In the early 1980s, reports began to surface of gay men dying of a form of pneumonia. Although Fauci was quick to raise the alarm and to investigate the role of the immune system in the new syndrome, he became the public face of the medical establishments sluggishness and indifference to the plight of gay men, the poster boy for the agency that denied dying men experimental drugs. The playwright and Act Up founder Larry Kramer was relentless in his criticism. Fauci was a murderer, he raged. Fauci was Eichmann.

Fauci did embody the paternalism of medicine at the time, Specter writes. Patients were rarely consulted in their treatment, not even AIDS activists so formidably self-educated about the disease. But their anger made an impression on the doctor. He flinched from it, yet wanted to understand. Fauci began to listen. He went to Act Up meetings. He heard stories of desperation, of men boiling their blood and shooting it back into their veins.

Fauci changed course, confounding his colleagues. He advocated for the activists, and revamping the clinical trial system. He was persuaded by the facts, Specter says, a vanishing art in this country.

They were all New York guys, Fauci has recalled of the activists. I had a little affinity to them because Im a New Yorker. And I said, What would I do if I were in their shoes? And it was very clear: I would have done exactly the same thing. Theyre all New York guys in this story Fauci, Trump, Kramer. The reason to listen to, rather than read, this story is for the texture of the voices, the archival audio that distills the panic and resolve of the era.

Specters own voice a bit breathless, a bit reedy rather surprisingly turns out to be one of the books most effective instruments. On the page, he can be as professionally impassive as Fauci at a news conference. But in the recording, there is no tamping his emotion and exasperation. The book becomes an indictment of Faucis great adversary, the adversary he shares with Kramer and with Specter, too. That adversary is not a virus or a particular administration. Its apathy.

Our continued existence depends on just how angry you can get, Kramer wrote in a fiery 1983 editorial, addressing gay men. Unless we ght for our lives we shall die. In his milder way, Fauci has been making the same point for years where viral epidemics are concerned. Why arent we more prepared? Why isnt there a universal vaccine for the flu, which kills tens of thousands of Americans each year? A vaccine of this kind could defend against all strains and provide a decade of protection, like a tetanus shot. Where is the political will to make this a reality? Why has America suffered so many lucky breaks spared the worst of avian flu and SARS while learning nothing? As incredible as it may be to imagine, this pandemic will pass; will we learn nothing again? How close to extinction must we come? Its the question Specter himself has posed in his work, that he poses again here, in telling the story of a celebrated physician and the heroic trait of changing ones mind.

Excerpt from:
In Fauci, a Doctor Whose Work and Mission Have Been Shaped by Politics - The New York Times