Anthony Fauci (right) has been an outspoken member of the White House Coronavirus Task Force.
Draw Anger / Getty Images
By John Cohen
ScienceCOVID-19 reporting supported by the Putitzer Center and the Heising-Simmons Foundation
At 8 p.m., Sept. 23, Anthony Faucy arrives in Washington, D.C. In his living room there was still Bho, he was in suit and tie, chatting on his cell phone with the assistant, disappointed that his day was over. It began at 6 a.m. and included testifying at a three-hour Senate hearing on Covid-1 on. Early in the evening, he talked to actor Alan Alda about the epidemic at the live streaming event. The head of the US National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) and chief scientist of the White House Coronavirus Task Force, Fauci still has more than 200 e-mails to read and reply to in his inbox. “I’ll be up until the morning,” he said.
The week key, which appeared on the cover of that week Time The 100 Most Influential People Magazine issue of 2020, went up and turned into jeans and sweatshirts. When he came down, his wife Christine Grady – U.S. A biothostist at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) Clinical Center – brought them an IPA beer and salmon sliders on their back porch deck, where they sat for an hour. , With social distance interview Science. Fawcett has spoken out against President Donald Trump and his relations with White House staff. The Emergency Use Author Theory (EUA) issued by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) discussed the Covid-19 vaccine tested by the government’s Operation Operation Speed Speed and all its aspects. His confrontation with the army at that day’s hearing. Rand Paul (R-PA), who has a history of injecting NIAID directors.
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Since 79-year-old F. C. Key, who has led NIAID since 1984 and is a world-renowned H.I. Having established a reputation as a V / AIDS researcher, he has no regrets about quarreling with Paul. “I said to myself, you know, sorry, I don’t disrespect it, I don’t get aggressive, but I don’t let Cherry Data let it go by saying selected information.”
This interview was edited for clarification and promotion.
Q: Why aren’t you afraid to speak your mind at the White House?
A: I’m running the gauntlet of being someone who doesn’t hesitate to tell the president and vice president what they don’t want to hear. There are some people in the White House who, when I first started saying things like those task force meetings, they were like, “Oh my God!” That’s when I got the nickname, “Skunk on a picnic.” When they take an optimistic note, I’ll say, “No, wait a minute.”
I said using my experience with activists in the early years of the AIDS epidemic, “If you really want to know what’s going on, you have to talk to the people in the trenches.” So when people were saying, “The test is OK, anyone who wants to be tested can be tested,” I would call at night and talk to individuals who are assistant health commissioners, health commissioners, or New York, Chicago, Someone running an ICU from New Orleans, Seattle and LA. I would do it regularly, and what they saw in the trenches was not always what was happening in the discussion. So I will bring this perspective to the task force and I will say, “I’m sorry, I’m not trying to weaken the president. But there is one thing called reality. “
When you have 70,000 [COVID-19] Infected in a day and that is Platoos, 44,000,000, that’s not really very good news. Some will say, “Well, you know, we should stay positive because parts of the country are at their best.” I don’t disagree: yes, there are some parts of the country that are doing well, where the positivity of the test is 1% or less. But other areas are not doing well, and this country is a big forest, and when you catch fire in some parts of the forest, the whole forest is at risk.
Q: That’s not rocket science Tony.
A: The point that I sometimes make is the similarity of crew racing. I knew nothing about the crew until my daughter became captain of the Stanford varsity team a few years ago. And then I decided that what I really needed to do was learn how to do it right. Each of those eight people as long as the ninth person is Coxswain, he is doing exactly the way you should, you will never win a race. You need one person, sometimes two, God forbid, which is not synchronized and is yours. You have lost the race. Everyone has had to work together. And it’s a concept that I try very hard to overcome.
Debbie [Birx, a scientist on the Task Force] Now she is constantly out in the field and she is quite watching that when you increase the positivity of the test, she predicts that the rate of infection will increase. And then when people start implementing public health measures that increase comes under control. It’s almost like a mole blow. And it doesn’t work in the long run.
Q: Operation Operation Speed Speed A vaccine that can be vaccinated quickly. But what do you think about his portfolio? The obvious missing ingredient is the inactivated virus vaccine. It has come a long way from vaccines manufactured by China and now Europe is investing heavily in them.
A: In the whole world, you want to continue all those platforms. Extensive effort was decided upon. I was not the primary person in making that decision. I was and am responsible for the NIH component of that multilateral effort. We do research, and we say, these are the things we need to do. A decision was made that they would undertake an important process involving several agencies of the federal government. It wasn’t entirely in my hands. One thing that made me happy happened, because we were pushing for it, was to get a comprehensive portfolio, a comprehensive vaccine platform, in which recombinant proteins with adjuvants were more traditional.
Q: Most COVID-19 vaccines tested in the United States contain only versions of the viral surface protein, Spike. Inactivated virus vaccines contain all viral proteins. What do you think of the extension to include more viral ingredients?
A: You know, it’s an interesting psychodynamic, saying that we have this devastating outbreak and we must move forward as quickly as possible. We come forward and say that relying on companies, we are willing to invest in this approach. There was just an emphasis on the need to do something about it, as this is the same thing as opposed to approaches with other diseases where the nature of the crisis in the process is minimal. Antigens other than spikes will be taken in the second generation of potential SARS-COV-2 vaccines.
Q: The EU situation poses an interesting problem. The manner in which convulsant plasma was approved for the EU by hydroxychloroquine is linked to the confidence to leave the vaccine.
A: I understand the need and importance of the EU, but I have long been of the opinion that the golden standard for determining if an intervention is safe and effective is running a randomized controlled clinical trial. The EU is based on the principle that the benefits outweigh the risks in a situation where there is reason to believe that the intervention can be effective. I’m just for that – these people can quickly get life-saving interventions for those in need. But this should only happen in a situation that does not interfere with the process of ultimately proving whether the intervention is really safe and effective. For convective plasma, an EUA was issued, and I hope that when the clinical trials are completed, we get a definite answer.
Q: Nucleotide plasma did not work in Ebola.
A: Yes, exactly. And Cliff [Lane, a deputy director of NIAID] Did a study in Southeast Asia, and did not work in convulsive plasma influenza.
Q: And the data for convex plasma against Covid-19 is really soft.
A: One of the things I’ve learned, and the fun you keep learning as you get older and older, is the sophistication of modern-day statistics. When you investigate a matter in a post-Hawk analysis of a pre-determined end point, boy, you can lead the way to the garden. We were saying that if you torment the data enough, it will eventually tell you what it wants to tell you.
Q: I know it’s too late for you. And you also had a wonderful exchange with “Senator Rand”. [Fauci mistakenly said “Senator Rand” at the hearing.] Do you feel good about it?
A: I do. I was born and raised on the streets of New York, but I am an animal from Washington, D.C., and I have great respect for government institutions. Just as I have great respect for the presidency, I have great respect for the Senate. And in that regard, I have great respect for the senator. But I won’t let Senator Paul say things that are cherry-picked data. And he compared us to Sweden, and said, Sweden can infect everyone and they have a much lower mortality rate than us. And I say, sir, with all due respect, you are comparing apples and oranges, you should not compare Sweden with the United States, you should compare Sweden with the same demographic population as Scandinavian countries like Norway and Denmark. And Sweden has done a lot less, especially in terms of death, than other countries.
