Dr. Anthony Fauci discusses his career, reflects on pandemic response at UIC forum

Dr. Anthony Fauci visited University of Illinois Chicago on Tuesday to discuss his decades-long career in medicine and public service.

Marie Lynn Miranda, UIC’s chancellor, spoke with Fauci about his work battling two major public health crises — the HIV and AIDS epidemic and the COVID-19 pandemic — the need for more robust local public health systems to better manage future outbreaks and restoring trust in health care professionals and scientists.

The 83-year-old retired in 2022 after leading the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases for nearly 40 years. He served as an adviser on domestic and global health issues to seven U.S. presidents.

About 2,100 people attended the chat at UIC’s Isadore and Sadie Dorin Forum, including former Mayor Lori Lightfoot, who did not speak. At three separate points, pro-Palestine demonstrators with the organization Behind Enemy Lines interrupted Fauci and Miranda and were removed from the auditorium.

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During the chat, Fauci discussed the country’s failures in responding and managing the COVID-19 pandemic. He pointed out that before the outbreak, the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health ranked the U.S. as overwhelmingly the best country for pandemic preparedness.

But at the end of the fourth year of the pandemic, “we had 1.7 million deaths and the outbreak isn’t even over yet,” Fauci said. “We are now in our fifth year of this outbreak, and that is more deaths per capita than virtually any other country in the world, including low- and middle-income countries with maybe one exception.”

The country’s diminishing public health system was one of the reasons the response to the virus was weakened, especially given that most local public health departments are critically underfunded, Fauci said.

“So when you heard us always talking about how we can control [COVID-19] by identification, isolation and contact tracing, all of that takes place at the local level,” Fauci said. “And if you don’t have local public health infrastructure, no matter how devoted and committed the people are, if they don’t have the resources, it’s not going to happen.”

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At the federal level, responding to COVID-19 was complicated by the ever-changing virus, Fauci said.

“When you’re dealing with the moving target, then you have to make decisions based on the information, the data and the evidence that you have,” Fauci said. “So what we knew in January of 2020, was very different from so many standpoints than what we knew in July of 2020 and in April of 2022.”

COVID-19 wasn’t the first outbreak Fauci handled. During the early 1980s, he was on the forefront of responding to the growing HIV and AIDS epidemic. He started working for the National Institutes of Health in 1981 after finishing fellowships in infectious disease and immunology.

Nobody else wanted to get involved in treating and learning about the disease, Fauci said, and some didn’t think it was even worth addressing.

Fauci said his undergrad degree in classical studies made him a more empathetic doctor, enabling him to see patients such as those with AIDS as people outside of their infections.

“I just felt this compelling empathy towards these young gay men who were being stigmatized, not only for being gay, but stigmatized because they had a disease that was a mysterious disease that was likely sexually transmitted,” Fauci said.

“I felt an almost fundamental ethical responsibility to say I’m going to change the direction of my career and start studying this disease that didn’t have a name.”

Pat Nabong/Sun-Times