was open to the possibility it was created in a Chinese medical lab and was accidentally released.

In summer 2022, Fauci announced he would depart from his governmental positions by the end of the year. In December 2022, after 38 years as its director, Fauci retired from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.

Impact

Anthony Fauci was highly visible during the COVID-19 pandemic, becoming the subject not only of international news, but of memes and other cultural touchstones on social media. Routinely described as one of the most trusted figures in America, despite his clashes with conservative media, Fauci was a voice of reason during the pandemic. In 2008, Fauci was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest prize awarded to civilians in the US, and he was named one of Time magazine’s Guardians of the Year for 2020.

Personal Life

Anthony Fauci is married to Christine Grady, who is chief of the Department of Bioethics at the NIH Clinical Center. They have three daughters.

Bibliography

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Bauso, Lisa, et al. “Dr. Anthony Fauci’s Childhood Home in Brooklyn.” Untapped New York, 14 Oct. 2020, untappedcities.com/2020/10/14/childhood-home-anthony-fauci-brooklyn/. Accessed 14 Oct. 2024.

Fauci, Anthony. “A Conversation with Dr. Anthony Fauci.” Interview by Lauren Jackson. The New York Times, 2 Apr. 2020, www.nytimes.com/2020/04/02/podcasts/the-daily/coronavirus-fauci.html. Accessed 14 Oct. 2024.

Lantry, Lauren. "As Dr. Fauci prepares to exit, he reflects on his legacy and COVID decisions he would change."ABC News, 16 Oct 2022, abcnews.go.com/Politics/dr-fauci-prepares-exit-reflects-legacy-covid-decisions/story?id=91553536. Accessed 14 Oct. 2024.

Schulman, Ari. "Why Many Americans Turned on Anthony Fauci."The New York Times, 30 Aug 2022, www.nytimes.com/2022/08/30/opinion/why-anthony-faucis-covid-legacy-is-a-failure. Accessed 14 Oct. 2024.

Specter, Michael. “How Anthony Fauci Became America’s Doctor.” The New Yorker, 20 Apr. 2020, www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/04/20/how-anthony-fauci-became-americas-doctor. Accessed 14 Oct. 2024.

Smith-Schoenwalder, Cecelia. “5 Key Takeaways from Fauci’s COVID-19 Testimony." US News and World Report, 3 June 2024, www.usnews.com/news/national-news/articles/2024-06-03/5-key-takeaways-from-faucis-covid-19-testimony.  Accessed 14 Oct. 2024.

Specter, Michael. “How Anthony Fauci Became America’s Doctor.” The New Yorker, 20 Apr. 2020, www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/04/20/how-anthony-fauci-became-americas-doctor. Accessed 14 Oct. 2024.

Staley, Peter. “How Anthony Fauci Quietly Shocked Us All.” The Salt Lake Tribune, 4 Jan 2023, sltrib.com/opinion/commentary/2023/01/04/peter-staley-how-anthony-fauci. Accessed 14 Oct. 2024.

Unger, Donald N. S. “I Saw People Who Were in Pain.” Holy Cross Magazine, Summer 2002, www.holycross.edu/departments/publicaffairs/hcm/summer02/features/fauci.html. Accessed 14 Oct. 2024.