Anthony Fauci

The pharmacy was on the ground floor in Dyker Heights and the family lived directly above it. Fauci worked the register and delivered prescriptions for his father, a Columbia-educated pharmacist, and rode the subway into Manhattan for Regis, a Jesuit high school that admitted by examination, where he captained the basketball team at five feet seven. Holy Cross gave him a degree in classics in 1962. Cornell Medical College graduated him first in his class in 1966. He arrived at the National Institutes of Health in 1968 as a clinical associate in the allergy and infectious diseases laboratory, and he did not work anywhere else for the next 54 years.

Before the epidemics he was a vasculitis doctor, and he worked out how to re-dose cancer drugs so that polyarteritis nodosa went from killing 98 percent of patients to putting 93 percent of them into remission. Rheumatologists ranked it among the field's biggest advances in 20 years. Then 1981. He took over the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases in 1984 and held it for 38 years, through HIV, biodefense after September 11, SARS, swine flu, MERS, Ebola and COVID-19. He was the main architect of PEPFAR, the Bush AIDS program credited with more than 20 million lives saved. He advised seven presidents, served as Biden's chief medical advisor from January 2021, and left government on December 31, 2022.

In October 1988 ACT UP came to the gates of his institute. Larry Kramer had been calling him an incompetent idiot and a pill-pushing tool of the medical establishment in print for years. Fauci did not control drug approval and said so, then went to New York and San Francisco to talk to the people who were dying and helped open experimental AIDS treatments to patients outside the trials. Kramer ended by calling him the only true and great hero in the government. Thirty-two years later the same job made him a target from the opposite direction: Fire Fauci chanted at anti-lockdown rallies, the chant retweeted by the president he was serving, death threats serious enough to require a security detail, and his wife and daughters harassed for years.

Nothing here is settled and the fight is still running. He holds the National Medal of Science from 2005 and the Presidential Medal of Freedom from 2008, Holy Cross renamed its science complex for him in 2022, and he has taught at Georgetown since July 2023. On January 19, 2025 Biden gave him a preemptive pardon covering 11 years of possible federal offenses, and less than three weeks later the Health and Human Services Department cancelled a 168,000-dollar contract for an exhibit about him at the NIH. In June 2026 the outgoing director of national intelligence released documents she said proved he lied to Congress. They did not. On July 29, 2026, under Senate subpoena, he took the Fifth.

Anthony Fauci's life against the full span of the corpus — the fading end marks a life still in progress.

• Cyclophosphamide regimen for vasculitis discovery
  Turned a 98 percent mortality rate into a 93 percent remission rate —
• Harrison's Principles of Internal Medicine book
  A principal editor from the 11th edition through the 21st, and editor-in-chief of two 1986
• President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief other
  Its main architect. Credited with more than 20 million lives saved. 2003
• On Call: A Doctor's Journey in Public Service book
  The memoir 2024

• 1966 aged ~26 Graduates first in his class at Cornell Medical College He had taken a classics degree at Holy Cross four years earlier.
• 1968 aged ~28 Joins the NIH as a clinical associate He worked nowhere else for 54 years.
• 1984 aged ~44 Becomes director of the NIAID He held the job for 38 years.
• October 1988 aged 47 ACT UP protests at his institute Larry Kramer had been attacking him in print for years. They later reconciled.
• 2003 aged ~63 Helps design PEPFAR for George W. Bush
• June 19, 2008 aged 67 Receives the Presidential Medal of Freedom for PEPFAR
• December 31, 2022 aged 82 Leaves government after 54 years He joined the Georgetown faculty the following July.
• January 19, 2025 aged 84 Biden issues him a preemptive pardon on his last day in office It covered possible federal offenses from January 1, 2014 onward.
• July 29, 2026 aged 85 Testifies under Senate subpoena and invokes the Fifth Amendment Weeks earlier the outgoing intelligence director had released documents she said proved he lied to Congress. They did not.

• Larry Kramer 1935–2020
  Writer who co-founded Gay Men's Health Crisis and ACT UP — forcing faster federal response to AIDS. attacked him, then called him a hero
• Maurice Hilleman 1919–2005
  Virologist who developed or improved more than forty vaccines, preventing millions of deaths and transforming public health. wrote his biographical memoir
• C. Everett Koop 1916–2013
  Surgeon general whose public communication on AIDS, smoking, and child health reshaped national health policy. surgeon general through the same epidemic
• George W. Bush b. 1946
  43rd president who led the country after the September 11 attacks and launched wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. built PEPFAR with him
• Donald Trump b. 1946
  Businessman, media personality, and 45th and 47th president whose populist movement transformed American politics. contradicted him from the podium
• Joe Biden b. 1942
  46th president who enacted major infrastructure and climate legislation after decades in the Senate and vice presidency. pardoned him