Dr. Fauci on Receiving Threats on His Life
August 11, 2020 - Anthony Fauci, director of the U.S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, comments on the vitriol directed toward public health experts.
Transcript
Deborah Roberts: Dr. Fauci, your leadership has come without some stresses and frustration personally. You've have talked about during the AIDS crisis how you got hate mail. And during this crisis, you’ve had death threats to the point that you had to hire security. We saw such unity in the beginning of this pandemic, people saying we’re all in this together. Now we’re seeing a lot anger. Did you see that coming? And where does that come from.
Dr. Anthony Fauci: Well, I just think it’s a reflection of the divisiveness of the country. It has taken on a political tone like nothing I’ve seen. I mean, I’ve gotten people who were upset that I was putting effort on HIV/AIDS. I mean, a lot of that was people who were homophobic and felt that I was diverting resources to people that they didn’t think should be part of society. Obviously ridiculous. But that was never anything that was serious as it is now, where people get angry enough that that threaten my life and terribly harass my wife and my children with phones calls. And I don’t evet want to talk about the things that they do which-, I’ve hired security, the federal government is providing it for me. It seems inconceivable, I mean if you just think about it. Take a deep breath and thing about it, that when you’re trying to promote public health principles to save people’s lives and keep them healthy that there’s such divisiveness in the country, that that’s interpreted to so far from your own way of thinking that you actually want to threaten the person. It’s tough for me to figure that out except to say, “Boy, I hope we get past this divisiveness in our country and get more down to-, you know, people have their different thoughts, different ideology, that we get it out of the realm of such intensive divisiveness that you start doing things like threatening people.” That’s just no way that our society can really function well and go along that way. We’ve gotta get past that.
