Opinion | How Anthony Fauci Quietly Shocked AIDS Activists – The New York Times
Dr. Fauci walked through the fire with us, and his friendships with AIDS activists deepened with time, bound by a shared trauma. In those early years, while some in our community were accusing him of not caring enough about AIDS, he didn’t tell us about the hundreds of gay men he had tried to save under his care at the N.I.H. hospital. Until this month, he still did rounds there, a clinician above all else.
When Covid hit and the rest of the world got to know Dr. Fauci, he leaned on us for guidance. David Barr, another ACT UP veteran, set up and hosted weekly calls with him and health officials from various frontline cities, allowing Dr. Fauci to counter the rosy spin from other members of the White House task force with a well-informed “That’s not what I’m hearing.” I’ve always been a politician among the activists, and it’s been the honor of my life that he leaned on me hard during his tumultuous year navigating “team normal” and “team crazy” in President Donald Trump’s orbit.
Like all of us, Dr. Fauci has his flaws, but I’ve never met a man more willing to let a friend rip into him. Our conversations are filled with F-bombs. His willingness to give absolutely everyone the benefit of some shared humanity — “I just met Jared, and he seems like a good guy” — is almost freakish but has come in handy over his stretch of working for seven presidents.
Because he crossed Mr. Trump, Dr. Fauci was turned into a villain for the MAGA crowd, providing fodder for those who thrive on conspiracies and hate. There has rarely been a larger gap between a mob’s viciousness and its target’s decency.
Beyond today’s frightening anti-science minority, there’s a majority that spans the world. Among them are H.I.V.-positive gay men like me who survived the earliest plague years — now, amazingly, aging into our 60s and 70s. We belong to a much wider community of people living with H.I.V. in America today, most of whom are people of color. And beyond our borders, we are bound to millions of men, women and children in sub-Saharan Africa whose lives have been saved by science and advocates for public health.
Our majority includes millions of Americans who listened to Dr. Fauci’s advice during that first scary year of Covid and kept listening as we got ourselves vaccinated and boosted, and we survived this plague. We draw hope from the progress of science. We are blessed with heroes willing to stand up for truth, unbowed by withering assaults.
On behalf of all of us, thank you, Tony Fauci.
Mr. Staley is the board chair of PrEP4All, a leading H.I.V.-prevention advocacy group. His memoir, “Never Silent: ACT UP and My Life in Activism,” was published last year.