Do you represent science, Mr. Fauci? Yes or no? No, that's not a yes or no. Yes. It's a yes. But this is science. What does dogs have to do with anything that we're talking about today? These are scientific experiments. You're not doctor. You're Mr. Fauci. In my few minutes, he belongs in prison. Suspend. I've instructed her to address him as doctor. I'm not addressing doctor. We should be writing a criminal referral because you should be prosecuted for crimes against humanity. You belong in prison, doctor Fauci. Okay, some tense moments on Capitol Hill yesterday where Doctor Anthony Fauci pushed back against Republican criticisms of his handling of the Covid 19 pandemic, he denied accusations that he aided Chinese efforts to create the coronavirus pandemic data and made up social distancing guidelines. Fauci choked up at one point as he described the threats that his family has faced as a result of all of those claims, there have been credible death threats leading to the arrests of two individuals and credible death threats means someone who clearly was on their way to kill me. it is very troublesome to me. it is much more troublesome because they've involved my wife and my three daughters. All right. Joining me now is Doctor Deborah Burke. She was response coordinator for the white House coronavirus task force in the Trump administration. A doctor, Burke said, grateful for your time today. you obviously have worked closely in your career with Doctor Fauci, and you have come to understand some of the same dynamics that he was talking about there. in terms of the threats, what when you see something like what played out with Marjorie Taylor Greene happened in this hearing. I mean, how do you understand the real world ramifications of that? My parents taught me that we can have an honest and transparent dialog without name calling and without disparaging people as humans, as their families. I appreciate where Doctor Fauci is and what he's experienced. I've experienced much of the same. I have two daughters, too, and they screened my mail because there was so many death threats that came by mail, by text. And they're not just death threats, they're sexual threats, which are very disconcerting to your daughters when you're trying to teach them that America is safe. So. And we have to be able to I was on the debate team a little bit of a nerd. and you got to argue both sides, and you understood that you could make your points in a collegial way. And I the one thing good coming out of the hearing, I believe and I think Doctor Fauci made this point over and over again, we're at a place where we can definitively say we did not know if it was lab or zoonotic from animals. We do a lot of zoonotic work. It's our opportunity to really decide as a global community, how we're going to control laboratory experiments in a way that protects the public. Do you think there is any veracity to some of the Republican accusations that there was an effort to discredit the lab leak theory? I think early on, people did take very definitive sides, and it did divide along party lines, and we're still suffering from that four years later in a whole set of issues related to pandemic and pandemic preparedness. Sure. But on the lab leak specifically, you think that happened? I do think it happened. I think people were, if you look at what people said about Bob Redfield and how they disparaged him as a scientist because he wanted to bring forward the lab leak potential, and I think the reason he felt he needed to bring it forward to push was to push against this. It had to be this way because we didn't know, and we knew we would never know. I mean, we knew whispers that China was not transparent. We knew with the second stars, China was not transparent. So we were not going to get an answer. But that shouldn't have held us back four and a half years later from both ensuring that we protect against lab leaks and we protect that public. I mean, people got infected with HIV in the lab. It happens. It definitely happens. And so we have to put different rules and regulations and guidelines in place to protect the public. We can do that. We've done that before. I realize hindsight is 2020, and you and everyone in our government who worked hard to keep Americans safe, deserve all of the, all of the thanks. in the world for for taking that on on behalf of all of us. But with hindsight being 2020, is there anything you think you would do differently? It does strike me in in trying to figure out how to cover this, that if we do face another pandemic, it's going to be a serious crisis of trust in the people that are going to be trying to battle it in the types of roles you and Doctor Fauci held in in 2020, because we didn't address community issues, and we learned that in HIV. This is what bothers me, because Tony and I and Bob all faced HIV and understood the way you battle and the way we're controlling HIV without a vaccine is working with the community and listening to what they need. And still we're not listening to their concerns and saying, this is a study that addresses that, or we don't have the study that addresses that, and we're going to get the information because we know it's important to you. We can't ignore people. And when you ignore people, they get pushed to the side. They even get more vehement because they know they're being ignored. When you look at what happened in rural health, people died in rural communities because they've been dying at 20% higher rates across all diseases for more than a decade. They know that. They know that they've been ignored from the health care system. So these are the kinds of things that we have to address to rebuild trust. It's not going to happen as a one off. It's going to happen as a continuously listening. I'm not sitting in Atlanta or Washington, but getting out in the communities and listening to their concerns. If we do that, you did enough of it in 2021. That's why I went out state. I state because every the what was I think not appreciated is amazing. Things were done. And we're not capitalizing on that. We're not capitalizing on the FDA nimbleness and really creating that as a future pathway. We're not capitalizing on bringing the private sector to all. Pandemic preparedness because they're the ones that brought us test. There's the one that brought us treatments. They're the ones that brought us vaccines in a very quick period of time, but we haven't insured our active pharmaceutical ingredients. We're still very dependent on elsewhere. You mean that we don't make the stuff that goes into our drug in America? Sorry to translate. Yes. Yes, absolutely. Thank you. We're not on shoring critical, essential medicines that can protect American people. Yeah. So, while I have you, can I just ask? And again, I'm sort of thinking about how does this look if we potentially face another pandemic, which I know, again, everyone in the system is constantly preparing for, we're seeing a lot of concerning reports about bird flu at the moment, the outbreaks in cows leading to, you know, tests and milk. I'm getting questions from my friends who are also moms as this is the safe is it not? What is the level of concern right now about that potentially becoming a pandemic? Well, thank you, Casey, because this is why I'm really concerned because we're making the same mistakes today that we made with Covid. Okay. And what do I mean by that? We're not testing to really see how many people have been exposed and got asymptomatically infected. We should be testing every cow weekly. You can do pooled PCR. We have the technology where the great thing about America is we're incredibly innovative and we have the ability to have these breakthroughs. We could be pooled testing every dairy worker. I do believe that there's undetected cases in humans because we're once again only tracking people with with symptoms. When we did that with Covid, the virus spread throughout the northeast undetected because it took a long time to get to the vulnerable individuals. But in the meantime, thousands, hundreds of thousands of people were infected with asymptomatic or mild disease and never came to medical attention. We have to switch from symptoms to actually definitive laboratory testing. We have the capacity to do that today. Right? Like that. Right? Well, that's cheerful. I don't know exactly what to say. but it does. It does. there's so much that that happened that we saw play out in 2020 that I think is going to matter in terms of future. You're right that we learned a lot as well in terms of PCR testing. Doctor Brooks, I'm very grateful for your time today. Thank you very much for having me on.
