On Call Quotes

“I learned in this instance and in several situations over the coming years that a leader, particularly in an area of controversy, cannot make everyone happy all the time. If you do, you are probably not a good leader and you soon will not be respected.”
― Anthony Fauci, On Call: A Doctor's Journey in Public Service

“Peter Navarro never hid his antagonism toward me. He stopped me one day in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, where we were tested routinely for COVID, and again blasted my failure to encourage people to take hydroxychloroquine, the lack of which he said was causing people to die. He would not let it go. Perhaps he just had a thing about me. To give him the benefit of the doubt, I arranged with Cliff Lane to have Navarro present via Zoom his case on hydroxychloroquine’s effectiveness to the entire NIH guidelines panel cochaired by Cliff in early August. This group was thirty-five of the top experts in infectious disease, public health, and epidemiology from all over the country. Navarro made his presentation, and uniformly they politely said, “Mr. Navarro, there’s nothing there. These are anecdotes, and all the evidence indicates hydroxychloroquine doesn’t work and can even cause harm.” Navarro’s answer was that he valued his reading of the existing medical literature on hydroxychloroquine as much as or more than theirs. “If I am wrong, no one is harmed. If you are wrong, thousands of people die.” The truth was the exact opposite. By that time, the FDA, which had given hydroxychloroquine emergency approval early in the pandemic, had revoked it on June 15, after it was found to cause heart problems and even death, not to mention proving ineffective against COVID. I had given Navarro one last chance, but he still could not accept reality.”
― Anthony Fauci, On Call: A Doctor's Journey in Public Service

“One on February 5, 2002, on our way back from a speech that he gave in Pittsburgh about early warning systems for bioterror attacks, he asked me, “Tony, what keeps you awake at night?” “It’s not so much the possibility of another deliberate bioterror attack, Mr. President,” I said, “but more the possibility of a naturally occurring disaster such as a brand-new emerging respiratory virus that has pandemic potential.”
― Anthony Fauci, On Call: A Doctor's Journey in Public Service

“Everyone on the Trump team seemed to have a lot on their mind during that session. I hoped that at least some of them heard what we were saying.”
― Anthony Fauci, On Call: A Doctor's Journey in Public Service

“All these weaknesses in our public health response to COVID were profoundly compounded by one of the true enemies of public health: the spread of egregious misinformation and disinformation enabled by the internet and social media that unfortunately remains with us today.”
― Anthony Fauci, On Call: A Doctor's Journey in Public Service

“the acceptance of public health measures such as vaccinations was highly politicized as exemplified by the fact that there were fewer vaccinations and more hospitalizations and deaths in states that are predominantly Republican versus states that are predominantly Democratic.”
― Anthony Fauci, On Call: A Doctor's Journey in Public Service

“We must sustain this critical investment in the biomedical and health sciences and continue to nurture collaborations between the public and the private sectors.”
― Anthony Fauci, On Call: A Doctor's Journey in Public Service

“only 62 percent of the U.S. population had received all the recommended COVID shots, meaning we were not on track to reach the 70 percent threshold by midyear that public health experts considered an adequately vaccinated country.”
― Anthony Fauci, On Call: A Doctor's Journey in Public Service

“there was a forty to fifty times greater chance of dying from COVID if you were unvaccinated compared with a vaccinated and boosted person.”
― Anthony Fauci, On Call: A Doctor's Journey in Public Service

“But this narrative that I was restraining the American public as opposed to doing my job to save lives had taken hold of the Republican base and was being widely promoted.”
― Anthony Fauci, On Call: A Doctor's Journey in Public Service

“science is a process that continually uncovers new information. As new information evolves, the process of science allows for self-correction.”
― Anthony Fauci, On Call: A Doctor's Journey in Public Service

“we received criticism from some who felt that because of the urgency of the situation we should distribute unproven drugs or vaccines immediately without necessarily testing them for safety and efficacy. We felt that, in the long run, if drugs and vaccines are not tested in well-controlled clinical trials, one can do harm by distributing potentially toxic interventions,”
― Anthony Fauci, On Call: A Doctor's Journey in Public Service

“This is a classic example of the building blocks and iterative nature of science.”
― Anthony Fauci, On Call: A Doctor's Journey in Public Service

“The perfect storm had hit: the first pandemic of the twenty-first century; unmet promises of vaccine supply by the pharmaceutical companies; and the arrival of the outbreak months before it was predicted to occur.”
― Anthony Fauci, On Call: A Doctor's Journey in Public Service

“It’s a good rule when you are walking into the West Wing of the White House to advise the president, vice president, or the White House staff to remind yourself that this might be the last time you will walk through that door. If you base your advice on the truth and on scientific evidence and do not sugarcoat anything, it is likely that sooner or later you will be telling the president or the vice president something they really don't want to hear, something that may point out a problem with how their administration is handling an issue. Sometimes when advisers do that, their opinion is no longer sought. It's a version of shooting the messenger. Some people might fall into the trap of never wanting to disappoint a powerful figure, and so they slant their advice toward pleasing rather than informing. Don't fall into that trap.' I hope I would have arrived at the wisdom Jim imparted on my own, but he was explicit about it, and continued, 'If you're consistent and totally honest, you might risk being being dropped as an adviser, but this approach with the right kind of president or vice president can also engender respect and a durable relationship.”
― Anthony Fauci, On Call: A Doctor's Journey in Public Service

“Lighten up, Tony, things could be worse; we both could be picking cotton in Arkansas; trust me, I've done it."
- Dr. James Carroll Hill, from Manila, Arkansas (as quoted by Dr. Anthony Fauci)”
― Anthony Fauci, MD, On Call: A Doctor's Journey in Public Service

“People associate science with absolutes that are immutable, when in fact science is a process that continually uncovers new information. As new information evolves, the process of science allows for self-correction. The biological or health sciences are different from the physical sciences and mathematics. With mathematics, two plus two equals four today, and two plus two will equal four a thousand years from now. Not so with the biological sciences, where what we know continues to evolve and uncertainty is common. This uncertainty is magnified in the context of a deadly pandemic when there is already anxiety and suffering. With COVID, our understanding of transmissibility, severity, vulnerability of different people, and level of protection, to name a few, continually evolved, and our medical advice had to change to reflect this.
This is exactly what happened in early March with the question of whether to wear masks and how effective they were.”
― Anthony Fauci, On Call: A Doctor's Journey in Public Service

“The president’s overt hostility to much of the press,”
― Anthony Fauci, On Call: A Doctor's Journey in Public Service

“Right before Thanksgiving, I had flown home from a medical meeting in Amsterdam, sitting for almost nine hours next to a woman with a wet, violent cough. Even standing in the back of the plane whenever the seat belt sign was off could not save me from coming down with the worst case of influenza I had ever had. And I had had my vaccination!”
― Anthony Fauci, On Call: A Doctor's Journey in Public Service

“NIH does not make products; we do the basic and clinical research allowing industry to make products. It is a synergistic relationship between the NIH and industry.”
― Anthony Fauci, On Call: A Doctor's Journey in Public Service

“However, second, all of our policies relating to the monitoring and movement of and restrictions on returning health-care workers should be based on sound scientific principles and scientific evidence. A person who was without symptoms did not transmit Ebola, and one must come into direct contact with the body fluids of an acutely ill person to become infected. Returning health-care workers were well instructed to report symptoms and self-isolate the way Craig Spencer correctly did. Importantly, if a twenty-one-day quarantine was implemented across the board for all health-care workers who volunteered to care for Ebola patients, then I was certain, as were Tom Frieden and several of my colleagues who had volunteered or who were considering volunteering, that we would soon run out of people willing to care for these patients. A quarantine would mean that those of us, including myself, who were caring for Ebola patients in the United States would automatically be putting ourselves out of action for twenty-one days after taking care of even a single person.”
― Anthony Fauci, On Call: A Doctor's Journey in Public Service

“At the same time, as we had feared, we were receiving reports of adverse events associated with smallpox vaccination including myocarditis, or inflammation of the heart muscle. As knowledge of these complications spread, people became more and more reluctant to come forward to be vaccinated. In the end, relatively few people outside the military, where smallpox vaccination was mandatory, opted to get vaccinated.”
― Anthony Fauci, On Call: A Doctor's Journey in Public Service

“Before a meeting at the White House to weigh the pros and cons of each approach began, OMB official Nancy Dorn pulled me aside and whispered to me in exasperation out of earshot of the others, “Every time you come into the White House, it costs us billions of dollars.”
― Anthony Fauci, On Call: A Doctor's Journey in Public Service

“This meant that the fund would have to fall under the category of mandatory spending. The money would come directly out of the Treasury year after year just like Social Security and would not have to go through the normal annual appropriations process.”
― Anthony Fauci, On Call: A Doctor's Journey in Public Service

“A recently updated plan and guidelines put out by the CDC recommended a “ring vaccination” approach; if cases of smallpox were identified, patients with suspected or confirmed smallpox would be isolated, and their contacts would be traced, vaccinated, and kept under close surveillance, as would the household members of those contacts. The plan called for identifying other high-risk people who might have had direct or indirect contact with the patients and who therefore also should be vaccinated. In essence, one would vaccinate in “rings” around the index or original case. Local quarantining and travel restrictions also could be enforced if deemed appropriate.”
― Anthony Fauci, On Call: A Doctor's Journey in Public Service

“And so what started out in 1987 as a completely unfounded movement instigated by a small group of misguided scientists turned out to be responsible for the avoidable deaths of hundreds of thousands of people.”
― Anthony Fauci, On Call: A Doctor's Journey in Public Service

“learned that the cause for which you are advocating must be legitimate, worthy, and not motivated by self-interest; your arguments must be evidence based; and you must be truthful and consistent in your reasons for”
― Anthony Fauci, On Call: A Doctor's Journey in Public Service