Tony's Diary Package — page 871

activism, and two opposing sides learning that collaboration was more productive than combativeness. Peter Staley and other AIDS activists from that era speak candidly about their fight for AIDS attention and action, primarily through the Larry Kramer-led AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP), which aggressively made noise in public and scientific spaces in order to oppose prejudice and demand help. Convinced that the government wasn't doing enough to research and treat the fatal disease--which was largely decried as an affliction that plagued only gay men and women--they saw Fauci as a bureaucrat who didn't care about the sick and the suffering, and castigated him accordingly. As Fauci himself explains in a lengthy interview that forms the core of Fauci, he heard that condemnation but soldiered on anyway. Breakthroughs regarding the identification of AIDS as a virus, and how to effectively stymie its growth through a cocktail of drugs, were earned through countless hours of work, and in an environment that became increasingly hostile thanks to the fury of those who were losing loved ones to the disease, and vehement that more could be done to save them. In what would be a turning point in the AIDS fight, in Fauci's life, and in the history of medical science, Fauci chose to listen to those voices, attending an ACT UP meeting where he went toe-to-toe with his critics, and then speaking on their behalf at a 1990s AIDS conference in San Francisco. In doing so, he charted a new course in which the experiences and input of subjects were taken into greater consideration during clinical trials. Fauci makes plain the parallels between Fauci's "bookending" battles against AIDS and COVID-19, along the way depicting a man who's given his life to the investigation and treatment of the world's worst ailments. Sandwiched in between those two all-caps epidemics were his clashes with SARS, Swine flu, MERS and Ebola, against which he led the charge. In a telling moment in Hoffman and Tobias' nonfiction biopic, Fauci says that he sought to destigmatize Ebola by hugging recovered patient Nina Pham at a press conference, and such leadership-through-example is again seen in a late clip of him receiving the COVID-19 vaccine on a stage in front of cameras. Time and again, the individual presented by the film is one who puts others first and takes risks in order to guide and reassure the American public. "Time and again, the individual presented by the film is one who puts others first and takes risks in order to guide and assuage the American public." He's also a scientific titan who, having served as adviser to seven presidents (beginning with Ronald Reagan), isn't afraid to deliver unpleasant truths that many--including his bosses--don't necessarily want to hear (or, at least, don't want to hear said into a microphone). Clips of Fauci ruffling Trump's feathers by pushing back on his hydroxychloroquine nonsense, and setting out a realistic timetable for a vaccine, reconfirm this point, painting him as an honest, candid grown-up in a milieu that's full of selfinterested officials who'd prefer to tell people what they want to hear. It's clear that he's made mistakes over the course of his tenure; The New York Times global health reporter Apoorva Mandavilli highlights, for example, Fauci's confusing mask messaging. Yet the fact that Fauci has now been labeled all manner of undeserved things by right-wing anti-science loons--at great emotional cost to him, his wife Christine, and their three daughters--only accentuates his bravery, resilience, and staunch adherence to reason and evidence.