The pandemic is nearly over -- but Fauci has a few more lessons to share

Fauci also says he feels something “just short of anger.” “Listening to divergent people with divergent opinions is something he’s really skilled at, and good at, and [he] doesn’t get angry when people hang him in effigy,” says his friend John Gallin, the chief scientific officer and scientific director of the NIH Clinical Center. “When people won’t work with him, that’s when he gets upset.” Fauci’s foundational belief is that people are good — even people who don’t agree with him or say awful things about him. In 1990, AIDS activists held up a Fauci mask on a pole, as if he’d been decapitated. Fauci understood: He was letting them down. He realized that he would do the same thing if he were in their position — and that helped move the science forward. “When the Peter Staleys and the Gregg Gonsalveses and the Mark Harringtons and the Larry Kramers were attacking me,” Fauci says of Staley and other prominent AIDS activists, “I [could] have done what 99.99 percent of the scientific and regulatory community did, which was pull back from them and say, ‘You guys are attacking me. Screw them and to hell with them.’ I didn’t. I gave them the benefit of the doubt.”

Fauci was able to extend the same empathy to the last administration. “I try to look for the positive aspects of people in the Trump White House,” he says. “I think anybody who says, ‘Everybody who was in the Trump White House was a bad person’ is incorrect. I mean, there were people there who were really trying their best, except that there was a prevailing motivation, with few exceptions, of ‘Defend Trump and what he does at all costs.’ ”

Fauci’s humanistic conviction has prevailed, despite the need for a federal protection detail that protects him from people who want him dead. “I don’t think it’s naivete, because I’m the least naive person you’ve ever met,” Fauci says of believing in the inherent goodness of people. “I always look and try and find out: Is there a degree of something positive about what they’re trying to do? Can I put myself in their shoes and say, ‘Do their motivations have some kernel of positivity to it, or is it all just tearing things down?’ ” He says of some of his congressional critics: “I still give the benefit of the doubt to people like Rand Paul and Roger Marshall and people like [Representative] Jim Jordan.” And yet, Fauci says, his forehead wadded up in disgust: “Even when you give them the benefit of the doubt, I still can’t find something there that is reasonable. It’s just attacking for the sake of attacking.”