And think critically about what has happened on television. Watch monday night at 8 00 eastern on cspan2. When youre dealing in the politics,of politics, policy and medicine, the , thing that i have found to be very effective is be consistent, be totally honest, and do not tell people things that you think they might want to hear. Tell them the truth that is based on evidence. Because even though politicians, be they in the administration or the congress, may not be happy with what you tell them because it disappoints them, they will respect you if after a while it is clear to them that you are telling them the truth based on scientific evidence. Susan dr. Anthony fauci, director of the National Institute of allergy and Infectious Diseases, and a prominent member of the White House Coronavirus task force, has become a fixture in americas living room during the covid19 pandemic. Recent polls give him a higher than 75 Approval Rating for his communication about the crisis. Over the next hour we will give you a more indepth look at this veteran Public Health official. You will learn more about dr. Faucis life, work, and Public Health philosophy from his own words. He sat down with q a for a profile interview in 2016, and in this program we will share much of that conversation with him. Bounty, dr. Fauci, now 79 years old, has been in his role with nih since 1984. He has advised every president since ronald reagan. In this first segment he talks about his working relationships with several of those prior president s. Following that we will show you a portion of a recent interaction between dr. Fauci and President Trump at the white house on march 29. Brian let me show you some video you have probably not seen for a long time. This goes back to 1998. It is very quick. It is from the debate, George Herbert walker bush and michael dukakis. And they are talking about heroes. I agree with the governor on athletics. Theres nothing corny about having sports heroes, young people who are clean and honorable and that they are setting the pace. I think of dr. Fauci, probably never heard of him. He is a very fine research, top doctor, working hard doing something about doing research on the disease of aids. Brian that was 1988. Do you remember that . Dr. Fauci yes i do. Brian what was the impact on you when he mentioned that . Dr. Fauci i did not see the debate. I was out of town coming in on a plane. The next morning when i walked into the nih, as i walked into the lobby, people started clapping. And i said, what is this all about . [laughter] what do you mean . The president called you a hero during a National Debate that was seen by hundreds of millions of people. I was totally surprised. Brian did you know him . Dr. Fauci well, very well. Ive had the great privilege of getting to know president george h. W. Bush from the time that he was Vice President. And when he was getting ready to run for president , he sincerely wanted to know more about the strange disease called aids. Because quite frankly and disappointingly, the reagan administration, of which he was the Vice President , Vice President was president reagan was a good man, did not use the bully pulpit enough about calling attention to aids. George h. W. Bush felt that this was important. So while he was still Vice President , he came to the nih and wanted to meet me. He said i wanted to meet this person fauci who i see doing all this with aids. I spent a considerable amount of time with him, introducing him to my patients, talking to him about what hiv is, and we struck up a friendship. And it was one of those great honors that just falls into your lap. As soon as we finished, he would invite me to the Vice President s mansion for lunch and reception. Then when he became president , it was wonderful because i had a direct input to him. He would call me up or he would invite me to lunches. And even after he left the presidency, he would still write me notes, and he sent me a nice letter on my 60th birthday joking around saying i cannot believe youre 60 years old. He is a wonderful human being. Brian how many president s have you known personally . Dr. Fauci essentially all of them to a different degree. I knew president george h. W. Bush very well. When president clinton came in i got to know him, not on a personal level. But i spoke with him and Hillary Clinton when she was first lady, then when she was senator of new york and secretary of state, no doubt about that, eight years of that. Then when george w. Bush came in, i had met them originally when he was a staffer in the white house with his father. And we struck up a very good relationship, and i think that that was one of the reasons why he sent me to africa in 2002 for the purpose of determining the feasibility of developing a program that might transform hivaids in the developing world. So i got to be quite close with president george w. Bush, related not only to the fact that i knew him through his father, but the fact that he took a very keen interest in global hivaids and allowed me to be one of the architects of the program, which has now transformed hiv globally. And luckily now that president obama is still quite interested and quite amenable to getting involved in solving the problems that i am involved with, so i had the great privilege of meeting several times at the white house and at the nih with president obama. So i have been very fortunate in that the president of the United States have been extremely amenable to listening to and helping out with the problems that we face visavis research and Infectious Disease. Brian 27 institutes in nih and you are just one of the 27. But clearly the most visible, except for maybe dr. Collins. How many president s have asked you to be the director of nih . Dr. Fauci george h. W. Bush two or three times. He was great when i said no to him. People thought he would be upset with me because i said no. He respected me for that, continue doing what youre doing. When president clinton became president , his staff asked me if i was interested and said they had heard that i would really be a very good i explained what i did to george h. W. Bush. That even though this would be a great honor, i dont even want them to ask me, because i dont want to have to say no. So i took my name out of the hat. When george w. Bush became president , he specifically asked me and i said, as i said to his father, that although this is a great honor and a great position, i think i could contribute more to the nation and to the arena of Biomedical Research by staying in the position i am right now. The following put together by dr. Birx, dr. Fauci, and our other Top Health Care experts, and these people are amazing. These Health Care Experts who are the best in the world. They demonstrate that the mitigation measures we are putting in place may significantly reduce the number of new infections and ultimately the number of fatalities. I want the American People to know that your selfless efforts are saving countless lives. You are making the difference. Modeling estimates that the peak in death rate is likely hit to hit in two weeks. I will say it again. The peak, the highest point of death rates, remember this, is likely to hit in two weeks. Nothing would be worse than declaring victory before the victory is won. That would be the greatest loss of all. Therefore, the next two weeks and during this period it is very important that everyone strongly follow the guidelines, you have to follow the guidelines that our great Vice President holds up a lot. He is holding that up a lot. He believes in it so strongly area the better you do, the faster this nightmare will end. Therefore, we will be extending our guidelines to april 30 to slow the spread. The decision to extend this mitigation process until the end of april i think was a wise and prudent decision. Dr. Birx and i spent a considerable amount of time going over the data, why we felt this was the best choice and the president accepted it. Pres. Trump im so glad dr. Fauci and dr. Birx gave us a number, and a number on the outside, and maybe it is not even on the outside. We dont know. 2. 2 Million People would have died if we did not do what we are doing. Now we are looking at numbers that are going to be much lower than that. They dont want to be stars. They want to win. They have been fighting this stuff their whole life between ebola and swine flu and i dont know. Thats what they do. They fight disease. There is nobody that does it better. Susan during our 2015 interview with Anthony Fauci, he talked about his work with Infectious Diseases and his role of the public face of the institute. Brian when did you make the decision and why that you were going to be available . There are 27 institutes at the National Institutes of health and i can name one or two others. You are always available to answer the questions. Why did you decide to do that . It became clear to me that in the discipline i was dealing with, Infectious Disease, particularly emerging Infectious Disease that generates a lot of concern on the part of the public, that could be hivaids, it could be pandemic flu, ebola, even most recently now with the ebola crisis, it became clear to me the public needed to be educated to understand just what these issues meant to them personally and to the nation and the world. I was perplexed by seeing that scientists who shunned away from trying to explain things in plain english the way people can understand them, it was the culture back then when i first started doing it, that scientists either did not want to be bothered with getting involved or when they did, they spoke over people as opposed to trying to get people to understand. I made the decision along time ago that it was important for the public to understand, and if you really want to garner support from the congress and from the administration, you had to be understood and you had to be in the public eye. Otherwise it could slip under the radar screen. As it turned out, that was the truth. That was one of the reasons why there was a lot of attention paid to it. Brian do you have a boss . Dr. Fauci in science, technically speaking, if you look at the executive branch of the federal government of which i am in, obviously the president is the boss. The department i am in is the department of health and human services, so the secretary is the next level of the boss. Then there is the nh the nih where you have a director in multiple institutes. Technically speaking, that is the boss. When you are in a scientific and Public Health, there is very little of that, the boss tells somebody to do something that you might see in another endeavor. It is more of a collaborative discussion, an intellectual deciding what the best direction to go is. Technically someone is administratively your boss, but in reality it is more doing the right thing and the best thing at the most appropriate thing. The National Institute of allergies and Infectious Diseases is responsible what is the broad scope . Dr. Fauci it is both the conduct and the administration and planning of research in all of Infectious Diseases as well as in certain immune mediated diseases like asthma, allergy, autoimmune diseases. What is an Infectious Disease . Dr. Fauci one that is caused by a microbe that is transmissible. The ones you know if they are very clear, aids is an Infectious Disease caused by hiv. Influenza, a recurring problem every season. Every winter, you get an influenza outbreak. Sometimes you get a pandemic that is very serious. Malaria, tuberculosis, respiratory diseases, sexually transmitted diseases, all diseases that are caused by a microbe that hopefully you could prevent and or treat. Brian what is a microbe . Dr. Fauci an organism, and it depends on what is, that has the capability of replicating and getting transmitted from one person to another. Bacterias can live more freely. Viruses need to get into a cell to live. Brian when you look at the world as an outsider or generalist and you see the cdc, you see World Health Organization, who is in charge . Dr. Fauci no one needs to be in charge. Each one has their own goal. Within the federal government, it is relatively, you need to explain take the department of health and human services. The three most commonly recognized organizations that have to do with health and research are the cdc, the nih, and the fda. The cdc are the disease detectives. They do surveillance, they track down disease, they recognize the outbreaks of new disease, are very active with the a bowl outbreak right now Ebola Outbreak in west africa. Theyre active when you have a flu season or an outbreak of west nile. The nih is pure research. When there is a disease, what we do, when you are thinking of Infectious Disease, we understand how that disease evolves, we develop drugs, we develop vaccines, we do prevention modality. We do the research that allows you to intervene. The food and Drug Administration is a regulatory agency. They make the regulation of approvals for monitoring of drugs or interventions. That is within our own government. When you go globally, the who is kind of like a global cdc. With the cdc is for us, they sort of coordinate Health Globally throughout the various nations. Brian these numbers may be off so you can correct any of them. Since 1978, you have had 490 major and 31 honorary degrees. Any of those numbers go up . The honorary degrees have gone up. 38. Brian where do you find time for this . Dr. Fauci i dont sleep much. Brian really four and a half hours a night . Dr. Fauci five of the most. Brian no doctor would tell you to only get four and a half hours of sleep. Dr. Fauci it is not the healthiest thing in the world, but when you physiologically get used to it, you get used it. You wake up and you are fine. Brian when do you find time for the lectureships . Dr. Fauci i tend to do lectures that are important in their impact. I really do honestly, no boondoggle and. Someone says we are having a meeting in st. Johns in the virgin islands, we want you to go talk about i wont do that. If there is a National Meeting where youre going to impart Important Information to a group of scientists. I may or may not do that. I pick and choose enough so that i am not so often away from my office that i would lose effectiveness. I am very very careful about not over traveling. I do think you can do in one day, fly up, come back the same day. I dont do things well, lets go out to a meeting at a ski resort, give a talk, you stay there i zero do that. Its always in and out. You can be economical. Brian you are 74. How long are you going to work . Dr. Fauci im going to keep doing it until im not effective. Right now i am as energetic and effective as i have ever been. Who determines how long you stay there . Dr. Fauci you get reviewed every few years by a committee, an outside committee that reviews you and determines your effectiveness. If it turns out you were not effective, the recommendation is to step down. Brian when there is a new director of your institute and he or she meets you and since before you and says, tell me what i should look out for and we are not talking about medicine, we are talking about politics. What would you tell them . Dr. Fauci when you are dealing in the interface of politics, policy, and medicine, the things i have found to be very effective, be consistent, be totally honest, and do not tell people things that you think they might want to hear. Tell them the truth that is based on evidence. Even though politicians, be they in the administration or the congress, may not be happy with what you tell them because it disappoints them, they will respect you if after a while it is clear to them you are telling them the truth based on scientific evidence. That is the one thing i would emphasize to anyone who follows me. That that is how you can be successful in getting good science to drive policy. Brian what do you tell them about dealing with congress . Dr. Fauci be clear. Do not try to razzledazzle them. Do not talk down to them. Do not feel that because you are a scientist you are superior, that you can talk over their heads. The most important thing is for the congress to understand and appreciate what you are doing and the importance of your work. There is a balance between talking down to someone and not talking in such an esoteric way that someone does not have a clue what you are talking about. You have to do that balance where you can make the person feel that they are really that they really understand what you are talking about. They will like that, because people like to learn. They will feel good about that and say, i have learned something today. They will also respect you for being able to explain it to them. Susan we are spending this hour looking at the life, work, and publichealth philosophy of dr. Anthony fauci. Director of the National Institute of allergy and Infectious Diseases, and a leading voice in the Coronavirus Response in the United States and globally. Dr. Fauci has been director of the National Institute of allergies and Infectious Diseases since 1984. His first major challenge was dealing with the hivaids epidemic in the United States. In this segment he is talking about that. Brian have you ever had the feeling that something was going to get away from us when it came to one of these crises . Dr. Fauci not that it was going to get away from us, but that it was going to be much more serious than anyone anticipated. That started off right from the very beginning of my career as the director of the institute. When i first started seeing and taking care of hiv infected individuals before we knew it was hiv, in the early 80s, 1981, the fall and winter of 1981 to 82, this was something we had never seen before. It was unpredictable. What was going to happen. I got involved early on and was concerned that many people in and out of government were considering this just a fluke among gay men, some strange disease. The way i saw it evolve and following it, it was quite scary and unfortunately, my concerns were wellfounded. It turned out historically to be and is today one of the most devastating historic pandemics that we have ever experienced. That civilization has ever experienced. Brian when did you personally recognize this . Was there an aha moment . Dr. Fauci there was. It was the early summer of 1981 and the cdc and the centers for Disease Control and prevention put out something called morbidity and mortality report. A template which gives you a heads up on diseases or patterns of disease like the flu or an outbreak of this. They reported on their june 5, 1981, five men from los angeles who presented with a very unusual kind of pneumonia that you only see in people who have dramatically suppressed immune systems. I looked at it and said, five gay men why all gay men and why this strange disease you never see in Healthy People . They were supposedly completely healthy other than that. I thought it was a fluke. And im put it aside. One month later on the july 4, 1981, the next mmwr appear on my desk and they said, now 26 men, not only from l. A. , but San Francisco and new york with not only this strange pneumonia, but a strange kind of cancer you only see in people who are immunosuppressed. One thing that blew me away was that all of them were gay men and i said, somethings going on here that is really bad. This is likely a new disease. I had no idea what it was. It looked very much like an Infectious Disease. When you look at the patterns, it seems to have been spread by sexual contact. That is when i really had a combination of an aha moment and an anxiety reaction where i was saying, this is going to be bad. I made what i consider the transforming decision in my own career. I decided i was going to stop what i had been doing rather successfully for the previous nine or 10 years and devote myself completely to studying what i felt would be an enormously difficult disease. And it unfortunately turned out that was the case. Brian when you look back at that, people were mad at you in your own operation. Who got mad at you for what reason that you took gays in and had them involved in the discussion . Dr. Fauci in a wellmeaning way, the people who had cultivated me in science and academics thought i was being foolish, throwing away a very promising career in one area of medical research to go after something they thought was going to disappear. This is a fluke, its going to go away. Later on as i began to take the leadership role in not only the research, but when i became director of the institute of the National Institute of allergy and Infectious Diseases in 1984, there were people who were concerned and i would say bordering on being angry with me in that it was clear that i wanted to put more research in dutch resources in this. Even though it was early in the history of the pandemic, i wanted more government resources, more research, and it became clear that we needed to embrace the gay community, the activists, to get a better feel for what was going on in the trenches. There was a lot of resentment towards me on that. Resentment on the part of the scientists because they thought i was going to divert resources away from other important areas of Infectious Diseases. I was arguing, i dont want to divert resources. I want to resources. I want to argue before the congress and the president on why we needed more resources for this disease. That was that area of resentment. And then the idea of activists playing a major role in some of the decision and policy making in a Research Program was completely foreign and antithetical to many scientists. At the time, it was, we are scientists, we dont make the decisions about what needs to be done. We dont need to involve the community. I thought that was not a good idea. The community had a lot to offer. They were the ones that were suffering with unknown disease, the rigidity of the regulatory process of getting drugs approved that were experimental drugs that showed some efficacy was all a changing paradigm. We had not experienced that before. Brian here you are in 1990 at a town hall meeting. We will be seeing some revolutionizing of the way we look at treatment of hiv because the end of the 1980s has created the concept that you will see in the 1990s of early intervention. We treat people before they develop fullblown disease, protecting them against opportunistic infections. Hopefully that is the goal of the decade of the 1990s, to convert hiv infections into a chronic, manageable infection whereby you can test someone, counsel them, and treat them with a combination of drugs early in the course of infection so you might have situations like many other chronic diseases where there is a feasibility of reasonable, comfortable lifespan. Brian 25 years later here we are. What happened . Dr. Fauci it happened. We were fortunate. We have drugs right now that when given to people who are hivinfected, if someone comes in, i can show the dichotomy in the early 1980s, if someone came into my clinic with aids, their median survival would be six to eight months, which means they would be half of them would be dead in eight months. Now if tomorrow when i go back on friday and somebody comes into our clinic who is 20 plus years old who is relatively recently infected and i put them on three drugs, the cocktail of highly active antiretroviral therapy, i can look them in the eye and say, we can do Mathematical Modeling to say that if you take your medicine regularly, you could live an additional 55 50, 50 years. That you could live essentially a normal lifespan, just a few years less then a normal lifespan, that is a huge advance. Susan as with the hivaids crisis and later epidemics, dr. Fauci helps it to negotiate the Coronavirus Response. In this next clip we see him at the white house podium trying to avoid the political fray. Pres. Trump the fact is i have heard for years that the who is very much biased toward china. Do you want to get into this political mess . Dr. Fauci no, i dont want to. Tedros is an outstanding person. I have known him since he was the minister of health in ethiopia. Anyone who says the who has not had problems has not been watching, but under his leadership, they have done very well. He has been all over this. I was on the phone with him a few hours ago leading a who call. I am not talking about china. You are asking me about tedros. The World Health Organization is praising china. Dr. Fauci i cant comment on that. I dont have any viewpoint into it. I dont even know what your question is. I want to apologize for my kurt spots when you asked me about the china deal curt response when you asked me about the china deal. What i really want to say is, my job is i am a scientist. I am a physician and a Public Health person. I dont like to get involved in that stuff. Susan i am a scientist, a physician, a Public Health person. Where did dr. Faucis desire to serve the public come from . He provided some insight during q a interview. Brian the first doctor in your family was a pharmacist. Where were you born . Dr. Fauci i was born and raised in brooklyn, new york. In the bensonhurst section, which back then and maybe even now, brooklyn, if you took an aerial photo and looked at different sections, they were ethnically divided. There was the italianamerican section, the africanamerican section, the puerto rican section, etc. I was in an italianamerican section, a very family oriented, very nurturing area to live in. My father is firstgeneration, his father was born in italy, came to the United States at the turnofthecentury. My father was raised early on in the little italy section of new york and manhattan, moved to brooklyn, and our family was raised in brooklyn. He went to Columbia University college of pharmacy, became a pharmacist, and that is what he did all his life. Brian so that is how he got the name doc. Dr. Fauci back then, pharmacists were called doc. Many people who cannot afford to go to a doctor or did not want to take time of making an appointment would go to their neighborhood pharmacy and explain their symptoms. My father never overstepped his bounds. If somebody needed to see a physician, he would say go see a physician. Often he would give them the advice they need to take care of minor ailments they had. Brian what was moms background . Dr. Fauci my mother went to Hunter College in new york city and got married at a very early age. My mother and father interestingly got married right out of high school. My father went through Pharmacy School and my mother went through Hunter College, both married. My mother gave birth to my sister and then me. She became a homemaker for her whole life. Brian the jesuits taught you high school, college. What impact what did it mean to be taught by jesuits . Dr. Fauci well, it is a great experience, i have to say. They combine intense intellectualism with discipline, not in the sense of smacking you around, but intellectual rigor, discipline in how you handle yourself as a person, as a human being, and they have a general motto, i think this had a major influence on me and what i did. The issue of service to others, that is very big. That does not mean people who dont go into Public Service are doing anything lesser with their lives, but they tend to have i would not say a pushing, but a leaning towards something about what you do is Public Service. Either everything you do, which turned out what i did by going into Public Service, or at least a part of your life. It was an interesting combination of concern for mankind as well as a good intellectual rigor. Brian when did you want to be a doctor . Dr. Fauci it was early high school. I am very interested in people. I am a people person. Probably as part of the jesuit training, which is steeped in the humanities, so when i went to high school, we took four years of greek, latin, a romance language, ancient history, things like that. When i went to holy cross, another Jesuit School as a college, i took a hybrid premed course. It was called it is almost an oxymoron. Ab greek classics premed. You were majoring in the humanities of the classics with a lot of philosophy, but you took enough science to get into medical school. The idea about when i wanted to become a doctor, i like science, i like discovery, i like the challenges of science, but i also so much like mankind and the humanities that it was just a natural fit. Where do you put science and people in the same bucket . To me, that was medicine. Brian who was an early mentor . Probably someone in high school. With the jesuit training is a long training before you become a priest. Back then they would have what is called scholastics. People who were not yet ordained as priests, but they dressed with the garb of a priest and they taught in the high school. There were a couple of those scholastics who had a major impact on me. Just great people. Highly intellectual and highly nurturing of you and what you wanted to do. Brian you did an interview with Science Magazine in 2003. Saying Anthony Fauci lets see. Works 14 hours a day, jobs for lunch, eats dinner with his family after 9 00, and continues working until bedtime where he sleeps four and a half hours. How much of that is true . Dr. Fauci it is all true. Fortunately it still is. I work a lot of hours, i worked most of the weekend. I do not do it as a drag. I do it because i like it and i am energized by what i am doing. We fortunate, likely through the creativity and the tolerance of my wife who also works at the nih and is the chair of one of the departments there, we arrange our schedule, when the children were growing up that even though it is particularly not particularly healthy to eat dinner late at night, the only way that we could as a family be together every single day was when i would come home at 9 00, my children who would get out of school at 3 00, most of them played sports and would come home after school and have a snack and wait home wait for me to come home and have a snack, they would either study more and go to bed. I would go to my office and continue to work and get up and go to bed at around 5 00. 28, and she is a clinicalnt in psychology at boston college. She graduated from harvard and ,hen taught in the innercity minority areas in new york city and in washington, d. C. , and then went for further graduate training. Is in a phd program because she got interested in clinical psychology. I daughter is a student at the university of pennsylvania, my youngest just is working in San Francisco for twitter. Please tell us the story of meeting your wife. I have been at the nih for about 10 years or so, and i just happen to have made a trip to china for meeting, for scientific meeting. The nih, at the beginning of the nurseds pandemic, hired a who is a clinical nurse specialist. My wife started off as a nurse before she got her phd in ethics and she came to the nih and i didnt know she was a nurse because i didnt know she was away for that week. One of my patients was a person who only spoke portuguese. My wife or just come back a few months earlier, from two years with project hope in brazil and she was totally fluent in portuguese. As i was talking to the patient, i wanted to tell the patient, they had to go home, rest, could not drink, could not indulge because he was just recuperating. I told him i needed someone to translate. Nurse whod a new could translate. Sheem they have to do turned around and spoke to him in portuguese and i found out them to tell told , im going to play around and have a ball. She was horrified and did not want to say that. She turned to me and said, he said fine, he is going to do that. When i looked at her, she was a very attractive young nurse and she said very interesting. I was single, so i went back to my office. Head days later, i told my nurse, could you tell that nurse to come to my office, i want to talk to her. She thought she was going to be fired because she thought i had. Ound out that i found out she walked in completely petrified and sat there looking very nervous. I said, i didnt realize you had come here until just last week. I said, would you like to go out for dinner sometime . She almost fell out of her chair and said of course. And we got married a year later. In the same interview, they asked you the question in a science interview. Are you a man of faith . Saidl read to you what you. Broadly and generically, im not a regular church attender. Someone who into tries to keep degree of spirituality about them. I look upon myself as a humanist. I have faith in the goodness of mankind. Is that totally accurate today . What does that say to the jesuit education, did they talk you out of the church . Enamored as i am with the principles of goodness to mankind and doing the best you can. I think there are a lot of things about organized religion that are unfortunate, and i tend to like to stay away from that and think more in terms of the principles of the principles that i learned from the jesuits and catholic religion that are run my life by. The idea about the organization of religion is not something that id here to very much . Covid19 is sometimes compared to h1n1 and sars. About how from him those past pandemics ended and about the effectiveness of vaccines. In 23 2003, you testified about another subject. It means how does this , the genesis of the pathology, that something we will be studying now that we have the virus. We are not sure at this point whether its the virus itself that is causing all the damage in the lungs of the individuals, or the virus together with what would be a normal immune response but in some diseases the immune response itself causes damage. We have certain infections in which a certain type of immune response can make the pathological effect worse. We see that in some cases of respiratory and central in virus and some cases of measles. It is important for us to nail down the path of genesis. The big item is vaccines. Brian do you remember of course you remember sars, but do you remember, when you talk to a group like this, how do you talk the language sometimes, the average person gets lost. Dr. Fauci you have to make sure you are understood. I make it a very important goal that you do not want to make you do not want to impress people and razzledazzle them with your knowledge. You just want them to understand what you are talking about. Brian what happened to sars . Where is it now . Dr. Fauci it essentially disappeared. Sars came, we isolated the virus, we started to make a vaccine, which was successful it looked pretty good in an animal model and then all of a sudden, pure Public Health measures suppressed it and it went away. It was one of those diseases that are very common, which is a disease that is fundamentally an animal disease and it jumps species from the animal to the human, and sometimes, it is trivial, and nothing happens, and one person gets invented, but sometimes, it adapts itself to the human, and it spread from human to human. That is what sars did, but once you suppressed it, it essentially stopped. Because the next one that jumped into humans did not have the capability of spreading easily from persontoperson, so we dodged a bullet with sars. We. Did. We did. Brian you are talking about another issue. Dr. Fauci importantly, the virus has evolved to be able to jump from chicken to human. Still very, very inefficiently, so it is not something where it easily does that, and they have been real rare, like one or two cases that have been definitively confirmed that it goes human to human. It still is a virus that has not been able to assume the capability of becoming a real classical pandemic, but when you see the smoldering activity going on, the migratory bird, and it is not just southeast asia, it is russia, kazakhstan, we are talking about romania and turkey, so the bird flu, the infections of the birds, they are not going away, so the conditions that would be amenable to a pandemics are not resolving themselves. In fact, they are getting worse, so that is also a reason for the accelerated current activity. Brian what happened to bird flu . Dr. Fauci it went away. So over the last few years, there have been these blips of a virus that is fundamentally a bird or another animal virus that jumps to a human but it does not adapt itself to easily go from human to human. So you will see cases of h5n1, age seven and h7n9, things that are fundamentally animal viruses that will jump. The thing that you have to worry about is if it jumps enough, will it, by evolution, adapt itself to all of a sudden start saying i like being in a human, and essentially transmit more and more . That particular virus did not do that. It just stayed in a very inefficient way from bird to human rarely and never going from human to human in any meaningful way. Brian i want to read the first paragraph of a New York Times article from january 7. This is by denise grady. An unusual method for producing antibiotics may help solve an urgent global problem, the rising infections that resist treatment with commonly used drugs and the lack of new antibiotics to replace ones that no longer work. I know you know this story. The madison, if i pronounce it correctly, it is texobactin . Did you play a role in this, and what is it . Brian our dr. Fauci our Institute Funded the research. Not only do we do research, but most of what we do is we give grants to very competent scientists like the scientists in this question who do this so we did have our fingerprints on this. This is an interesting finding because we have a significant problem of antibiotic resistance now today in the modern day. And if we continue to have a problem with microbes becoming more and more resistant and not a new class of antibiotics to meet the challenge, we could get in trouble. Things that would normally be easily treatable could become untreatable. Whenever we get a situation where you have a new class of antibiotics that could counter the emergence of resistance, that is something you want to pursue very vigorously, which is what we are going to do. Brian the flu. A lot of people i know get the flu shot. People over 65 got a double dose, the new dose, or whatever it is, and i know a ton of people that came down with the flu. Lots and lots of money was spent on the flu vaccine, and it did not work. Dr. Fauci it is not working optimally, that is for sure, because each year, you make a calculated guess based on information that you gather of what is circulating toward the end of the season of your season, and what is going on in the southern hemisphere. Brian who makes that guess . Dr. Fauci who in coordination with a number of people, including cdc. Brian World Health Organization. Dr. Fauci and they have to make that decision in february of the prior season because in order to start manufacturing the influenza vaccine, it takes about six months so that by the middle to end of the summer, you start distributing it in the fall, and then it is ready for the winter season. At the time the decision was made for this 20142015 season, they thought that this particular strain of h3n2, which is a designation of certain types of influenza, would be one type. As soon they started manufacturing the vaccine, about 1. 5 months later, it became clear that the virus was drifting, and that means mutations and drifting so that by the time you got to the flu season, the majority of the strains did not match what was in the vaccine. Now, that is the bad news. The somewhat comforting news is that you still can get good benefit from vaccination even though there is not a perfect match. Because what is called cross protection if i get back to if i get vaccinated for the one that is not circulating in the community, i can still get a certain degree of protection. I might not be protected against getting infected but i might be protected against getting serious disease or hospitalization. Brian do you get a flu shot . Dr. Fauci i do, every year. Do you ever get the flu . I have gotten the flu and the past. I got the flu in the midtolate 1970s and i was sick or than i have ever been. I did get the flu vaccine that season but it did not work on me, but it seems to have worked since then. I have not gotten influenza in several years. Brian as you sit at your desk every day, what is your number one concern way out there . Dr. Fauci my number one concern way out there is the idea of emerging and reemerging infections that we have not been exposed to before that spread by a respiratory route. Pandemic influenza, that is really serious as something that bothers me and worries me a bit. That is one of the reasons why the real priorities we are working on right now in my institute is to develop universal influenza vaccine. A universal influenza vaccine is one that you can take once or a couple of times in your lifetime and it would cover all the strains of influenza so you do not have to play this guessing game each year where you have to change your vaccine or maybe every year or two, and keep getting vaccinated every year. If you can get a universal flu vaccine, you give it a few times like you would get a measles vaccine and forever be protected for a polio vaccine and forever be protected. That is the thing you need to do. Brian how close are you . Dr. Fauci it is tough to predict. It is foolish to say we will have it in x number of years. We made some breakthroughs. It encourages me to think that within a reasonable period of time we might have some form of , universal flu vaccine. As we close, a reminder that the dr. Fauci program is available to watch at cspan. Org as are all of our q a interviews and all of cspan programming. Washington journal, live, every day, with news and policy issues that impact you. Up monday coming morning, what is next for Coronavirus Response legislation on capitol hill. Then, Scott Burruss on the authority federal and said officials have in enforcing quarantine, curfews, and other restrictions of movement. In the president of the International Association of discussf police cuss the coronavirus epidemic. Join the discussion. Night, on the communicators, from the annual state of the net conference, documenting the internet. We document about 800 pagers every day. Its kind of huge. Out to bef, in terms only part of what we do. Television,tional and you can search to find clips of what other people said and be able to put those in blog in blog posts alike. Compare that people can and contrast, and think critically about what is happened on television. Watch mind denied at 8 00. Astern on cspan2 next, Queen Elizabeth of england with a broadcast message on the impact of the coronavirus in the United Kingdom and the governments response. The u. K. Has more than 4000 confirmed cases, including prince charles, and more than 4000 deaths. The queen recorded her message