Tony's Diary Package — page 537

Those efforts were met with resistance, but Fauci is no stranger to friction. At the height of the AIDS epidemic, in 1988, playwright Larry Kramer called Fauci a "murderer" and an "incompetent idiot" on the cover of the San Francisco Examiner magazine. Kramer and other AIDS activists felt that the NIAID's clinical trials for HIV drugs were moving at a glacial pace while thousands of people were dying. When a group gathered outside his office to protest, Fauci invited some in for a chat. Over time, he built a relationship with them that would lead to changes in the way people with AIDS got access to experimental drugs. It was a revolutionary approach at a time when people with a disease had little say in the science aimed at treating them. "That was a tough period," he says. "There were many scientists who thought that I was caving in". Warm but blunt, with a pronounced Brooklyn accent, he has often worked well with political leaders. Former US president George H. W. Bush called him a hero for his work on AIDS, and Fauci worked with his son, former president George W. Bush, to design the President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR), a global programme to provide treatment for people with HIV. But this year, his staid and steady advocacy for public-health measures to slow the spread of COVID-19 earned him stiff criticisms from President Donald Trump and others who were eager to play down the severity of the pandemic and get the US economy restarted. Trump has suggested that he might fire the scientist, and a stream of vitriol has poured from some of the president's followers. Steve Bannon, a former Trump adviser, said that he would like to see Fauci's head on a pike outside the White House. Fauci now has federal guards overseeing his security. The threats made him "more pissed off than afraid", he says. "I'm out there trying to give a public-health message to save people's lives." But some researchers were also frustrated with Fauci's public performance. He often stood next to Trump during press briefings as the president repeatedly misrepresented the severity of the pandemic. Although Fauci sometimes contradicted Trump, he did not directly confront the president. Such briefings stopped in April. Fauci has since become more outspoken, says Mark Harrington, executive director of Treatment Action Group, a New York City think tank that focuses on the treatment and prevention of AIDS, tuberculosis and hepatitis C virus. "He's been speaking truth to power for the last few months in a way that none of the other people in the task force or federal government have been doing," Harrington says. Fauci, who turns 80 in December, has no plans to retire soon. He has agreed to stay on at the NIAID and to serve as president-elect Joe Biden's chief medical adviser. Osterholm says he expects Fauci to continue to have an active role in front of the cameras. But Harrington is looking forward to the day when Fauci can focus his attention again on other pressing concerns, such as HIV and hepatitis C. "He needs to be able to do his day job," he says. "It's a big job."