Anthony Fauci visited gay saunas to understand how AIDS spreads

Anthony Fauci said AIDS activists protesting outside his office in the 1980s and effectively burning off his body were “justified in their concerns”.

Fauci is at the forefront of the United States’ response to the coronavirus pandemic, but COVID-19 was far from its first experience in tackling infectious diseases.

He was director of the National Institutes of Allergies and Infectious Diseases in the 1980s when the AIDS epidemic erupted and killed many strangers. He was heavily criticized at the time by activists such as Larry Kramer, who famously accused him of ‘murder’.

Talk to Terry Gross about NPRs Vars lug Fauci said Wednesday night (February 3) that there is a ‘stark contrast’ between COVID deniers who sent him death threats throughout the coronavirus pandemic and the AIDS activists who protested against him in the 1980s.

“The activists were justified in their concern that the government, although they did not do it deliberately, would not actually sit at the table to provide their own input on things that would ultimately affect their lives,” Fauci said.

“Although they were very theatrical – they were very iconoclastic, they seemed threatening, but I never felt threatened by the AIDS activists for one moment.”

Anthony Fauci further said that AIDS activists were ‘right’ in their belief that the federal government did not listen to their ‘valid concerns’ about the epidemic.

“Not only are they threatening violence, but ultimately they were on the right side of history,” he added.

Fauci said he reached a “turning point” with AIDS activists when he tried to put himself in their shoes.

‘When you listened to what they said and set aside the dramatic, the theater, the iconoclastic behavior, and listened to what they said, what I did, because I felt that these young men were going to be in this way , suffers terribly, ”Fauci said.

‘So I tried to be so empathetic and easy going and say,’ Let me put myself in their shoes. If I were in their position, what would I do? ‘And I quickly came to the conclusion that, if I were in their position, I would do exactly what they did. ‘

After the realization, Fauci invited AIDS activists to meet with him to find out how they could “work together”. After weeks of discussions, they brought AIDS activists into the fight against the disease by placing them on advisory committees and in clinical trials.

“We integrated the activists into the process that we were involved in very, very strongly involving them, their lives and their health, and things really turned around,” he said.

Anthony Fauci visited gay saunas to understand how HIV spreads

Elsewhere in the interview, Fauci said he visited gay saunas and pubs in the early years of the AIDS epidemic in an effort to understand how the virus spread. His research began before they first identified what caused young gay men to die.

‘We saw this large number of mostly gay men who used to be otherwise good and who had been devastated by this terrible mysterious disease, and it was so concentrated in the gay community that I really wanted to get a sense of what was going on that would lead to this explosion of a sexually transmitted disease, ”Fauci said.

‘I went into the bathhouses to see essentially what was going on, and the epidemiologist inside me said,’ Oh well, this is a perfect setup for an explosion of a sexually transmitted disease. ‘And the same goes to the gay bars and see what’s going on, and it gave me a good insight into the explosiveness of the outbreak of the sexually transmitted disease. ”

He also said that then-President Ronald Reagan’s support for religious law “to some extent” “influenced the federal government’s response to the outbreak, noting that the Christian groups that supported it” had no empathy for the LGBT + community.

The result, according to Anthony Fauci, was that Reagan avoided using the presidency’s pulpit to draw attention to the AIDS epidemic, which ultimately hampered efforts to educate the public about the nature of HIV.