https://www.city-journal.org/article/review-of-on-call-a-doctors-journey-in-public-service-by-anthony-fauci
On Call: A Doctor’s Journey in Public Service, by Anthony Fauci (Viking, 480 pp., $36)
At the 1996 meeting of the International AIDS Society in Vancouver, a group of researchers presented the results of a much-anticipated study. The scientists had tested AZT, the first drug approved to fight human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), in combination with two newer anti-viral drugs. HIV is a particularly devious infection. When AZT or other antiviral medications were administered individually, the virus would soon find a way to evade them. But when the three drugs were prescribed together, something almost miraculous happened: the combination therapy suppressed HIV to undetectable levels, even in patients with advanced AIDS. And the virus did not bounce back.
Anthony Fauci was sitting in the audience that day. The Brooklyn-born doctor had joined the National Institutes of Health as a researcher in 1968 and began focusing on AIDS in 1981, soon after the baffling new disease emerged among gay men in New York and California. In 1984, when Fauci was named director of National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID, a division of NIH), he made developing effective HIV medications one of the agency’s top goals. It was “a long, tortuous, and incremental quest,” Fauci writes in his new memoir On Call: A Doctor’s Journey in Public Service. Twelve years later, “AIDS was no longer an inevitable death sentence,” he writes.
In retrospect, that would have been a fine time for Fauci to retire from his federal post. If he had chosen that moment to return to private practice or join a top medical school, he would be remembered today as one of the greatest public health leaders of the twentieth century. The HIV therapies he championed brought the AIDS epidemic under control and saved tens of millions of lives around the world. But Fauci remained in his NIAID role for almost three more decades. During that time, he would have more successes, including fighting emerging threats like Ebola and Zika. But he would also build up more institutional power, presiding over vast research budgets and becoming increasingly isolated from divergent views or criticism.
Fauci finally retired at age 83 in January 2023, after five decades with the NIH. It must have seemed like a propitious time to write his memoirs and take a valedictory promenade. The media widely celebrated Fauci for his leadership during the Covid-19 pandemic. In On Call, he writes that his constant Covid press appearances—along with his well-publicized differences with President Donald Trump—had made him “an instant hero to the millions of Americans who saw me as a physician bravely standing up for science, truth, and rational decision-making.” In short, Fauci had become something like a secular saint, at least in liberal circles. His image would soon join those of George Washington, Thomas Edison, and Martin Luther King in the National Portrait Gallery. And collectible Fauci bobbleheads and figurines were available in fine gift shops everywhere.
