The old cliché has it that bureaucracies are “faceless” institutions, insensitive to the demands of the people they serve. Anthony S. Fauci, who led the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases from 1984 to 2022, is a career bureaucrat, but he also has one of the country’s most recognizable faces.
Perhaps slightly more unexpected and revealing is Fauci’s contention that America’s disastrous covid response was not solely the fault of the petulant man in the Oval Office: aging infrastructure and pervasive inequalities were also to blame, as were Fauci’s colleagues at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Fauci allows himself several respectful but cutting criticisms of the CDC, an agency that he alleges was slow to track cases and develop effective testing technologies.
At first, his efforts were largely confined to the laboratory, where he conducted pioneering research, and the NIH Clinical Center, where he tended to critically ill patients. Even now, he appears most comfortable in his capacity as a physician and scientist, and “On Call” is punctuated with succinct and remarkably lucid introductions to thorny medical topics, such as the nature of the immune system and the different types of influenza. But AIDS was not just a clinical conundrum for Fauci.