WASHINGTON – From a window on the seventh floor of the National Institutes of Health campus in Bethesda, Maryland, Dr. Anthony Fauci looked down at a chaotic scene. Hundreds of protesters had swarmed the grounds, blocking entrances and pathways to demand action. They set off colorful smoke bombs and blasted air horns every 12 seconds, a haunting acoustic reminder that, statistically, someone had just died of AIDS. They focused their anger on him, the nation’s top infectious disease doctor, for what they perceived as the government’s lackluster response to a disease that was, at that point, killing mostly gay and bisexual men and intravenous drug users.
Fauci watched as a man he recognized climbed onto the concrete portico of the main building. Police wrestled him down, and Fauci, dressed in his white lab coat, bolted downstairs to investigate. As a burly officer marched the man through the main door toward a police van with his hands zip-tied behind him, Fauci called out, “Peter, is that you?” The man, Peter Staley, replied, “I did it! I was the first one arrested.” Fauci knew Staley, who was HIV-positive, as one of the leaders of the protest. Publicly, Fauci had argued with Staley and other activists over the government’s response to AIDS, but in that moment, his concern was personal. He wanted to ensure Staley was not hurt. The baffled police officer stood by in disbelief as Staley grinned and assured Fauci he was OK. “It was an extraordinary moment,” recalled Staley, who remains close friends with Fauci almost 40 years later.
For Fauci, it would be one of many personal moments in a 56-year career that would see him become the nation’s most revered – and, in some cases, reviled – scientist and infectious disease expert. He served seven presidents, from Ronald Reagan to Joe Biden, advising leaders through anthrax attacks, Ebola, Zika, and the West Nile virus. As director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, part of the National Institutes of Health, he became a fixture of American public life. “He became an icon because of his success,” said Dr. Jeanne Marrazzo, who succeeded him as director of the institute after he retired in 2022.
However, it would be the COVID-19 pandemic under President Donald Trump that would turn the 85-year-old white-haired doctor with the gruff Brooklyn accent into a lightning rod like never before. Fauci’s job often placed him in the crosshairs of the intersection between politics and science. George W. Bush gave him the Presidential Medal of Freedom for his work on HIV and AIDS, and Biden awarded him a Presidential Medal of Freedom as well. Yet, the political climate shifted drastically. On Thursday, Aug. 6, a GOP-led Senate panel voted 8-5 to hold him in contempt of Congress. A week earlier, he had been subpoenaed to testify regarding his role in pandemic-era policies.
The committee chairman, Republican Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky, and other GOP lawmakers accused him of obfuscation. Digging through the diary Fauci kept on his government computer, they accused him of saying one thing in private emails while recommending different policies to the public. More than 100 times, Fauci’s response was the same: He invoked his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination. Fauci’s attorney, David Schertler, declined ’s request for an interview with Fauci, stating that the legal situation remains sensitive. The broad, preemptive pardon he received from Biden covered only the period from 2014 to the end of Biden’s term, leaving questions about earlier periods of his career.
Fauci’s defenders argue he has been unfairly made a villain by MAGA Republicans putting politics ahead of public health. For Fauci, they say, the focus has always been the science. “I never saw him say one thing privately and another publicly,” said Jerome Adams, who was surgeon general under Trump. Like many scientists working in government, Fauci understood there is often tension between science, policy, and political reality. “Those are difficult judgments, and reasonable people can disagree about them,” Adams said. But he added that he always found Fauci to be a man of integrity.
Fauci credits his parents with instilling the values that led him to a career in medicine and public health. Born into an Italian-American family, Fauci grew up in a three-bedroom apartment above his father’s pharmacy in Brooklyn. His father, Stephen Anthony Fauci, was a pharmacist whom he remembered as a shy man with a strong sense of ethics, integrity, and community. On Sundays, when the pharmacy was open for half a day, Fauci worked the counter, ringing up prescriptions and learning the trade. In between, he was the starting point guard on the basketball team at Regis High School, an all-boy Jesuit school in Manhattan. Fauci remembered his father accommodating customers who could not afford their medication, a lesson in empathy that stayed with him.
Regarding the COVID-19 era, some experts suggest the criticism is misplaced. Fauci got some things wrong as he and other scientists tried to contain a virus they knew nothing about, said Dr. Paul Offit, a vaccine expert at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. But “I think he was the right man for the job,” said Offit, who had raised doubts about the reliability of early data on the effectiveness of the COVID vaccine and questioned some public health recommendations on booster shots. Other experts emphasize the evolving nature of scientific knowledge. “It’s perfectly reasonable to change the way you think about a complex topic such as an emerging virus if you receive new insights that justify doing so,” said John Moore, a professor of microbiology and immunology at Cornell. “Indeed, it would be professional malpractice to not do so.”
The intensity of the current political attacks has not deterred Fauci from his long-standing commitment to his work. Despite the legal battles and the public scrutiny, those close to him say he remains focused on the mission of public health. “He is fully ready to finish this fight,” Staley said. If anything, Staley noted, Fauci has gone back to the thing he loves most: being a doctor. His career, which spanned the darkest days of the AIDS crisis to the global disruption of the COVID-19 pandemic, remains a testament to the complexities of leading the nation’s scientific response during times of extreme uncertainty.
The transition from a celebrated hero of the AIDS epidemic to a target of intense political vitriol highlights the polarized nature of modern American discourse. Fauci’s supporters point to his decades of service as evidence of his dedication, while his detractors argue that his public health mandates were overreaches that damaged the economy and civil liberties. Throughout it all, Fauci has maintained a stoic, if sometimes weary, public persona, rarely engaging in the partisan bickering that characterizes much of the criticism directed at him. His ability to navigate these competing pressures for over half a century is viewed by many as a masterclass in bureaucratic survival and scientific leadership.
As the legal proceedings continue, the legacy of Anthony Fauci remains a subject of intense debate. Whether history views him as a flawed bureaucrat or a steadfast defender of science during a global health crisis may depend on the political lens through which his actions are viewed. Yet, for those who worked alongside him, like Staley, his character is defined by the moments of humanity he displayed even in the heat of conflict. From the pharmacy in Brooklyn to the halls of the National Institutes of Health, Fauci’s path has been marked by a consistent, if sometimes controversial, adherence to what he believed to be the best scientific advice available at the time.
Ultimately, the story of Anthony Fauci is the story of the modern American scientific establishment. It is a story of immense power, profound responsibility, and the inevitable friction that occurs when scientific recommendations collide with political agendas. As he navigates the final chapters of his professional life, the lessons of his career—both the successes and the controversies—will likely be studied for generations. For now, the man who once stood on the front lines of the AIDS crisis continues to face the challenges of a new era, undeterred by the noise of the political arena.
Biden gave him a presidential pardon after congressional Republicans threatened him with criminal charges over his handling of COVID-19.
They claimed the NIH he led funded research that a lab in Wuhan, China, used to create the COVID virus.
Schertler said in a statement that Paul is waging a baseless campaign to put Fauci in jail and harbors a “seemingly pathological” obsession with him.
They carried fake coffins with Fauci’s name on them.
Privately, Fauci had met them over dinner and wine, strategizing for hours over how to get experimental drugs quickly to AIDS patients who had no other hope.
He and his family receive so many death threats that he has his own security detail, which he pays for himself after Trump revoked his taxpayer-funded protection.
They painted him as someone obsessed with celebrities and his own fame.
The broad, preemptive pardon he received from Biden covered only the period from 2014 to the end of Biden’s term in January 2025.
His attorneys feared Paul was trying to coax Fauci to say something under oath that could be misconstrued and used to prosecute him.
In his 2024 memoir, “On Call: A Doctor’s Journey in Public Service,” he described his family as loving and close-knit.
His father, Stephen Anthony Fauci, whom he remembered as a shy man with a strong sense of ethics, integrity and kindness, ran the pharmacy from 9 a.m.
He took a 45-minute break in the evening to have dinner with his family.
He delivered them on his Schwinn bicycle on weekends and during school breaks and summer.
We will just put it on a tab,” Fauci wrote in his memoir.
He went to Cornell University Medical College, graduated first in his class in 1966 and accepted a fellowship at the National Institutes of Health in 1968, studying how the human body protects itself against infectious diseases and cancers.
He had picked up the government’s morbidity and mortality weekly report from a pile of junk mail on his desk at the National Institutes of Health.
An article detailed an unusual form of pneumonia in five men who otherwise had been healthy.
The virus would kill more than 700,000 Americans.
He testified before Congress and pressed Ronald Reagan’s administration to dedicate billions of dollars to AIDS research.
Fauci built a research program that tried to learn how to stop HIV from destroying the immune system.
Because Fauci was seen as the federal government’s AIDS czar, he became the target for activists who felt the administration wasn’t moving fast enough.
The writer Larry Kramer branded him a murderer in an open letter published in 1988.
Two years later, on May 21, 1990, hundreds of protesters stormed the offices of the National Institutes of Health.
They demanded the government allow dying patients access to potentially lifesaving drugs that hadn’t yet been approved by the government.
“We realized that our only salvation was going to come from science,” said Staley, who left his Wall Street job to become a political activist with the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power, or ACT UP.
He invited them to meetings in his office and, later, to long dinners over bottles of wine at restaurants and in the home of his top aide.
Fauci listened, really listened, agreeing at times and pushing back strongly when he didn’t.
The meetings gave him insight he couldn’t get anywhere else.
He responded by appointing people with HIV to committees overseeing AIDS research.
He pressed the Food and Drug Administration to allow thousands of people into experimental drug trials.
“I am brutally honest with the guy,” Staley said.
“The stuff I have told him over the years, 9 out of 10 people would end the friendship.” But “he wanted to hear that.
By early 2020, COVID was spreading rapidly across the United States.
Trump announced at a White House news briefing on March 19, 2020, that the anti-malaria drug hydroxychloroquine could be a game changer in COVID treatment, claiming early test results had been promising.
The next day, at a briefing in the same room, reporters asked Fauci, with Trump at his side, if that was true.
“Hydroxychloroquine doesn’t work,” he responded, adding the evidence cited by those touting the drug was anecdotal and not backed by science.
At the same briefing, Trump referred to the State Department as “the Deep State Department,” and Fauci covered his face with the palm of his hand to hide his reaction.
A photo of the moment went viral and quickly became an internet meme – and Fauci noticed everything for him started to change.
He gave updates on television, answered reporters’ tough questions and served as the voice for the latest science on stopping the spread of the coronavirus.
“While millions of Americans appreciated or admired me, a hard-core group saw me as a nay-saying bureaucrat who deliberately, even maliciously, was undermining President Trump,” he wrote.
“They loved and supported the president and regarded me as the enemy.
To them, my hand to my forehead moment proved it.”
He and his family were bombarded with angry emails, texts and phone calls.
In Congress, Republicans aimed at Fauci more frequently and pushed the unproven theory that the coronavirus was created at a lab in Wuhan, China, instead of spreading from animal to human, as Fauci believed.
At a contentious Senate hearing in July 2021, Paul repeatedly clashed with Fauci and accused him of lying about the government funding research in Wuhan.
“If anybody is lying here, senator,” Fauci shot back, “it is you.”
The bitter exchange set the stage for Paul’s Senate hearing last week.
“I think he really did try and explain things clearly.
“I think I might crumble if this were happening to me.
Two days after he pleaded the Fifth, Fauci was back at Georgetown University Medical Center, where he has worked since retiring four years ago.
There, away from the chaos and the cameras, he quietly made his rounds and tended to patients.
Michael Collins writes about the intersection of politics and culture.