Dr. Fauci is in

One of the country’s most recognizable public figures from the COVID and AIDS pandemics made an appearance on-Island last Thursday.

After a visit to the Island hospital, immunologist and longtime presidential advisor Dr. Anthony Fauci spoke to 450 attendees at the Agricultural Hall about his career as a public health official for seven U.S. administrations, including his work in the White House Coronavirus Task Force. He also shared concerns about the country’s vulnerability to infectious disease outbreaks.

Fauci spoke as part of the Martha’s Vineyard Hebrew Center’s Summer Institute schedule, sharing the stage with moderator Dr. Jordan Cohen.

The discussion ranged from what sparked Fauci’s career to the state of public health under the current presidential administration, to why he personally chose to focus on infectious diseases and the immune system.

“There are a bunch of psychological reasons why you would pick a subspecialty,” Fauci told Cohen. “I’m the kind of person where I like to have a problem that’s identifiable, that’s preventable and treatable, and that is serious enough that it could kill someone. I mean, that’s just a challenge as a physician.”

Fauci took questions about threats to public health in the U.S. and his role in health crises such as the AIDS epidemic, though Cohen told the crowd at the outset that Fauci would not answer political questions.

Dr. Fauci did weigh in on Vineyard-specific topics. When asked by The Times which public health principles are particularly helpful for a place like Martha’s Vineyard, an Island with a shortage of healthcare workers, he highlighted local efforts to get Vineyarders vaccinated and shared that he had spent a couple of hours earlier in the day speaking to physicians and nurses at Martha’s Vineyard Hospital. “I was really impressed by the commitment to do the kinds of things which are top-rate, first-rate public health,” he said

Fauci shared his worries about the ongoing recurrence of measles, which despite an available vaccine has contributed to three deaths amid outbreaks in Texas and other states. Fauci criticized Robert F. Kennedy Jr. in his answer, calling out the current secretary of health and human services’ unfounded claims that vaccines — such as the one for measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR) — cause various diseases instead of preventing them.

During the first Trump administration, Fauci said, the president asked him to hold a meeting with Kennedy, whom Fauci then invited to the National Institutes of Health (NIH). “[Kennedy] went and gave this totally conspiratorial talk about vaccines … forgetting that vaccines were saving hundreds of millions of lives historically. So I thought maybe that was the end of it,” Fauci said. “Sorry, no, come back to Trump Two, he’s the secretary of the HHS. And right now, what he’s doing is he’s undermining the whole concept of vaccines.”

Fauci also lamented billions of dollars of cuts to public health grants under Trump. He noted that the U.S. could suffer when medical students choose to learn and work in other countries. “What it’s doing is providing a very powerful disincentive for young people to go into science … Bright young people are going to do other things, or they’re going to train in other countries. And right now, other countries are really recruiting American scientists,” he said.

Fauci also reflected on his work under Trump in the administration’s Coronavirus Task Force, which coordinated the federal response to the COVID pandemic, and in Operation Warp Speed, which facilitated the seven-month rapid development of the COVID-19 vaccine.

He recalled first hearing about the virus in January 2020, when a pneumonia-like disease appeared to be spreading in China, while information from the Chinese government was incomplete and inconsistent. “We were still getting information from the Chinese that it wasn’t particularly well transmitted,” Fauci said. “And then about a week or two later, we started to hear from our Chinese scientific colleagues, calling us in a very frightened way that this is really worse than what the authorities are saying.”

When COVID began to take hold in the U.S., drastic measures were necessary, he said, such as closing schools, bars, and businesses. “People have selective amnesia about this,” he said about the restrictions. “The reason that was done was that there were freezer trucks placed outside of hospitals in New York, L.A., San Francisco, and Boston, because there wasn’t enough room in the morgue to handle the bodies of the people who were dying, and you couldn’t get into the hospital if you had a heart attack or a [gastrointestinal] bleed, because all the beds were occupied by people with COVID. So something dramatic needed to be done.”

He did acknowledge that in the event of another pandemic, there could be room for improvement in how long schools in particular are closed.

“The next time we do something like this, putting a pause on things is absolutely the right thing to do. But be careful about how long you do it for,” he said. “There were some schools that didn’t open until a year and a half later.”

Fauci also spoke about being put in the uncomfortable position of having to publicly contradict the Trump administration’s messaging on COVID, despite what he said began as a strong relationship between himself and President Trump.

“Once it became clear that [COVID] wasn’t going away, and that it was threatening the economy and the election cycle … then there was sort of a panic, and they started saying things that weren’t true, like, ‘It’s going to disappear like magic, watch, it’s going to be gone by Easter, everybody’s going to be going back to church.’ And my famous statement was, ‘I’m sorry, Mr. President, but the virus doesn’t understand Easter Sunday.’”

Looking back on the rise of the pandemic, Fauci told the audience that he wants people to understand that science is based on the best data available at a given time, and that public health officials may modify their advice as the information available to them changes.

“When you’re looking at something in August of 2023, it might be different than what you were looking at in January of 2020,” he said. “And if you want to stick with the science, you have to gather your information, your data, and your evidence, and make your recommendation based on the evidence as it exists, which means you have to be flexible and realize that science is self-correcting.”