Do we like Anthony Fauci?
Our score: 8 out of 10. A forty-year record on the right side of AIDS and public health, held back from higher by one contested origins fight and an aide's case still before the courts.
Anthony Fauci grew up in Brooklyn, the son of a pharmacist, working the cash register and doing deliveries at the family shop. Then came Regis High School, Holy Cross and a first-in-class finish at Cornell Medical College in 1966. He joined the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases in 1968, ran it from 1984, and stepped down from the NIH in December 2022 after advising seven presidents.
AIDS made his name, and it started badly. In April 1990 more than 1,000 ACT UP demonstrators descended on the NIH, some with an effigy of him, furious that new drugs were moving too slowly. Fauci said he sympathised with their cause but believed their allegations were untrue. Larry Kramer was his loudest critic, and Fauci later described him as a friend. One activist told the Washington Blade the protests helped move him toward the community, and in December 1990 he took part in an NIH meeting between President George H.W. Bush and gay men with AIDS.
On the harm test, we found nothing nasty in his own words or acts. In December 2023 he warned that anti-gay politics was “reverting back to the way it was 40 years ago” and urged activists to push back hard. Georgetown credits him as a key architect of PEPFAR, the global AIDS relief program. He's a scientist, so there's no film slate or studio to check, and nothing on the climate turned up either way. That's honestly the whole list.
The fresh mess started on 29 July 2026. Fauci faced the Senate Homeland Security committee, chaired by Rand Paul, and invoked the Fifth Amendment more than 100 times, saying Paul's public calls for his prosecution showed the hearing was meant to get him to incriminate himself. Republicans argued Biden's preemptive pardon removed that right, while legal experts told PBS the pardon doesn't cover conduct after January 2025, testimony included. The committee voted along party lines to hold him in contempt, and Paul said he'd refer it straight to the Justice Department. A defence lawyer said Republicans lack the votes for the normal route.
A second front opened in April, when his former NIAID adviser David Morens was indicted on five counts, including destroying and concealing records. Prosecutors allege he used a personal Gmail account to dodge public-records laws and passed back-channel information to an unnamed senior NIAID official, who CBS says appears to be Fauci. Fauci is not accused of wrongdoing. He testified that Morens wasn't an adviser on institute policy, acknowledged many of Morens's actions were wrong, and denied using personal email for official business.
The real good is big. Georgetown credits him as a key architect of PEPFAR and records his 2008 Presidential Medal of Freedom for his HIV/AIDS work. Biography.com notes he gave activists access to experimental drugs during clinical trials. He also kept turning up to work through a hostile stretch. After a letter of white powder arrived in 2020, which wasn't dangerous, he said he'd have gone to work the next day even if someone pointed a gun at him.