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She decided to assure Fauci that he would do exactly what he said. “I sort of gulped and thought: what the heck am I going to do now?” Grady says.
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watch the trailer for Fauci.īut the patient, who had spent months in hospital, said “no way” and vowed to go to the beach every day and go dancing at night. Fauci asked her to tell the patient that his ulcers were not completely healed, so, if discharged, he would have to keep his legs elevated and change the dressings frequently. Christine Grady, a nurse who had spent two years in Brazil and spoke Portuguese, was summoned to act as an interpreter. A self-confessed workaholic, he had little time for romance.īut one day, the film recounts, he was treating a Brazilian man who could not speak English. That’s what it is.”īy 1984, he had become the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), a position he still holds. Asked why it still affects him, he pauses, clenches his jaw and says: “Post-traumatic stress syndrome. In one of six interviews he gave to the film-makers, Fauci is seen fighting back tears as he recalls an Aids patient who lost their sight. In 1981, Fauci turned his research focus to early scientific reports of a mysterious disease that at first had stricken gay people, intravenous drug users and people with haemophilia. He took up clinical medicine during an internship and residency at the New York Hospital-Cornell Medical Center, then arrived at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in Bethesda, Maryland, as a clinical fellow in 1968.
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It was an unpretentious childhood where you did not get intimidated, he says in the film – “or, as we used to say, you didn’t take shit from anybody”. Janet Tobias, the film’s other director, says Fauci has a “grounded charisma”: “He was forged in the Aids pandemic and he was tested in the Covid pandemic.”įauci worked at his parents’ pharmacy while growing up in Brooklyn, New York. In both cases, he has been a lightning rod for public emotion: revered as a hero by some, reviled as a villain by others. It is a portrait of a man whose career has spanned seven US presidents and been bookended by the two great pandemics of the past century: HIV/Aids and Covid. The film begins with a split screen: the Fauci of today and the Fauci of four decades ago walking the same journey to his desk. People are able to sense that there’s a lot of noise and their ears are trying to find the signal and Tony is the signal.”Ĭult hero. “At the core of Tony’s popularity is that people intuit that this is a man who is speaking the truth and will not let anything stand in the way,” says John Hoffman, the co-director of a new documentary, Fauci. But it also reveals much about the US, a polarised country where face masks and vaccines have become as controversial as abortion and gun rights – and where science itself is under siege. The phenomenon says much about his devotion to saving lives, as well as his willingness to listen and his role as a candid truth-teller. T-shirts and yard signs that declare “Dr Fauci is my hero” and “In Fauci we trust”.Īnthony Fauci, an 80-year-old scientist, doctor and public servant, has become an unlikely cult hero for millions of people during the Covid pandemic. Dolls, doughnuts, hoodies, mugs and socks. Candles, colouring books, cupcakes and cushions.