Napa County Dept. of Public Health’s Invitation for all citizens to get tested for COVID 19.
So, we were tested for COVID-19 this week, not because we had any symptoms, but because we had the option which all should have.
The public health policy wonk in me, wanted to experience the testing process, the way I went through the HIV/AIDS testing process year after year, when I was running a national HIV/AIDS education organization, and fighting another epidemic. My mantra during my days of fighting AIDS, was “Take the Test,” the same message being used now. I took the test then, to learn what kind of fears and feelings people experienced who were being tested.
In the battle against the HIV virus, we knew that “education was our only vaccine,” and, sadly, 40 years later, it still is. Now, with testing finally available in Napa County thanks to a public health partnership with actor Sean Penn’s CORE non-profit– I needed to learn whether I was COVID positive: to discover if I was as “high risk” as my entire age group was being stereotyped.
Additionally, the possibility exists that we can see our three granddaughters at the end of this month–the first time in 10 weeks. Sure, I know my status could change between today and tomorrow, but I felt compelled to know what my COVID status was now, and find out how high a risk I actually was.
On Monday, we called the Napa Department of Public Health to set up appointments for us to get tested. The Napa DOH worker took our pertinent info, and said we’d probably get an appointment in a few days. We did. The call came three days later, on Thursday, and Carol Villano and I were asked if we could come to the Napa Fairgrounds—where the mega-music festival BottleRock is usually held on Memorial Day weekend–within a few hours. This year, Sean Penn’s CORE Public Health workers would be the only star attractions at the Napa Fairgrounds
.
We donned our masks, hopped in the car and, just a bit nervous, headed to get our COVID-19 tests. When we pulled into the Napa Fairgrounds with Carol driving, I started taking photos. The CORE worker waved at me and said “No Photos”, and I later saw the sign which prohibited photos for privacy reasons. Right next to it was another poster that read: “Take the Test,” and “Hagase el examen” in Spanish. We were the 14th car in line, and started waiting at 3:14 pm. We kept our windows up and our photo IDs on the dashboard, as we were instructed. “Hagase el examen.” It felt like the responsible thing to do.
Cars of all colors and sizes were in front of us, and adults of assorted ages were calmly waiting their turn. Not a bad wait, I thought, picturing the miles- long lines that fellow humans in desperate need of food had to endure at Food Banks across the country. Think about that the next time you hear someone complain about wearing a mask.
Car-by-car, we crawled up toward the drive-in testing tent, where four masked and heavily gowned nurses were waiting to provide free testing. Carol watched carefully to make certain the nurses changed their gloves after testing each person, and they did so methodically. Each of the nurses wore a plastic face shield, to protect them from anyone who might be carrying the virus.
The only male nurse of the group, a young volunteer named Ralph, asked us to roll our windows down, and patiently explained what he was going to do with the swabs, and how uncomfortable it might feel going up one nostril. He asked who wanted to go first. I volunteered. Getting tested was my idea, so it was the least I could do.
Ralph asked me to keep my mask over my mouth, while he gently tried to maneuver the swab up my right nostril. He ran into my deviated septum, blocking his path, and tried the other side. It was uncomfortable, as Ralph warned it might be. I didn’t make it easy for him, scrunching up my nose and my face to help the swab slide in as smoothly as it could.
Carol, who wasn’t so keen on getting tested in the first place, did far better. Ralph swept the swab swiftly up her nostril, and she took it without flinching. Women are so much tougher than men.
The entire COVID-19 testing trip took 50 minutes, from the moment we checked in at the drive-through site, until the moment we exited the testing tent. Like 3,000 other residents of Napa County–where 3 people have died of the virus–we were fortunate to be tested–thanks to a movie star with a conscience, not a President without one.
Since we are asymptomatic, we were told we’d find out our COVID test results within 3 to 5 days. Remarkably, we found out we tested “negative” within 24-hours, since the Napa County Department of Health processed all of the days’ tests immediately. I was so astounded by the speed with which the Napa County DOH gave us our test results, that I volunteered to do contract tracing for them—especially since it was not nearly as invasive as the contract tracing we did during the AIDS epidemic.
The professionalism, outstanding quality and first rate service of the joint program between our County DOH and Sean’s Penn non-profit CORE organization, was the kind of public health service that’s a model for the country, and one which should be provided all people, regardless of symptoms, location or wealth.
Carol and I tell ourselves how fortunate we are each day; that we have food, enough money, a roof over our heads, good health, and each other. On top of all that–unlike 97% of our fellow US citizens– we had the option to be tested for this dreaded disease, which has ended the lives of nearly 90,000 people. With numbers like that, we’re all part of the same “high risk” group, called humanity. And we know, from first-hand experience, that there’s something we can do about it.
Over the past three years, I posited a wide-range of potential Democratic national tickets that would be the strongest team to not only crush Donald Trump, but to sweep in a Democratic Senate and keep Nancy Pelosi as Speaker of the House.
Throughout 2017 and early 2018, I floated the ideaof a Cuomo/Klobuchar ticket (in either order), before Andrew Cuomo became the proactive poster boy of COVID-19 public officials, and graced the cover of Rolling Stone.
Long a progressive, Warren Democrat, I favored the all female 2016 ticket of Clinton/Warren. With Warren declaring for President in 2020, I thought a Warren/Cory Booker ticket would be a powerhouse, especially since Hillary’s loss exposed the weakness of a Democratic National ticket without a strong, African American candidate.
When neither Booker’s, nor Kamala Harris’ national campaigns took off, and Biden began to look like the practical alternative to defeat Trump, many Democratic activists began trading the names of VP picks, as if we were assembling fantasy baseball teams. Biden’s announcement that he wanted a woman on the ticket, narrowed that field, even though we occasionally entertained the notion of a Biden/Booker, Biden/Cuomo or Biden/Barack Obama as a powerful one-two punch.
As Biden narrows down his Vice-Presidential field of dreams to a select group of women, I believe that it must be a woman of color, for many sound political reasons, particularly to energize voter turnout among the Democrats most reliable voting block—women, and specifically Black women. While the first, and most politically potent, choice of many might be Michelle Obama, the former First Lady has repeatedly said she’s not interested. Good, strong second choices abound, with Kamala Harris, Stacey Abrams, Val Demings, and even Senator Tammy Duckworth (an Asian/Pacific Islander) leading the field.
Yet, the calamitous consequences of the COVID-19 Pandemic may have picked the most powerful, and obvious, running mate of all for us. The best choice for Biden has been crusading for public health for decades, tackling epidemics like HIV/AIDS, TB, and health and economic inequality. Her name is Dr. Helene D. Gayle. Google Dr. Gayle, and you’ll be blown away.
Trained and board-certified in Pediatric Medicine (her MD from University of Pennsylvania Medical School, and her Masters in Public Health from Johns Hopkins University’s School of Public Health), Dr. Gayle worked at the CDC for 20 years, directing the National Center for HIV, STD and TB Prevention.
Helene’s heroic work in HIV/AIDS was recognized by Bill & Melinda Gates, when they hired her away from the CDC to run their Foundation’s HIV, TB & Reproductive Health Program, which she did for 5 years, expanding her expertise to help those in greatest need globally. There were still ‘mountains beyond mountains’ for Dr. Gayle to climb and in 2005, her talent was tapped by one of the world’s premier international relief and development organizations, CARE, USA, with programs that help more than 80 million people in 93 countries, and over 10,000 employees spread across the globe. CARE is now dedicated to stopping the spread of the Corona Virus Emergency. (www.care.org).
Dr. Gayle served as President and CEO of CARE, for 10 years, “helping millions of people recover from natural disasters and other acute emergencies, prevent the spread of HIV/AIDS, and gain access to healthcare, nutrition, education, economic opportunity, safe water and improved sanitation.” A member of the Council on Foreign Relations, the American Public Health Association, and the National Academy of Medicine, Helene Gayle was named by Forbes Magazine as one of the most powerful women in the world, and by Foreign Policy as one of the top 100 “Global Thinkers.” She has more high-level Administrative accomplishments than all other possible female candidates for VP, combined.
Dr.Helene D. Gayle, MD, CEO
Like Dr. Anthony Fauci, who has won over the American public through his straightforward, medical-science based information, Helene Gale was also born in New York State and has dedicated her professional life to improving public health. One of five children raised in a Buffalo, N.Y, family that revered education, she was educated at Columbia University’s Barnard College, before attending Medical School. Dr. Gayle has chaired President Obama’s Advisory Council on HIV/AIDS, and launched a McKinsey Social Initiative (now, McKinsey.org) that builds public/private partnerships for social impact.
Helene Gayle, articulate and charismatic, was among the very first global public health officials to recognize, early on, that the HIV/AIDS epidemic was taking a heavy toll upon the Black, Latino and poor communities in the United States. When I served as CEO of Cable Positive, the AIDS action and education organization of the Cable & Telecommunications industry, I was fortunate to collaborate with Dr. Gayle on several HIV/AIDS education projects during the early 2000’s, including producing a series of Public Service Announcements and documentaries aimed at communities of color. In 2008, the entire industry gave Helene Gayle the only Humanitarian Award it has ever bestowed upon any individual. Extraordinary.
Three years ago, Dr. Gayle moved to Chicago to head one of nation’s oldest and largest community foundations, the Chicago Community Trust, focusing sharply on closing the racial and ethnic wealth gap in the Chicago area. The move extended her first hand experience and fact-based problem-solving approach into every region of the nation, from both coasts, to the South—where she lived for decades—and now to the nation’s heartland. She is the personification of a global, caring, experienced and highly capable citizen. Like Dr. Fauci, Dr. Gayle is a consummate medical and public health professional, not a politician. She has run vast national and international non-profit, public service organizations on the strength of science, fairness and humanity.
And, for Joe Biden, and all Americans, Dr. Helene Gayle is the most outstanding, highly qualified candidate for Vice-President, during the greatest public health crisis in over 100 years. It’s all about the science, and humanity.
Former President Ronald Reagan (r.) and his HHS Secretary Margaret Heckler.
Is Tony Fauci just Margaret Heckler in drag?
At the only White House photo op this week in the Oval Office— strategically scheduled while the Stock Market was still open, unlike all the other Corona Virus briefings–I watched on TV as Dr. Anthony Fauci, sitting comfortably on a fancy couch and flanked by Dr. Deobrah Birx in her Hermes scarf–commanded the attention of the cameras in the room.
Fauci was pushed forward by his boss, Donald Trump, at precisely the very moment the number of deaths from COVID 19 passed 60,000 Americans in a less than 60 days, the GDP recorded the biggest quarterly plunge since the Great Recession of 2008, and the demand for widespread Corona Virus testing was exploding. Fauci did a fancy flim-flam, announcing “ the early results of a federal trial (his own, at NIAID) with Remdesivir, an experimental anti-retroviral drug, “ as a potential treatment for COVID 19.
With a COVID-crazed nation desperate for any shred of good news, Fauci, playing the role of Trump’s fluffer, called the preliminary, non-peer reviewed results of his findings a “very important proof of concept, that has proven a drug can block the virus.” He added, almost sotto voce, that the new data needed to be further analyzed and subjected to the medical & scientific peer review process. Fauci’s fandango had Trump’s desired effect upon the stock market, driving the Dow Jones Industrial Averages up over 500 points, overshadowing the gnarly GDP numbers, and knocking the gruesome and growing number of COVID deaths out of the headlines.
“Some scientists were unsettled by the way in which the findings were reported,” Dr. Steven Nissen, of the Cleveland Clinic who has conducted dozens of clinical trials, told the New York Times. “ The disclosure of trial results in a political setting before peer review or publication is highly unusual. Where are the data? This is too important to be handled in such a sloppy fashion.”
Additionally, as Gina Kolata—a renowned expert on pandemics– Peter Baker and Noah Weiland reported in their Times story, “Remdesivir Shows Modest Benefits in Corona Virus Trial,” the Fauci announcement upstaged a more thorough, peer-reviewed, data-controlled study which found exactly the opposite result and was published in the highly respected Medical Journal The Lancet on the very same day.
To make matters worse, and to lean on his long-time involvement with HIV/ AIDS, a straight-faced Fauci compared the early results for Rendesivir to the early results for AZT as a first-step treatment for AIDS—without mentioning AZT’s damage to many patients, along with the impossibility of acquiring the drug treatment for people without money or connections.
Fauci finished by abandoning his scientist’s seriousness, and went full-frontal Trump salesman: “ I can guarantee you, as more people, more companies, more investigators get involved, it is going to get better and better.”
Fauci’s breathless briefing looked familiar. My mind darted back 36 years, to another day in late April, when, with trumpets blaring, Ronald Reagan’s Secretary of HHS, Margaret Heckler, held a press conference at her HHS Offices in Washington, DC to, as Laurie Garrett wrote in The Coming Plague, “announce discovery of the virus that caused AIDS.” Reagan, in the final year of the first term of his Presidency, still had not mentioned the word AIDS, and wouldn’t do so for another 3 years.
Foreshadowing Fauci’s tap-dance for Trump on COVID-19, Heckler “declared victory for her agency’s National Cancer Institute, announcing, ‘Today we add another miracle to the long honor roll of American medicine and science…Today’s discovery represents the triumph of science over a dreadful disease.” Then Heckler boldly forecast the “development of an AIDS vaccine within five years,” according to The Coming Plague. That was in 1984; an AIDS vaccine has still not been discovered.
Sean Strub, writing in his book Body Counts, observed that “the (Heckler) press conference seemed contrived, like it was held to assuage the public’s fear.”
The fear, or the “new wave of AIDS hysteria,” which Strub referred to was, ironically, stirred by Dr. Anthony Fauci , then with the NIH, who published an article in the Journal of the American Medical Association earlier in 1983, raising the possibility that “routine close contact, as within a family household, can spread the disease.”
“AIDS takes on an entirely new dimension (and if) the possibility that nonsexual, non-blood borne transmission is possible, the scope of the syndrome is enormous, “ wrote Dr. Fauci.
Despite the CDC’s sternly rebuffing Fauci’s false findings, the public hysteria, Strub writes, “pushed the government to do something about AIDS” with Congress authorizing $12 million for AIDS Research. Fortuitously for Fauci, who started the whole brouhaha, he was appointed to head the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, which he still heads to this day.
That’s why I found Fauci’s premature announcement in front of his fabulating boss, about another potential magic treatment for COVID-19 (not bleach, disinfectants or an anti-malarial drug) to be so odd, in addition to breaking every scientific protocol, as other researchers have observed. Fauci had followed this road before. He watched Margaret Heckler make a fool of herself in front of the world, when she promised an AIDS vaccine by the end of Reagan’s presidency.
Fauci knew what it was like to flack for the fact-denying, magical thinking Reagan Administration that overpromised on treatments for another virus in another epidemic. To Fauci & Heckler’s credit, at least they didn’t call the quest for an AIDS Vaccine, “Operation Warp Speed,” a deceptive and dangerous way to brand the careful, methodical process of vaccine research, especially with anti-Vaxxers (many of whom are Trump supporters) eager to savage any process that’s less than airtight.
Dr. Fauci’s flimsy and suspiciously timed “findings” regarding Remdesivir as a potential treatment for COVID 19, revived the vision of Reagan’s HHS Secretary Maggie Heckler, dressed professionally and proper, casting aside her credibility to declare victory over a virus, newly identified, that had barely begun to destroy millions of lives.
Carol Jacobson Villano (left) congratulates our family’s matriarch, Ethel Jacobson Hamburger (r.) on the 8th Annual Wellness Run which she successfully organized.
A little less than three years ago, Carol Jacobson Villano and I were walking around downtown San Francisco when my cellphone rang.
The number that appeared was that of our 89-year old cousin, Ethel Hamburger — the matriarch of Carol’s family — calling from Philadelphia.
We were scheduled to see her soon for an annual non-profit fundraiser she organized, coupled with my book tour that would take us up and down the East Coast. Etty had arranged for me to speak about my book at the congregate care facility in which she lived, just outside of Philly. I would be speaking to a group of residents — ages 80 through 100 — who were interested in learning how to write their memoirs. When I saw Etty’s phone number appear, I thought something had happened.
“Hi Etty, it’s Steve. Everything OK?” I asked.
“Yes, yes, everything is fine. How’s Carol and Matthew and his family? ,” she said, always sure to mention the most important things first.
“They are all very well, thanks, Etty. Did you get my book yet? “ I said. We had just mailed her a copy of my own memoir “Tightrope,” out to her, so she could have it in plenty of time for the book reading event she arranged.
“GET IT?” she said, shouting into the phone. “I already READ it. I loved it.”
Etty, who had known me for more than 40 years, went on to say what she liked about the book, and how much she enjoyed the writing and wanted to tell everyone about it.
“But, listen” she said, getting to the point. “We’ve got to market this book. I’ve put together a list of many of the Jewish publications in and around Philadelphia and I think it would be advantageous for you to contact them before you come down here.”
I laughed. “Etty, I love this idea. Plus, I may be the only new author with an 89-year old Jewish grandmother for my press agent.”
Delighted, Etty paused and than corrected me. “Great grandmother,” she said.
It was vintage Ethel Hamburger. Loving and precise; gentle and caring, and always looking to do whatever she could to help. I fell head over heels in love with Etty the first time I was introduced to her, 46 years ago.
Carol and I had just moved down to Washington, DC, one week before Richard Nixon resigned the Presidency. We were barely married two years, knew no one, and were instantly welcomed into the Washington wing of the Jacobson family.
When Rosh Hashanah came the following month, Etty invited us to join her and her husband Irvin, their four children and a few friends and neighbors for the Jewish Holiday. They lived on a quiet, leafy street in Chevy Chase, Maryland, in a big house that never ended, just like their love.
We were given a seat at their table, with the rest of the family and friends, and always felt as if the chairs had been waiting there for us, all along. Although not yet a Jew, I was touched by how warmly Irv and Etty welcomed me, and how patient and understanding they were with my questions and quizzical looks.
I observed closely how comfortably faith fit this family, and how easily their envelope of love was expanded to include all comers. Nothing was a big deal; no one was a stranger. It was my first introduction to a living, thriving, comfortable form of Judaism, and I found it exhilarating.
Over the course of our next year in Washington, Etty’s effervescence made us an essential ingredient to family gatherings, especially after the birth of our son, Matthew. Etty’s children craved cradling this crinkly little cousin, and they were first to offer to babysit, giving us an occasional night out, before “date nights” were a thing.
The following Spring, when our son was less than 6 months old, we moved into a townhouse in Crofton, Maryland during the middle of Passover. Undaunted, Ettie came bearing gifts of Matzoh Ball Soup, to make a special Seder for us in our new home. My mother, a devout Catholic, who was visiting us, joined in Etty’s traveling Passover meal, experiencing generous portions of her caring, joy and ecumenical love. It was a gesture of genuine kindness that my mother talked of with admiration for years, even on her deathbed in 2007 at the age of 92.
A few years later, I began contemplating converting to Judaism. As I studied, I kept visualizing the effortless way Etty & Irv and their warm family ladled out large scoops of love with faith, without condescension nor attempts at conversion. They had taken an ancient religion and culture, and made it contemporary; had perfected a set of precepts into the practical realities of everyday life; had crafted an art-form of family and love, using faith and food, compassion and intelligence, respect and reflection, and taught indelible lessons of life, love and learning.
Etty’s ease of educating and embracing us into their family, were powerful catalysts behind my becoming a Jew, and raising our son in the faith as well. We were the embodiment of musician Paul Simon’s “one and one-half wandering Jews,” and were welcomed into the tent.
Now, more than four decades after Ethel Hamburger expanded her family, and her already big heart, to include Carol, Matthew and me, this beautiful human’s life was claimed by COVID 19.
She lived to reach her 92nd birthday, as my mother did. And, just like my mother, Etty’s indefatigable thirst for life, and generosity with her love took many forms: in her cherubic smile; her schoolgirl innocence; her bright, dancing eyes; her cooking, and teaching, and writing — always writing.
For her 90th birthday in 2018, a book of Etty’s poems — created over many years — was published by her children. The book is packed with photos and stories of family members from every generation, and tales of Etty’s childhood, growing up as a Jacobson outside of Chicago, Illinois.
Essentially Etty, at her 90th BirthdayParty.
Entitled “Essentially Etty,” it is a living, breathing 136-page ode to love and life and family, impossible to read without hearing Etty’s lilting and uplifting voice. I’ve read and re-read her poem “Living and Loving” (see below) and each time I do, I see those eyes and that sweet, warm smile, welcoming us into her cozy home, to share life, and love and learning.
I will not live an unloved life
As I will live, I will love.
To have the capabilities of all my senses
To wake up each morning
Ready to experience anew
Whatever life has to offer.
I love to encounter new adventures
I love to be with people
I love the opportunity to help others
To share their joy when personal needs are met.
I love to learn new things,
To expand my knowledge and capabilities.
I love to greet each new oncoming season
The fresh buds and flowers of springtime
The warm sun on my shoulders and walking barefoot at the water’s edge;
Director of the National Institutes for Allergies and Infectious Diseases, Dr. Anthony Fauci.
It would be easy to get caught up in the campaign for canonization of Dr. Anthony Fauci.
The Director of the National Institute for Allergies and Infectious Diseases since the Presidency of Ronald Reagan, Fauci is the only believable spokesperson in the Trump Administration on the COVID 19 pandemic. His colleague Dr. Deborah Birx, the Administration’s Corona Virus Response Coordinator, crushed her own credibility by telling the Christian Broadcasting Network the preposterous lie that “The President is so attentive to the scientific literature and the details and the data.” Birx also gratuitously embellished Trump’s criticisms of the World Health Organization, and dissembled more than once on the matter of testing — probably the single most important, and missing factor — in mapping out any Corona Virus Response, for which she is responsible.
Unlike “Ambassador” Birx, who comes across like a wealthy, well-dressed dilettante, bemoaning being unable to host “dinner parties for 20 yet,” because of social distancing, Anthony Fauci is a down-to-earth, likeable 79-year old, highly educated Italian professional from Brooklyn — still bearing scraps of his Brooklyn accent — who played basketball in High School and rooted for the Yankees despite growing up on Brooklyn Dodger turf.
That training in street toughness, highlighted in a recent New Yorker article by Michael Specter, entitled, “How Anthony Fauci Became America’s Doctor,” should have made Fauci fight more furiously, against the anti-science prejudice and profit-over-patients Darwinism rampant inside the Trump White House, and frothing from the mouths of Ingraham, Hannity, Carlson, and even the fallacious Dr. Phil on Fox News. Unfortunately, like the good point guard he was on his high school team, Fauci stays in his lane, highly disciplined, especially when it comes to forcefully exposing lies and intentional falsehoods by Presidents and others with more power and bigger megaphones than he thinks he has. In fact, at this moment in history, no one in this country has more power nor a bigger following than Dr. Fauci — and no one is in a better position to save more lives by fearlessly using that force.
He wasn’t always so afraid to exercise his power, nor be so confrontation-averse. After graduating Medical School, Fauci choose to enter the Public Health Service, as a constructive alternative to going off to War in Vietnam. He didn’t pretend to have bone spurs to avoid service. Instead, he wanted to serve people and save lives the best way he knew how — by improving public health.
In the early days of the HIV/AIDS epidemic, Fauci, then at NIH, immersed himself in learning about this mysterious new disease. Unfortunately, he was buried in the bowels of the homophobic Reagan Administration where AIDS was laughed at, and the name of the disease wasn’t spoken for seven years by the President. For three of those years, Fauci served as the Director of the National Institute of Allergies and Infectious Diseases, a position he still holds 36 years, and five Presidents, later.
“ My face was the face of the Federal Government,” Fauci told The New Yorker’s Specter, in discussing his early role in fighting the AIDS epidemic. Specter wrote that Dr. Fauci asked the same question every day: “Why wasn’t the Administrationmoving faster?”
It’s the same question Dr. Fauci should be asking every single day today — with far more power than he had four decades earlier — of another fact-denying Administration. Unfortunately, now, under Trump, as he did under Reagan, Fauci has limited his effectiveness by limiting his aggressiveness. Again, he’s the high school basketball point guard, choosing to stay in his narrow lane.
Fauci was hated by AIDS activists, like Larry Kramer, founder of the Gay Men’s Health Crisis, who first called him a “murderer,” Michael Callen, and Sean Strub. They found Fauci to be “uncooperative,” as Strub wrote in his book Body Counts (Scribner, NY, 2014), too tightly bound to the research scientist’s sometimes myopic mantra of focusing only on the data, and not seeing the patients most affected by the disease.
But it was this disease and it’s catastrophic effect on patients, unlike anything Dr. Fauci had seen before, that pushed the point-guard hard over the line.
“Everybody died,” Fauci told Specter for The New Yorker. “I was used to treating people who had so little hope, and then saving their lives — that was so wonderful. But with AIDS in those days, I saved no one.” AIDS transformed Fauci, Specter wrote, from a “ conventional bench scientist to a public health activist.”
Fauci’s transformation was gradual, like a butterfly emerging from its comfortable cocoon. Over time, he became one of the most influential voices in the United States and the world on HIV/AIDS, winning the trust and respect of AIDS activists who previously loathed him. It was also his voice which was most influential in the creation of PEPFAR — the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief — a landmark achievement of George W. Bush’s, considered to be a model for addressing global epidemics and credited with saving more than 17 million lives worldwide.
Fauci had morphed from being a “sinner by silence” to Saint Anthony on HIV/AIDS over 25 years, making him the perfect addition to Trump’s public-facing phalanx of medical/scientific professionals when COVID 19 crashed into the United States. The conventional bench scientist in him knew all the data about how strong and early moves to mitigate the effects of a pandemic — and early and continuous testing — could reduce the number of deaths. Fauci told CNN’s Jake Tapper that much on State of the Union, on Easter Sunday, April 11, 2020, when the number of COVID 19 deaths in the United States surpassed 20,000, and appeared to be out of control:
“Obviously, you could logically say that if you had a process that was ongoing and you started mitigation earlier, you could have saved lives. But, there was a lot of pushback about shutting things early in the outbreak.”
The following day, with Trump hovering over the 5’5” Fauci at the White House Press briefing the way he lurked behind Hillary Clinton during a debate, the Infectious Disease expert walked back his statement — viewed as highly critical of the Administration’s failure to act swiftly — by tamping down the word “pushback.”
Yet, the question that was not asked of Fauci at that moment was whether he, Saint Anthony, was part of that “pushback,” to start mitigation and testing earlier and consistently? If so, how hard did he push? The question was the same Larry Kramer raised about Fauci before the good doctor’s transformation on HIV/AIDS: “Had Tony Fauci done all he was capable of doing?” (Strub, Body Counts, p. 328.) And, oddly, it was the very same question Fauci himself raised about the Reagan Administration 35 years earlier while a part of it: “Why wasn’t the Administration moving faster?”
Similar questions could have been raised about why the first batch of the CDC’s COVID 19 tests were defective (and who was responsible for them), and why, based upon Fauci’s extensive experience with epidemics, wasn’t he aware of the abysmal condition of the federal stockpile on medical supplies essential for use in any epidemiological emergency?
The easy, facile answer is that “it wasn’t in his lane,” which would push him back to being nothing more than a conventional bench scientist again and not one of the world’s leading public health advocates, which he has become. It’s an excuse which his old colleague and former NIH Director Dr. Harold Varmus gave to the New Yorker’s Specter:
““Tony isn’t running C.D.C. He’s not running FEMA. To tell him to stockpile defense mechanisms or to move forward surveillance tools into massive operations around the world — that’s just not his remit.”
That just doesn’t wash when one is talking about Tony Fauci at this stage of his distinguished career, where the world’s health is “his remit.” No one else has the enormous capacity, knowledge, record of accomplishment, depth of expertise, passion for public health and access to power as Dr. Fauci does. In fact, the answer was right in front of Fauci, in his own words and beliefs which defined his transformation from “bench scientist” to “public health activist” over HIV/AIDS, 30 years earlier:
““Everybody died. “I was used to treating people who had so little hope, and then saving their lives — that was so wonderful. But with AIDS (COVID-19, today), I saved no one.”
So it’s legitimate to ask if Saint Anthony has done all he is capable of doing at the peak of his power and influence? Has Fauci fought hard enough to mitigate the death and suffering of the COVID 19 pandemic, in nursing homes, poor urban and rural communities, among African Americans and health care workers abandoned by the present American president whose Administration is “not moving fastenough”? Is Dr. Fauci ready to jump out his comfort zone one more time to save even more lives? Or will he retreat to being a conventional bench scientist, and not the public health activist and truth-teller we know him to be? Is Fauci doing “everything he possibly can to stop the worst from happening,” as he told the NewYorker? Is Fauci moving fast & forcefully enough?
At 79 years old, with over 50 years of stellar public service, I pray that Saint Anthony is not distracted from his calling, nor diminished by his daily dealings with Donald Trump. Facing the biggest public health challenge of his lifetime — and ours — Dr. Fauci needs to amplify all of his courage and faith once again, to move out of his safe, familiar lane, and take the shot.
