Dr. Anthony Fauci on The David Rubenstein Show

you're the leading infectious disease person in the United States maybe the world and how many times a day do you wash our hands I would say at least six seven eight nine times a day is there any evidence that being vaccinated causes these diseases the answer is absolutely not president george w bush asked you what you could do about HIV and AIDS in Africa he felt that as a rich nation we have a moral responsibility the best way for me to prevent getting an infectious disease and having to have you as my doctor is what the normal low tech healthy things are the best thing that you can do David is Terry would you fix your time please well people wouldn't recognize me if my tie was fixable okay just steam it this way all right I [Music] don't consider myself a journalist and nobody else would consider myself a journalist I began to take on the life of being an interviewer even though I have a day job running a private equity firm [Music] how do you define leadership what is it that makes somebody tick [Music] we're here today with dr. Anthony also Tony Falchi who is the director of the allergy and infectious disease Institute of the National Institute for Health which he has led since 1984 35 years that's pretty long time to be leading an Institute at NIH is that a record it is indeed it is you haven't gotten tired of doing this over 35 years no cuz things keep changing we got new infectious diseases new outbreaks new challenges so it's almost like a different job every year or two I'm always worried about getting a flu so if I want to avoid catching the flu should I take a flu shot yes influenza vaccination clearly protects you it isn't a perfect vaccine it doesn't protect you 100% and it varies from year to year but the best way to avoid influenza is to get your flu shot every year now do you get one every year I do I do I usually don't get them and I'll tell you why I'm often afraid that I will get the influenza shot for a different flu than the one that comes out that season is that a problem since influenza almost unique among viruses tends to drift or change from season to season that essentially every year you get vaccinated with a vaccine that we hope matches well with a circulating virus but it's possible that you make a vaccine against one and it'll change a little by the time the season comes and then it isn't a best match but it's still always better to get vaccinated now a hundred years ago around 1918 1919 about a hundred million people in the world were killed by influenza why was that could they not treat it better than those days it was a pandemic and a pandemic means that it is a virus that no one had any previous experience with it was a brand new influenza and it happened to be one that spread very rapidly and that was very virulent it was a catastrophe or something like that not likely to happen again you think hopefully not as severe as that we had a pandemic in 2009 h1n1 the swine flu of 2009 it was a pandemic because it was a brand-new virus the good news is that it wasn't particularly virulent so while oh it's spread rapidly it didn't kill as many people you're the leading infectious disease person in the United States maybe the world and how many times a day do you wash your hands I would say at least six seven eight nine times it doesn't look bad if you shake somebody's hand then you go wash your hands right away okay so you avoid making I avoid embarrassing people right now I have a theory that when somebody is ready to COFF they get close to me so whenever I'm in a movie theater where I'm walking somewhere as soon as they walk past me that's when they call and all right you know I mean the movie theater that got bubonic plague right behind me do you ever have this problem where people are coughing on you all the time and what do you say to somebody that is very tough to the extent that you can do it within our social norms you try particularly in a flu season and the winter where there's a lot of virus going around to try and distance yourself we call that social distancing but sometimes you get trapped in the middle of last winter I was literally trapped on a transatlantic flight with a woman who was doing just that she was sneezing and coughing and I couldn't tell her to get out of there we were sitting next to each other sure enough about five days after I got back to DC I got sick so let's talk about humans in the background and infectious diseases when humans first came out of caves more or less let's say Homo sapiens 300,000 plus years ago they had an average life expectancy roughly of 20 years old today average life expectancy United States is maybe 80 or something like that we're infectious diseases a large part of the problem there wasn't only just infectious disease then it was the issue of survivor survival on the very severe environmental circumstances however if you look at the 17th 18th 19th centuries where they were infectious diseases before the vaccines vaccines and antibiotics greatly increased the life expectancy because many children died and when children died the average life expectancy goes down now what was the bubonic plague that went in Europe hundreds of years ago what was that well that was a bacteria it was called either your seniya pestis or Pasteurella pestis tyria that was spread interestingly through fleas that were in situations in which the hygiene wasn't very good it would bite somebody they would get infected there were two types of plague there was the bubonic plague where people would get very swollen lymph nodes they could die from that they generally don't spread it from person to person and then there was the pneumonic plague in which it disseminated through the body and you could call and transmit it to somebody it devastated Europe in the 14th century one-third of the population of Europe died from the plague the chance of that happening again is remote well not not with that microbe because it's easily treatable with an antibiotic when did vaccinations first start I remember reading about the remember in the Revolutionary War period of time some people would get inoculated against smallpox how did they do that then when that people first realize you could be inoculated against a disease that was in 1796 and that was Edward Jenner who noticed a very interesting phenomenon that smallpox was rampant in society then and he noticed that the women who were the cow maids who would be milking the cows they would get a relatively mild disease called cow pox which was very much related to smallpox and he noticed they would get cow pox they would recover from it but then they would be immune to smallpox so we put two and two together and said if we could deliberately infect people with a version of smallpox namely cow pox that they actually would be protected against smallpox and he actually did an experiment on a young boy which quite frankly retrospectively was an unethical experiment because he vaccinated the boy with this cow pox and then challenged the boy with smallpox and he was protected so that all started at the end of the 18th century now in the modern era there has been some concern about vaccinations some people think it causes diseases it could cause autism is there any evidence that being vaccinated causes these diseases no the answer is absolutely not and it's unfortunate because there's a lot of misinformation that is being spread widely leading right now to a diminution in the percentage of parents who vaccinate their children particularly against measles and that's why right now today as we speak we're seeing completely avoidable measles outbreaks throughout the country and even throughout the world is currently one now in what in New York City in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn that is really quite alarming let's talk about a few other communicable or infectious diseases tuberculosis is that it's still a big problem in the United States and around the world less so in the United States but globally it's still a big problem I mean it's a terrible problem there are 10 million new cases of tuberculosis each year and 1.6 to 1.8 million deaths how do you catch tuberculosis predominantly its respiratory spread if you get close and prolonged contact with someone who has TB that's how it gets transmitted what about malaria how does one get malaria and how do you prevent getting malaria well malaria is a parasite that is being transmitted by a mosquito and you get it by mosquito bite and only by a mosquito but rarely you can get it from being transfused with blood of someone who has malaria but that's very unusual mostly it is a mosquito bite that transmits malaria so you avoid mosquitos you're not gonna get malaria exactly president george w bush asked you what you could do about HIV and AIDS in Africa he felt that as a rich nation we have a moral responsibility can we actually give treatment care and Prevention that has saved now about 14 to 15 million lives you let's talk about HIV in originate in humans or not humans it started you know centuries ago in non-human primates in chimpanzees and then it jumped species from the chimpanzees to the human as jumping a species of common thing you know 70 to 75 percent of all the new infections that man gets infected with come from an animal it's called ZOA notic namely it's predominantly an animal virus but for one reason or other encroaching upon the environment of the animal or mutating a bit influenza was fundamentally an infection of birds HIV we said came from chimpanzees a variety of other infections Zika and other infections come from an animal now in Africa the health abilities that we have United States are not prevalent so HIV and AIDS are still a big problem there right well it is still we better not downplay it in the United States there was still about 38,000 to 40,000 new infections in the United States it is very concentrated both demographically and geographically it's very interesting that 12% of the population in the United States is African American and yet about 45 to 50 percent of all the new infections with HIV among African Americans I guess a few years back when President George W Bush was president he asked you to come to the Oval Office and ask you what you could do about HIV and AIDS in Africa and what did you tell him well he sent me to Africa to do a fact-finding and come back with the feasibility of doing something because he said and told me that he felt that as a rich nation we have a moral responsibility now that we have drugs that can treat and prevent infection that others individuals who because of where they live they don't have access to that and they're essentially going to die from a disease merely because of where they were born and raised ie in the developing world so we sent me to Africa to figure out can we actually give treatment care and prevention and we put together a program called the president's emergency plan for a relief or PEPFAR and that's probably one of the most important parts of the George W Bush legacy because that has saved now about 14 to 15 million lives thus far and more coming merely by providing sub-saharan Africa and other developing countries with the proper drugs that can save their lives as well as prevention and who's paying for this u.s. government the US government can place completely for the PEPFAR program and then we also have the Global Fund to fight AIDS TB and malaria and the u.s. government pays about one third of that we're now at the NIH offices and one of the buildings were in is the one where some research is done on Ebola correct can you explain what Ebola is why it's so dangerous and what the problem is right now in the Congo well indeed Ebola is yet again another virus it happens to be a particularly lethal virus if left untreated as a high high rate of mortality you know depending upon how you get treated or cared for it can be anywhere from 60 to up to 90% it's spread by direct contact between an individual who is very sick and has body fluids that are easily contaminating the people who take care of them it's highly lethal it is now a major outbreak in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and it still is not under control so when Ebola some people with Ebola came to the United States a few years ago right you were involved in treating them yes I did I took care of two patients one was a nurse who got infected in Texas when she was taking care of a person who came from Liberia I took care of her and then another person who got infected in Sierra Leone was air of act here to the NIH and my team and I took care of so when you take care of them I remember pictures you have to wear like our space yeah it's very difficult because they're very sick so you have to take care of them under intensive care circumstances and you have to put on literally a spacesuit to come to protect every single square inch of your body from being exposed to the contaminating right here this the division you're the head of the Institute right wouldn't have been easier to get somebody below you who maybe isn't so valuable to do their work rather than you're doing it well that was the exact reason why I did it because we all knew that health care workers in Africa at the time were getting sick in large numbers and dying 800 healthcare workers got infected in Africa during that outbreak and 500 of them died so I did not like the idea of asking my staff to put themselves at risk of getting infected if I wasn't willing to do it myself what what did your wife and three daughters say about the fact that you were gonna be doing this they were not happy my wife who is she's an ethicist but she was also a nurse so she understands disease she supported me but she asked with a quizzical look do you really want to do that and I said I think I really have to do it because it's my team and I didn't want to put them at risk for something that I wasn't willing to do myself but the best treatment for Ebola is liquids just flushing out it's it's it's essentially intensive care we I the person we took care of here at NIH was one of the sickest patients that I've ever treated I've taken care of thousands and what happened the patient he is alive and well and back home right now Roy's family this is the ugly Ebola this is what Ebola looks like it's called fillo virus because it's like a thread phyllo the Latin word for thread in 1995 there was an outbreak in the Democratic Republic of the Congo in a place called Tikrit there a person who survived Ebola this man here came to the NIH we took his b-cells we cloned the b-cells and we made what's called a monoclonal antibody which means that we made his cells produce an antibody in large amounts that actually binds to this glycoprotein right here right now this monoclonal antibody as we are speaking is being tested in the Democratic Republic of the Congo as one of the potential treatments for Ebola so somebody comes up to me and says I had Ebola but I'm okay now is it okay to shake that person saying oh yeah okay they're gone don't say yeah well you may remember when we discharged the young nurse who got infected in Texas and i discharged her from the nih that we had a press conference and I put my arm around her and hugged her and it made the front page of the Washington Post and the reason I did that deliberately was to show the rest of the world that when you recover from Ebola whatever your wife say she thought it was fine all right maybe was just something you decided want to do when you're in medical store or something when I was in graduate school I worked on HIV and nobody knew much about Ebola then but I noticed that the glycoprotein that HIV uses had some similarities we thought - the glycoprotein that Ebola uses and so I thought this would be a good opportunity to now make some headway into a new disease that people didn't know much about okay any doctor thought she gave me that opportunity the best way for me to prevent getting an infectious disease and having to have you as my doctor is what wearing a mask no no no you do that somebody's eye can see the red and ready to sneeze or cough walk away you avoid all the paranoid aspects and do something positive a good diet B you don't smoke I know get good sleep I think that the normal low-tech healthy things are the best thing that you can do David is staying so let's talk about your background you grew up in Brooklyn I did and you went to Catholic school I went to Catholic elementary school and Regis High School in Manhattan okay Holy Cross college and you didn't you always know you wanted to be a doctor do you think you want to be something more important like a lawyer a private equity investor something like well I don't I can't say I always felt I wanted to be a doctor I was very interested in the humanities I took classical background courses both that's likely because I went to a Jesuit school in Greek Latin philosophical psychology all the philosophies so I had an interest in the humanities but I also had an aptitude and an interest in science so I think it the best way to combine an interest in the humanities with an interest in science was to be a physician so you first came to NIH in 1968 right so when you were here there were a lot of other people entering the class with you some of them in fact many of them are gonna win Nobel prizes right so dr. Varmus among others Mike Brown Joe goldstein Bob Lefkowitz they all win Nobel prizes so how come you haven't won a Nobel Prize yet I'm the stupid one in the group no actually my work did not I probably wouldn't have won one anyway but my work was much more on broader global health issues they discovered really exciting specific thing but you have won the Presidential Medal of Freedom I have and the Lasker Award right and there's many award in medicine that you have not won the Nobel Prize okay that's the only one and while I nominate you if I know how to do that so let me ask you you have written more like I think it's 1,200 articles co-authored edited how do you have time to do 1,200 articles in your career and also run the the Institute and also treat patients well one my career has been quite long so that's one of the reasons for us so many articles but doing all of that taking care of patients running a lab and running a big Institute and getting involved in global health policy is I just explained it that I work a lot of hours I'm an unapologetic workaholic and I really love what I do how do you stay in good shape I well I used to run I used to run marathons and 10ks about two or three years ago I stopped running everyday I used to run about six miles a day and now I power walk about three to four miles a day every day and you generally are not sick no I'm generally pretty healthy thank goodness now if you do get a little sick and you go to a doctor's office you're sitting in the office don't people get nervous they see you're sitting there good they don't get nervous but yeah it's a good advertisement for the doctor that I go to because they say if this guy is going to a doctor the doctor must be pretty good so many people have come to you over the years and said why don't you leave and go into something maybe more lucrative than doing this in fact I came to you once and said why don't you come in at private equity you can figure out to be an investor in the healthcare world you'd be perfect you resisted all those he's white why did you do that well I would have loved that work for you David but just like everyone else I felt that I love what I'm doing and it's so exciting that that really is what drives me so it isn't as if I think those other professions aren't worthy I just really like what I'm doing there are still many challenges we had we need an HIV vaccine tuberculosis and malaria are still major killers particularly in the developing world those are things that I think we have the opportunity to do something about so I would like to continue to work until I can't work anymore and concentrate on those problems so you've worked under many different presidents of United States who was the most impressive of them well they were all different so I don't want to be pitting one against the other I enjoyed very much the Clinton administration really quite quite enjoyable working with not only President Clinton but Hillary Clinton but the person that was the warmest of them all that was just an amazing amazing gentleman was George HW Bush when he was president he was the first one that I got to really know as a president I got to know Reagan a bit but not much but George HW Bush extended himself to me when he wanted to learn about what HIV was because he wanted to do something about it so as you look back on your career what would you say are the characteristics that make somebody a leader one of the things that I tell people because I feel it strongly is that if you're leading an organization of some sort that has a purpose or a mandate that has the leader you've got to articulate to the people that you are leading exactly what your vision is and where you want the organization to go because I've seen in issues in which there wasn't good leadership where an organization is almost rudderless they don't know where they're supposed to be going it you don't dictate to people if you let them know what your vision is hire the best people and then don't get in their way then I think is the quality of a good leader and let's suppose I get a infectious disease and I want to be one of your patients how do I get to be one of your patient just call you how does somebody become one of your patients you get your doctor to give me a call or send me an email and if you have a disease that falls under one of the categories that we study then we'd be happy to see you and the best way for me to prevent getting an infectious disease and having to have you as my doctor is what wearing a mask no no don't you do that somebody I can see the rating ready to sneeze or cough walk away you avoid all the paranoid aspects and do something positive a good diet B you don't smoke I know I know you don't drink at least not very much so that's pretty good get some exercise I know that you don't get as much exercise as you should that's correct yeah it's good sleep I think that the normal low-tech healthy things are the best thing that you can do David is stay right what I'm gonna try to do that and hopefully when I next see you I'll be even healthier than I am today I would imagine you would be and I look forward to that thank you very much my pleasure you

Channel: David Rubenstein

Views: 36,543

Rating: 4.6705108 out of 5

Keywords: Bloomberg, nih, fauci, white house, virus, vaccine, medicine, medicines, national institute of health

Id: NaYDxJfatYg

Length: 24min 6sec (1446 seconds)

Published: Wed May 22 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/Antrekr]

I remember hearing a theory in a certain book, which explained the main reason contagious diseases from the past declined was thanks to proper sanitation. In an alternative reality, Fauci might even defend that.

[u/mankosmash4]

I tried to upload just the clip but Reddit didn't like that. The timestamp is 23:10 if you need to look for the relevant part manually.

It's interesting to see how different Fauci was before COVID happened and the medical establishment went batshit authoritarian.

[u/Guardias]

All before he realized he could make a killing by pandering to the pandemic panic.

[u/nostalgicBadger]

"On second thought, wear a useless cloth mask that you probably never wash, and we'd better close the gyms, even though we can't prove that's where anybody's getting infected."

[u/aixelsydTHEfox]

if Fauci went on Rogan, smoked weed and talked for 3 hours

then

I may start to understand his plight (servitude?) a bit more