Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, Anthony Fauci. (Drew Angerer / Getty Images)
Anthony Fauci said that AIDS activists who protested outside his office in the 1980s and who burned dolls from his body were “justified in their concerns”.
Fauci worked at the forefront of the United States’ response to the coronavirus pandemic, but COVID-19 was far from his first experience dealing with infectious diseases.
He served as director of the National Institutes of Allergies and Infectious Diseases in the 1980s, when the AIDS epidemic broke out, killing large numbers of queer people. He was heavily criticized at the time by activists like Larry Kramer, who accused him of “murder”.
Talking to Terry Gross at NPR’s Fresh air show on Wednesday night (February 3), Fauci said there is a “stark contrast” between COVID deniers who sent him death threats during the coronavirus pandemic and AIDS activists who protested him in the 1980s .
“The activists were justified in their concerns that the government, although they did not do it deliberately, was not actually giving them a seat at the table so they could have their own opinion on things that would ultimately affect their lives.” Fauci said.
“So although they were very theatrical – they were very iconoclastic – they looked threatening, but at no time did I feel threatened by AIDS activists.”
Anthony Fauci went on to say that AIDS activists were “right” in their belief that the federal government was not listening to their “valid concerns” about the epidemic.
“Not only were they not threatening violently, they were also on the right side of the story,” he added.
Fauci said he reached a “turning point” with AIDS activists when he tried to put himself in their shoes.
“When you heard what they were saying and put aside the drama, the staging, the iconoclastic behavior, and heard what they said, what I did, because I felt that if these young people went to this point, they should be suffering terribly, ”said Fauci.
“So I tried to become, and I easily became, as empathic as I could be and say, ‘Let me put myself in their shoes. If I were in their shoes, what would I be doing? ‘And I quickly came to the conclusion that if I were in their shoes, I would be doing exactly what they were doing.’
After that finding, Fauci invited AIDS activists to meet with him to find out how they could “work together”. After weeks of discussions, they brought AIDS activists to fight the disease, placing them on advisory committees and on clinical trials.
“We integrated the activists into the process we were doing, it involved them very, very strongly, their lives and their health, and things have really changed,” he said.
Anthony Fauci visited gay saunas to understand how HIV was spreading
Elsewhere in the interview, Fauci said he visited gay saunas and bars in the early years of the AIDS epidemic in an effort to understand how the virus was spreading. Their research began even before they identified what was causing the death of young gay men.
“We were seeing a large number of gays who were once well and who were being devastated by this terrible and mysterious disease, and I was so focused on the gay community that I really wanted to get an idea of what was going on there. it would lead to this explosion of a sexually transmitted disease, ”said Fauci.
“I went to the bathrooms to see essentially what was going on, and the epidemiologist in me said, ‘Oh my God, this is a perfect setting for an explosion of a sexually transmitted disease.’ It’s the same thing going to gay bars and seeing what was going on, and it gave me a great insight into the explosion of the sexually transmitted disease outbreak. “
He also said that then-president Ronald Reagan’s support of the religious right “to some extent” impacted the federal government’s response to the outbreak, noting that the Christian groups that supported it had no empathy “in any way” for the LGBT + community.
The result, said Anthony Fauci, was that Reagan avoided using the presidential pulpit to draw attention to the AIDS epidemic, which ended up hampering efforts to educate the public about the nature of HIV.