THE PLAGUE DOCTOR

Anthony Fauci on what's ailing America.

- JEROME GROOPMAN

Fauci's account of his career focusses as much on AIDS as on COVID, and comparison of the two crises is revealing.

Some fifty pages into his autobiography, “On Call: A Doctor’s Journey in Public Service” (Viking), Anthony Fauci, the former head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), describes a moment of horror when he and his colleagues realize that the scale of the epidemic they are dealing with is far greater than previously supposed: “Thousands and thousands of people had been getting infected before we knew that the disease existed, and they were passing the infections on to others long before they showed symptoms of the disease itself.” Later, as the government response—of which he is the “public face”—comes under fire, Fauci will be called a murderer.

The year is 1985, and a blood test for H.I.V. has recently become available. By the end of the year, it will be evident that, for each of the nearly sixteen thousand people in the United States suffering from AIDS, more than seven others are infected but asymptomatic.