Well, there will be a parade tomorrow for this year's
NBA champions, the Boston Celtics.
We give our heroes parades and the early days of
space travel.
We gave astronauts parades, but then we shot so many
astronauts into space and even to the moon.
But we stopped giving them parades.
We took space travel for granted.
There was no longer the stuff of heroism.
Our most important heroes have always been taken for granted.
They never get parades.
I'm talking about the people who do the most important
work a human being can do.
They save lives.
There is no higher calling than saving lives.
Some of you might know what it feels like, but
most of us don't.
Most of us have never and will never save a
life.
Not one.
We won't drag a wounded soldier off a battlefield.
We won't drive a dying person to an emergency room
just in time.
We won't pull that drowning child out of the water.
And we won't treat patients in hospitals who would die
without our medical expertise.
Not every doctor and nurse saves lives.
Some areas of medicine do not involve life and death.
Some doctors occasionally save lives.
And then there is Doctor Anthony Fauci.
He has had the experience as an attending physician of
saving the life of a patient in his care.
And in his 54 years at the National Institute of
Health, fighting every infectious disease that emerged in those 54
years and saving lives, Doctor Fauci's work has saved millions
upon millions of lives.
Who are the heroes who are there in American life
today?
Who are the ones that you would point out to
young Americans as figures who should inspire this country?
I think a Doctor Fauci probably never heard of him.
You did and heard him.
He's a very fine research top Dr.
at National Institute of Health, working hard, doing something about
research on this disease of AIDS.
After years of the research and clinical struggle with HIV
AIDS Doctor Fauci's work helped us get to the medical
breakthroughs that meant AIDS was no longer a death sentence.
And he did not believe that his moral responsibility as
a physician and public health official stopped at the border.
He convinced Republican President George W Bush to fully fund
a massive AIDS intervention project in Africa that was called
the President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, PEPFAR.
PEPFAR was the largest global health initiative for a single
disease by any country in history.
That was Doctor Anthony Fauci's work, and that program saved
over 25,000,000 lives.
The work was never easy.
I hate to use the word gay in connection with
sodomy.
There's nothing gay about these people engaging in incredibly offensive
and revolting conduct that has led to the proliferation of
AIDS.
There is a feeling among members of any of of
a number of professions or just the general population, that
patients with AIDS, many of whom are homosexual, are a
little bit different.
I think that that has led to a little bit
of a complacency about the approach towards this disease.
Doctor Fauci has always had to deal with harsh critics
of his work and attacks on him personally.
Really nasty attacks on some AIDS research activists were dissatisfied,
understandably, since they were dying, dissatisfied with the medical progress
in treating AIDS, they called Doctor Fauci a murderer.
The playwright, the acclaimed playwright Larry Kramer called Doctor Fauci
a murderer more than once.
Doctor Fauci's reaction to those attacks was to invite the
people who were attacking him and calling him a murderer
into his office to hear their complaints.
He went to Greenwich Village to meetings to hear their
complaints.
He went to San Francisco to speak to those people
in the streets to hear their complaints.
Some of those protesters who called Doctor Fauci a murderer
eventually became his best friends.
Doctor Fauci's work enabled Larry Kramer, who was HIV positive,
to live to the age of 84.
And their last words to each other and what were
the last weeks of Larry Kramer's life were Larry saying
I love you, Tony.
And I tearfully responded, I love you too, Larry.
That story is told and Anthony Fauci's powerful, hugely informative,
and deeply emotional new book On Call, A Doctor's Journey
in Public Service.
Anthony Fauci was used to curing patients with infectious diseases.
Then came AIDS.
He filled the National Institute of Health with as many
beds as possible to serve AIDS patients directly and to
treat them directly himself.
And for the first time in his medical career, he
was not a lifesaver.
He could not be a lifesaver.
He did not have the tools.
He did not have the medicines.
He was helplessly watching his patients die.
Ron had gone completely blind.
The cytomegalovirus, despite treatment that was obviously inadequate, had literally
chewed up the critical sight elements of his retina from
the time we had made morning rounds to the time
we walked into the room that evening.
I constrained my emotions as Cliff and I comforted him
about his devastating outcome, although he said to us he
expected that this would happen because he had had been
gradually losing vision over the previous weeks.
We left and finished our rounds.
I went back to my office around the corner and
down the hall from the patient ward, just out of
sight of my team, and burst into tears.
I was not just deeply shaken and saddened, I was
profoundly frustrated and angry.
Ron would soon die.
This is just one such story.
When all of the rest of us and everyone in
the world were waiting for a COVID vaccine, we did
not have to wait as long as AIDS patients had
to wait for relief.
Thanks to the years, decades of research on vaccines and
infectious diseases that Anthony Fauci and others committed their lives
to.
You all know the recent completely undeserved attacks that Doctor
Fauci has suffered, including in a recent congressional hearing.
This is not the night for that.
They have had their microphones.
They will not be heard here.
This hour is for you to finally really meet the
man.
The man behind the title, the man behind all that
wise medical advice that he has delivered to all of
us for decades.
That man's compassion and commitment and wisdom filled the pages
of his new book that is about his own love
story with his wife and family, his scientific detective work
that is full of suspense and drama and actually lets
you feel like you understand the medicine as you're reading
it.
And you do, but don't try to repeat it to
anyone as I've tried to.
And also, this book is full of Doctor Fauci's steadiness
and reliability under pressure, the bedside manner that this country
has always needed in a public health crisis.
That is the story told in this book.
And I invite you tonight here to meet Anthony Fauci.