Loved or hated, Fauci’s parting advice: Stick to the science

Loved or hated, Fauci’s parting advice: Stick to the science

SeattlePI.com

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WASHINGTON (AP) — Long before the bobbleheads and the “Fauci ouchie,” Dr. Anthony Fauci was a straight-shooter about scary diseases -- and “stick with the science” remains his mantra.

Fauci steps down from a five-decade career in public service at the end of the month, one shaped by the HIV pandemic early on and the COVID-19 pandemic at the end.

In an interview with The Associated Press, Fauci said he leaves excited by the prospect of advances such as next-generation coronavirus vaccines -- but worried that misinformation and outright lies mark a “profoundly dangerous” time for public health and science.

“Untruths abound and we almost normalize untruths,” Fauci said. “I worry about my own field of health, but I also worry about the country.”

Fauci, who turns 82 on Christmas Eve, has been a physician-scientist at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases for 54 years, and its director for 38 of them.

Because he candidly puts complex science into plain English, Fauci has advised seven presidents, from Ronald Reagan to Joe Biden, about a long list of outbreaks -- HIV, Ebola, Zika, bird flu, pandemic flu, even the 2001 anthrax attacks.

“Stick with the science and never be afraid to tell somebody something that is the truth -- but it’s an inconvenient truth in which there might be the possibility of the messenger getting shot,” Fauci said. “You don’t worry about that. You just keep telling the truth.”

He added, with characteristic understatement: “That’s served me really quite well with one exception that, you know, the truth generated a lot of hostility towards me in one administration.”

For all his prior influence on national and even global responses to infectious diseases, it wasn’t until COVID-19...

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