A Legend in His Own Mind
Self-doubt is not Anthony Fauci’s strong suit.
On Call: A Doctor’s Journey in Public Service, by Anthony S. Fauci, M.D., Viking, 464 pages.
Pain and sickness are awful things, and death is the fate that none of us wishes to face, but an acceptance of the inevitability of these things is the hallmark of a spiritually sound civilization. It is no exaggeration to say that modern American society has so thoroughly purged itself of the traditional religious understanding of the transience of health and the limits of our lifespan—that, as the psalmist says, “the days of our years are threescore years and ten”—that a great number of our fellow citizens cling to the curative powers of the latest supplement, therapy, prescription medication, or vaccine.
To be sure, these things can help and heal, but they are mere salves to the wound of existence. Our society is so conditioned to expect scientific progress and so hard-wired to believe in a kind of positive thinking that we have almost convinced ourselves otherwise.
Such is the attitude of serene arrogance that has defined the long, long public-health career of Anthony Fauci. Here is a man who, in his capacity as director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), cheered on the curtailment of everyday life during the Covid-19 pandemic, as though infectious diseases had not been features of life since time immemorial. Here is a man who suggested that the return to everyday life was contingent on the emergence and public acceptance of a vaccine for the virus, as though pharmaceutical companies were the grantor of our rights and freedoms.
In his long, turgid, and frequently insufferable new memoir, Fauci demonstrates his devotion to what Catholic priest and philosopher Ivan Illich once called the “medical utopia.” He also displays his fidelity to the clichés of the Covid era that most sane people have long since abandoned. In the opening pages, Fauci tells of a chilly Sunday evening in November 2020 when he was dining outside (of course) with members of his Covid pod (remember those?): his wife, Christine, and their neighbors, Ellen and Rob. “We were close friends and felt safe and comfortable together.” Here and throughout the book, Fauci delights in reminding readers of his own virtue: He makes clear that he would not have been socializing with family and friends had he not been working his tail off to beat back the pandemic. “I had been working fourteen to sixteen hours a day for almost a year since the pandemic crashed down on our country and the world in early 2020,” he writes.
In Fauci’s account, dinner and drinks were interrupted by a momentous phone call from none other than the CEO of Pfizer, who, in the sort of acronym-filled, data-laden technical language Fauci loves to flaunt, told him that the Covid vaccine that had been under trial was a smashing success: “You won’t believe it, Tony! The DSMB looked at the phase 3 data from the COVID vaccine trial, and there is more than 90 percent efficacy.” Upon receiving this news, Fauci can hardly contain himself. “After we hung up, tears welled up in my eyes, and I felt as if I had lost my breath,” he writes.
That Fauci can write in such overwrought, hysterical terms about vaccines that millions of Americans have expressed legitimate doubts about—and which were the subject of immense controversy for being mandated—demonstrates the depths of his myopia. That Fauci could write this way about vaccines that have not even prevented the “vaccinated and boosted” President Biden from coming down with his third bout of Covid is merely comical.
Nowhere in this book does Fauci display the slightest hint of self-awareness. Perhaps this is to be expected from a trained physician who has spent the better part of his adult life rattling around the halls of the NIAID, which is among the agencies that functions under the auspices of the National Institutes of Health (NIH).
As confident as he is in public-health policy, Fauci is even more confident in himself. This makes him an altogether lousy memoirist. Self-doubt or self-criticism are not his strong suits. Instead, Fauci has mastered the boastful tone of those long letters from extended family members, sometimes tucked into Christmas cards, that give you all the news from the last year—and, of course, it’s nothing but good news.
Readers seeking insights into their favorite public-health hero’s early life won’t find much on offer here. Born in Brooklyn, his father a pharmacist, his mother, a homemaker; his parents were kind, generous, and civic-minded. He loved basketball as a high-schooler but readily accepts the retrospective judgment of one-time opposing coach Lou Carnesecca: “Tony, I have taught a lot of young basketball players a lot of basketball skills and tricks, but I know for sure, you can’t teach someone height.” He settled on a career in medicine early. “If I became a physician, I could interact directly with people in the context of science—the health sciences,” he writes. “It just felt right. Now that I clarified that, college was the next decision.” We are only up to page 15.
Perhaps because they provide him few opportunities to display his brilliance and foresight, Fauci does not dwell on his formative years. He would much rather talk about his career, and by his career I mean his resume. That’s what this book reads like, such as this passage about his prospects at the NIH: “My upward career trajectory was steep. I was becoming well-known and respected nationally and internationally in this somewhat narrow field (at the time) of the treatment of autoinflammatory diseases.” Even when Fauci admits to something that would generally be considered a personal failing, he does so in such a way that makes him sound noble. In 1981, he married his first wife, but his selfless attentiveness to the AIDS epidemic proved too great a burden—so much for “in sickness and in health”: “Long-standing tensions in our relationship, compounded by the hours I was putting into my work on the raging AIDS outbreak, which surfaced just a few months after our wedding, unfortunately made the survival of our marriage impossible.” The couple divorced three years after their wedding.
In 1984, when he was in contention to take over the NIAID, Fauci seems to have shrugged at the prospect: “Word was out that I was considered a top candidate for the job. I was aware of the rumors but was ambivalent about the possibility.” Even so, he accepted the job and, somehow, managed to adjust, as he illustrates in this humble reflection: “I transitioned from the classical role of an NIH institute director, responsible for the planning, conduct, and administrative oversight of research in a specific specialty, to someone who had the explicit respect of and thus access to the highest leaders of government.”
The new position did nothing to help his ego. On a single page, Fauci writes the following lines: “My nature has always been to remain calm under very difficult circumstances. I can get animated and annoyed over trivial things like getting caught in a traffic jam, yet, when important issues are at stake, I am totally focused and unemotional”; “The sicker the patients and the more stressful and demanding the challenges, the better I function.” Is it any wonder that Fauci bobbleheads were all the rage among the pandemic-obsessed a few years back?
This book suggests a kind of alternate history of the last fifty or so years of American life, in which the defining events were not elections, wars, or cultural changes but a series of pestilences. Fauci gravely recounts one plague or crisis after another—from AIDS to H5N1 to Ebola to Zika—before finally, in the last hundred pages, making his way to Covid. One can read the earlier chapters with at least some measure of historical curiosity, because Fauci is describing diseases long ago defeated or controlled, but the section on the Covid debacle will be fresh to anyone who remembers stay-at-home orders, school by Zoom, and vaccine passports.
On January 29, 2020, President Donald Trump began his first substantive conversation with Fauci in the White House Situation Room: “Anthony, you are really a famous guy. My good friend Lou Dobbs told me that you are one of the smartest, knowledgeable, and outstanding persons he knows”—surely the greatest lapse in Trump’s judgment during his first administration. To his credit, Fauci saw Trump much more clearly for what he was: a man unafraid of illness and unbowed by public-health consensus. For Fauci, these were faults rather than virtues. Recalling a previous encounter with Trump in the fall of 2019, Fauci remembers being “a little surprised” when the president told him he had never gotten a flu shot before he was elected. “When I asked him why, he answered, ‘Well I’ve never gotten the flu. Why did I need a flu shot?’” Fauci writes. “I did not respond.” We should want a president confident in his own constitution, but for Fauci, there can be no values higher than medical advice.
Indeed, the Trump-Fauci exchanges documented here demonstrate that the president’s instincts were generally sound, even when he permitted himself to be unduly influenced by the alleged experts around him. At another point early in the pandemic, Trump asked, “Why can’t we just use the flu vaccine for this virus?” This anecdote is meant to illustrate Trump’s complete cluelessness, but, in its ignorance, it ironically reflects Trump’s desire to find normal, reasonable, non-disruptive solutions to the pandemic—in other words, not to panic. Of course the flu vaccine wouldn’t work on anything other than the flu, but is it not better to be considering modest measures before, for example, shutting down civilization?
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Nearly every exchange ends up making Trump look good. During a Rose Garden event, Trump attempted to cajole Fauci and others to ditch their masks. Fauci stood strong: “Mr. President, it would be an unforced error to take them off. The press would kill us.” True to form, Trump cut to the chase: “Who gives a shit about the press. They will try to kill us no matter what we do.” Fauci reports that Trump “seemed to be agitated that the pandemic was raging on.” Isn’t such eagerness to get on with things—to resume the business of living, even with its attendant risks—a good thing in a leader? As Fauci acknowledges, all of history is lined with “plagues and devastations.” Must society grind to a halt each and every time?
How wrong the public-health establishment was in thinking its assorted society-altering measures—those years of masking and social-distancing and curbside-pickup shopping—could ever corral a contagion. In these pages, we are reminded of the lowlights of this pitiful chapter in our nation’s history: White House Coronavirus Response Coordinator Deborah Birx’s goal to “flatten the curve,” the initiative known as “15 Days to Slow the Spread,” the attempt to put “on hold” the celebration of Easter in 2020. “Mr. President,” Fauci said, “the virus doesn’t understand Easter. I’m sorry, sir.”
Yet, true to form, Fauci seems to think he managed the situation just splendidly. “Much to my surprise,” he writes, “I became an instant hero to the millions of Americans who saw me as a physician bravely standing up for science, truth, and rational decision-making.” He says he was uncomfortable with all the adulation, but if that was really so, why did he write a nearly 500-page memoir touting his lifetime of public service? Fauci is a legend in his own mind, but anyone who lived through the pandemic will recognize he is no god—he is, in fact, merely another god who failed.
