Business
Column: Anthony Fauci's memoir strikes a crucial blow against the disinformation agents who imperil our health
Just after Thanksgiving 2021, Dr. Anthony Fauci visited a high school in the Anacostia neighborhood of Washington, D.C. His goal was to promote the safety of COVID-19 vaccines in a primarily Black community, where vaccine rates were lower than in the rest of the capital.
Fauci was joined by Barack Obama — the fifth of the seven presidents he would serve during his more than half-century career as a public health official. Together they made the rounds of vaccination booths in the school gym, posing for photos. As they were getting into their cars after the visit, Obama turned to him with a word of encouragement.
Fauci had been accused by congressional crackpots such as Sens. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) and Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) of having helped to create the COVID virus, unleashing the pandemic, and by Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) of having masterminded nationwide pandemic shutdowns. Credible death threats against him had prompted the government to provide him with 24-hour security protection.
AIDS had made me a target, but that was largely before social media…. Now my family and I were barraged by emails, texts, and phone calls … with foul language and sexually explicit messages and threatened with violence and even death.
— Anthony S. Fauci
Obama’s advice carried so much weight that Fauci, 83, has used it, in its original Latin, as the title of a chapter of his newly published memoir, “On Call: A Doctor’s Journey in Public Service.” That chapter, concerning the maelstrom of abuse he sustained as a right-wing whipping boy during the pandemic, is called “Illegitimi Non Carborundum.”
Published in mid-June, “On Call” is an indispensable addition to the growing shelf of books by medical and scientific professionals fighting back against the tide of disinformation undermining public health in the U.S.
Over the last few months I’ve reported on others, including “The Deadly Rise of Anti-Science” by pediatrician and immunologist Peter Hotez and “We Want Them Infected” by neurologist Jonathan Howard, which demolishes the claims of anti-vaccine ideologues such as Stanford’s Jay Bhattacharya.
This year has brought us not only Fauci’s book but “Tell Me When It’s Over” by vaccine expert Paul Offit, which takes aim at the “COVID myths,” which anti-vaxxers have wholesaled to encourage vaccination resistance in the general public.
Fauci’s book stands out because its author has chosen to place the abusive, ignorant treatment he received from disinformation grifters in and outside of government beginning with the Trump years in the context of his long career as a public servant.
His work started with his joining the National Institutes of Health as a fellow in 1968, at the age of 27. He stayed there, as a staff member and ultimately as director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, until his retirement in 2022.
Over that time, Fauci became the nation’s most respected and influential immunologist. His public role first emerged with the appearance of AIDS in 1981. Within a few months, he decided to leave the routine research he had been doing on human immune response and focus instead on “this mysterious new disease seemingly restricted at this point to gay men.”
It was a soul-crushing experience. The cause of AIDS was not understood until 1983, when the human immunodeficiency virus, or HIV, was identified as the culprit. There were no effective treatments, much less a cure. Fauci describes himself watching powerlessly as NIAID wards filled with patients facing a death sentence.
“None of my training or temperament,” he writes, “provided a bulwark against that horrible, inevitable outcome…. All of us who worked on the ward with those patients had to stuff away our feelings of loss, day after day, just to be able to carry on.”
A youthful Anthony Fauci opens an AIDS conference in Lausanne, Switzerland, in 2004.
(LAURENT GILLIERON/AP)
Fauci also became a target of AIDS activists, who blamed him for failing to persuade his bureaucratic superiors to pull out all the stops on AIDS research — among them the playwright Larry Kramer, who in 1988 wrote an op-ed in the San Francisco Examiner headlined “I Call You Murderers, an Open Letter to an Incompetent Idiot, Dr. Anthony Fauci.”
Yet Fauci’s efforts to bring Kramer and other activists into the official meetings, and his championing of a full-scale government program to battle the disease, ultimately brought them together by the time Kramer succumbed to AIDS in 2020. “A complex relationship, indeed,” Fauci writes.
But the experience with AIDS didn’t prepare Fauci for the abuse he received as “the de facto public face of the country’s battle” with COVID. “AIDS had made me a target, but that was largely before social media,” he writes. “Now my family and I were barraged by emails, texts, and phone calls… with foul language and sexually explicit messages and threatened with violence and even death.” Right-wingers and GOP politicians even called for Fauci’s prosecution.
The problem began with Trump, who was courteous with Fauci in private and even seemed to accept his truth-telling about the seriousness of the developing crisis — but at public rallies dismissed COVID as a Democratic “hoax.”
Fauci is judicious about many of the administration officials he worked with as a member of Trump’s COVID task force, including Vice President Mike Pence, who Fauci says seemed sincerely to face up to the crisis but was hamstrung by his sedulous fealty to Trump. But he’s contemptuous about those who exploited the public’s unfamiliarity with the scientific method to cast doubt on necessary pandemic countermeasures and hype useless nostrums.
“People associate science with absolutes,” he writes. But science is a process in which new information is absorbed and evaluated, leading to new conclusions.
That was the case with the government’s advice against masking, issued when the pandemic was new, its means of transmission unknown, and hospitals were suffering a severe shortage of surgical masks and other protective equipment.
When the shortages eased and it became clear that masks would help stem the spread of COVID, the advice changed — but was portrayed on the right as an example of deliberate deceit by government experts.
Those who earned Fauci’s contempt include Peter Navarro, a Trump economic advisor who marched into a White House meeting after Fauci had dismissed hydroxychloroquine, an antimalarial drug Trump was touting as a COVID treatment, dumped a pile of papers on the table and barked at Fauci: “I have all the evidence in the world that hydroxychloroquine works. And by preventing people from getting it, you have blood on your hands!”
Navarro is currently serving a prison sentence for ignoring a subpoena from a House committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection.
Fauci’s inclination to be candid about the perils of COVID and the value of social counter-methods eventually led to his being muzzled by the White House, barred from appearing on cable news shows even as the COVID toll increased inexorably. Nearly 1.2 million Americans have succumbed to the disease, the U.S. toll from which is by far the worst in the developed world.
“Attacks on me came daily,” Fauci relates. Right-wing organizations and Republicans in Congress kept “digging for something that would discredit me. When nothing was found, they just made up stories with no evidence whatsoever to back them up.”
Paul advanced the baseless charge that Fauci’s institute, via a grant to the research organization EcoHealth Alliance, had caused the pandemic, even though the research EcoHealth had funded at China’s Wuhan Institute of Virology could not conceivably have produced the SARS-CoV-2 that causes COVID.
In his book, Offit, director of the Vaccine Education Center at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and a member of the Food and Drug Administration panel that rules on the safety and efficacy of vaccines, traces his own experience with the anti-vaccine movement.
Offit ably traces the origin of the modern anti-vaccine movement to a fact-free campaign in 1982 blaming the whooping cough vaccine for childhood injuries, which was taken up by the mass media but had no basis in fact. It was augmented by a fraudulent 1998 paper tying the MMR (measles/mumps/rubella) vaccine to autism.
The paper was eventually retracted by its publisher, the British journal the Lancet, and its main author, Andrew Wakefield, was stripped of his British medical license. But the paper’s infliuence is still shown by resistance to the MMR vaccine in Britain and pockets in the U.S., where Wakefield is lauded by anti-vaccine agitators as a hero.
Offit shows how the messaging of anti-vaxxers has evolved from claims about the purported health hazard of vaccines into a movement for “medical freedom” — the right of individuals to decide for themselves “what we can or can’t put into our bodies or the bodies of our children.”
That turns the very concept of public health on its head. “Public health had morphed into private decisions, the public be damned,” Offit writes.
He ties the anti-vaccine movement to other health-related conspiracy-mongering, such as the notion that COVID originated in that Chinese lab, despite overwhelming scientific evidence that it reached humans the way other viruses have throughout history — as a spillover from wildlife in contacts with humans.
Even before that, the drumbeat of campaigns against vaccines resulted in a dangerous skepticism about science just when sober scientific judgments were most needed.
“The outside impact of these conspiracy theories on the American public meant that the war against Covid would soon become a war against ourselves,” Offit writes. “Much of the suffering and deaths from Covid could have been prevented had people chosen to be vaccinated. But they believed the myths. As a result, hundreds of thousands of people died needlessly.”
Doctors and scientists have been pondering with ever-increasing urgency how to combat the tide of science denialism that infects public health policymaking and public discourse. They’re facing a tough enemy, because the underlying driver of conspiracy movements is grift — the purveying of disinformation for profit and fame — witness the rise of anti-vaxxer Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to political prominence.
Fauci, Offit, Hotez, Howard and other responsible scientists are placing their livelihoods, reputations and even their safety on the line to bring the facts to the American public. They’re heroes, and we must heed their efforts to protect science from charlatans and frauds, for our own good.
Robotaxis could be turning into robocops.
A self-driving Waymo reported two teens to San Mateo, Calif., police on Monday after they were found drinking alcohol and shooting toy guns in the back of the vehicle.
According to a social media post from the San Mateo Police Department, officers detained two 15-year-olds after the Waymo they were riding in contacted the department and stopped in a parking lot until law enforcement arrived.
“Parents do you know where your teens are?” the San Mateo Police Department wrote on Facebook following the incident. “Waymo does!”
Officers removed both teens from the vehicle and determined they were using toy guns to shoot Orbeez out the windows. Orbeez are small, water-absorbing beads sold at toy stores.
“Toy guns, water guns, and BB guns all pose real dangers, especially to an untrained eye,” the Police Department said. “The simple handling of them can cause fear in [passersby].” “
A video posted on Facebook shows at least five officers and a police dog responding to the scene and approaching the Waymo with their weapons raised.
Waymo did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Waymo vehicles have internal cameras and microphones that may be used in an emergency or to “promote safety and security,” according to Waymo’s online support page.
The cameras are also used to ensure the vehicles are clean and to help find lost items, according to the support page.
The company said it does not use facial recognition or other biometric identification technologies to identify individuals.
“In more urgent circumstances, support may access live video during a trip,” the Waymo page said.
The San Mateo Police Department’s Facebook post has garnered nearly 60 comments, with one user accusing Waymo of “snitching.”
“At least they got a designated driver?!” one user commented.
Business
Commentary: How right-wing anti-transgender attacks led to a Supreme Court ruling upholding sex discrimination
At the Supreme Court, the unfounded fear of boys masquerading as girls in youth sports rolled the clock back on gender equality.
On the surface, the Supreme Court’s June 30 opinion upholding state laws barring transgender girls from women’s and girl’s sports teams looks like a victory for women’s rights.
The 6-3 opinion by Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh certainly presents itself that way. “Females and males have inherent physical differences relevant to athletic performance,” Kavanaugh wrote. “Therefore, in contact sports, forcing female athletes to compete against males can create significant safety risks.” He also asserted that “forcing female athletes to compete against males can undermine competitive fairness.”
The ruling applied to prohibitions enacted in Idaho and West Virginia against “biological” males’ participation on women’s teams in public schools. Federal judges in both states overturned the bans. The Supreme Court majority restored them. The ruling essentially upholds similar bans enacted in 25 other states.
There was no record of any transgender person participating in school sports in the State, let alone any ‘problem’ with transgender students … creating unfair competition or unsafe conditions.
— Justice Sonia Sotomayor, demolishing the Supreme Court’s argument in favor of banning transgender girls from girl’s sports
Kavanaugh, like Donald Trump and others in the anti-transgender camp, maintained that one’s gender is an immutable fact of life, established even before birth.
Anything else, Trump stated in an executive order he issued on inauguration day 2025, could only be the product of “gender ideology extremism.” The U.S., his order stated, recognizes “two sexes, male and female. These sexes are not changeable and are grounded in fundamental and incontrovertible reality.” That’s a “biological truth,” he declared.
In his own version of this overconfident and factually insupportable conclusion, Kavanaugh wrote: “As all agree, females and males have inherent physical differences relevant to athletic performance.”
Science recognizes that some people are “born with sex traits that don’t fit into typical male or female patterns,” to cite a discussion on the Cleveland Clinic web page on the topic “intersex.” The condition “may involve chromosomes, hormones, reproductive organs or genitals.”
From a psychological standpoint, medical science recognizes “gender dysphoria” as a real condition often requiring counseling and medical intervention such as the use of puberty blockers and hormones to stave off the development of secondary sex characteristics until the condition can be resolved.
No one disputes that there are physical differences between the sexes. Few would dispute that on average or even at the median, males may be bigger and more powerful than females, or that in certain contact sports the difference may be telling and on occasion dangerous.
But that’s not the same as asserting that the physical differences between males and females invariably mean that men will invariably prevail over women in all competitions or that their participation will endanger women.
The International Olympic Committee — in a policy statement Kavanaugh cited incompletely — says that in “most running and swimming events,” males have a 10% to 12% advantage over women. That’s a range that would accommodate the full spectrum of outcomes — transgender females win, cisfemales win, they tie. (The “cis” prefix denotes those living consistent with their birth gender.)
West Virginia and Idaho addressed this ambiguity by banning transgender women from all girls’ teams. So under their rules transgender girls can’t play football or soccer with cisgirls. But what’s the argument in favor of banning them from the 100-yard dash, or cross-country track, or diving, or archery?
But something else is going on here. The Supreme Court’s ruling was almost preordained, given the years-long campaign by conservatives to demonize transgender individuals as if they’re members of an alien species.
It will be recalled that during his presidential campaign, Trump spun a despicable fantasy in which children were kidnapped in school and secretly subjected to sex-change operations.
Trump’s executive order wiped out policies aimed at protecting transgender adults from discrimination. He moved to outlaw gender-affirming medical therapies for anyone under 19 by cutting off federal funding for healthcare institutions that provide such care.
He banned transgender individuals from serving in the military and ordered federal prison officials to move transgender inmates into the general populations consistent with their birth genders, which exposes them to physical assault. (Federal Judge Royce Lamberth of Washington, D.C., has blocked the government from transferring three transgender women into the male prison population or terminating their hormone treatments.)
I wrote during Trump’s first term, when his anti-transgender policies were still gestating, that the goal was to show that “one can target any community, as long as it doesn’t have a strong political voice or political power. These are the actions of bullies and cowards, pretending to be strong.”
Last year, the Supreme Court struck its first blow against transgender rights by upholding a Tennessee law banning transgender care, including puberty blockers and hormone therapy, for minors. Similar laws have been enacted in 25 other states. The majority in that ruling by Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. was identical to the one in the June 30 ruling — Roberts, Kavanaugh, and Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel A. Alito Jr., Neil M. Gorsuch and Amy Coney Barrett.
Who are the targets of this ideological campaign? They number only about 1.6 million U.S. adults, or one-half of 1% of the U.S. population. About 300,000 adolescents ages 13 to 17, or 1.4%, identify as transgender, according to a study by UCLA School of Law.
In West Virginia, as Justice Sonia Sotomayor observed in her dissenting opinion, “there was no record of any transgender person participating in school sports in the State, let along any ‘problem’ with transgender students … creating unfair competition or unsafe conditions.”
In endorsing the flat bans directed at transgender women in Idaho and West Virginia, Kavanaugh argued that any attempt to implement case-by-case judgments of students’ requests to join sports teams inconsistent with their biological gender would create “an enormous practical and administrability problem.”
Is that so? That wasn’t the case in Maine, where the annual K-12 population is more than 170,000. There, a committee was charged with determining whether a student’s participation in a sport consistent with their gender identity but inconsistent with their biological sex would “result in an unfair athletic advantage” or present a risk of injury to others. The committee held 56 hearings from 2013 through 2021, or an average of seven per year. During the entire time span, only four involved transgender girls. (The outcome of those hearings couldn’t be learned.)
It was Maine’s policy, one might recall, that provoked a confrontation between Trump and Maine Gov. Janet Mills at the White House last year, when Trump threatened to withhold federal funding from the state unless it barred transgender students from competing on women’s sports teams. “We’ll see you in court,” Mills snapped.
Whether the Idaho and West Virginia laws genuinely protect girls from unfair competition is questionable. (The Idaho law is styled the “Fairness in Women’s Sports Act.”) In practice, the laws may subject women in public schools to “invasive sex verification procedures,” as educational expert George Theoharis of Syracuse University wrote after the court ruling.
They’re also based on a retrograde view of women as fragile creatures needing men’s protection, Theoharis wrote — “the same logic that has historically been used to justify excluding women from making their own healthcare decisions and girls from rigorous math and science; that physically demanding work is simply beyond them.” (There don’t appear to be any state laws barring transgender women from competing in men’s sports.)
Becky Pepper-Jackson, the plaintiff in the West Virginia case, in which she is identified only as B.P.J., is the only transgender girl who sought to join girl’s teams — track and cross-country — in the state. That was in 2021, just after West Virginia passed its law and she was about to enter sixth grade. She didn’t appear to pose any competitive risk to others on the track and cross-country teams she applied to join — her lawyers told the Supreme Court that on those no-cut teams, she “came in near the back.”
Anyway, she had not gone through male puberty, which theoretically might have endowed her with a competitive advantage, because she had been taking puberty blockers and female hormones.
Thanks to the court’s ruling, Sotomayor observed in a dissent joined by Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson, West Virginia can deny Becky access to school sports “because it thinks they have an inherent athletic advantage, even if the facts show that they do not.”
B.P.J., Sotomayor wrote, “cannot practice on girls’ teams, even if she would not take anyone’s spot in an eventual competition, even if everyone who tries out for the team makes it, and even if having the chance to participate could aid immensely in treating B. P. J.’s gender dysphoria.”
So whose interest was really protected by the Supreme Court?
An Orange County real estate investor accused of criminally defrauding an Arizona bank of nearly $100 million pleaded not guilty Monday and remains in custody.
Mahender Makhijani, 44, of Corona del Mar — who also was ordered by an arbitrator to pay $1.34 billion in a separate civil fraud case — was arraigned in Santa Ana federal court on two charges.
He is accused of bank fraud and making a false statement to a bank in a June 8 case involving a $100 million real estate loan made by Phoenix-based Western Alliance Bank. He was taken into custody on June 10.
Makhijani is accused of providing bogus collateral for the October 2024 loan now in default. In a civil lawsuit, Western Alliance said the outstanding balance as nearly $99 million.
Prosecutors say he falsified title insurance policies that showed the bank would have a first lien on the underlying collateral if the loan went bad, when in fact it did not.
A trial was set for August 11 before U.S. District Judge David O. Carter in Santa Ana.
Michael Schachter, his criminal defense attorney, did not respond to messages seeking comment.
In the civil case, an arbitrator in May ordered Makhijani to pay Laguna Beach real estate mogul Mohammad Honarkar $1.34 billion after ruling he had fraudulently induced him into a 2021 joint venture — and then wrested control and lost to creditors more than two dozen properties Honarkar had owned.
Makhijani has not been criminally charged in that case, but prosecutors alleged in an affidavit in support of the bank fraud charges that he used “force and threats” in his dealings with Honarkar and others — including taking over the landmark Hotel Laguna in 2023 that Honarkar was renovating.
Prosecutors sought to hold Makhijani without bail after his arrest.
The affidavit noted he is a legal Indian immigrant with a home and bank accounts in that country, has access to private jets and threatened to “run away” if caught in a difficult situation.
The request was denied and he was granted $500,000 bail.
However, Makhijani remains in custody after a hearing sought by prosecutors last month before Magistrate Judge Autumn Spaeth.
The judge declined to accept a $450,000 cashier’s check submitted by a Makhijani associate for the bail, finding insufficient proof the source of the funds was legitimate, according to court records.
Makhijani is not prominent outside Orange County real estate circles, but he established a thriving distressed-assets business over the last decade that attracted prominent Southern California real estate investors.
Prosecutors said it paid for a lifestyle that included two multimillion-dollar homes in Corona del Mar, a luxury apartment in Newport Beach and various luxury vehicles.
As of last month, prosecutors had not fully traced his assets, which they believe are not held in his name and some of which may be in India.
The businessman employed an array of shell companies and strawmen to sign documents on his behalf, and to stand in for him as operators of his companies, according to the affidavit.
Makhijani told an associate he took extra precautions because wanted to insulate himself from litigation and that “they were sharks in the distressed world who took advantage of people,” the affidavit stated.
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