Dr. Anthony Fauci Sits Down With Amherst Students

A few hours prior to his LitFest conversation about his memoir “On Call,” Dr. Anthony Fauci, former chief medical advisor to the president, sat down with representatives from The Student and The Amherst STEM Network for an interview. Managing Features Editor Olivia Law ’27 and Contributing Writer Jiahuai Kang ’28 from The Student and Editors-in-Chief Kyle Hur ’25 and Nora Lowe ’26 from The Amherst STEM Network spoke with Fauci who, sitting cross-legged, polka-dotted socks peeking out above his dress shoes, discussed science communication, the human element of medicine, and the normalization of untruths.

The interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Kang: I’m a freshman here at Amherst College, and I know that you went to Holy Cross. Both of these schools have a strong emphasis on embracing non-traditional career paths and a liberal arts education. How would you say that your non-traditional career path in public health, from being a classics major at Holy Cross to being a doctor, influenced your decisions, how you looked at your career, and, more broadly, how you looked at your life?

Fauci: The idea of having the human being as the core of my education has had a major impact on every aspect of my career, both in my ability to deal with individual patients when I’m a practicing physician — which I have been all my career — and to understand the sociological, medical, and scientific impacts of outbreaks. For example, my personal understanding of the special challenges of the gay population, particularly in the cities of New York and San Francisco, got me very much involved with HIV and the activist population. So I’ve always thought of myself as a person who’s interested as much in the person as in the disease, as opposed to a scientist who is more interested in the disease. I don’t think my capability as a basic and clinical scientist suffered from my propensity to focus on the human element. The human element, I think, really guided me a lot in the decisions that I made in the arena of public health and how I handled the HIV/AIDS pandemic in the early years, with all the stigma and things that were associated with it. The secret of caring for the patient is to care for the patient.

Kang: Would you say that this kind of human understanding in science and medicine is lacking today in society?

Fauci: I don’t want to say that definitively because that seems critical. But I think in medicine now, the amount of time a physician has with a patient is really minimal. It’s overcome by getting all the information the computers are getting. You talk to people who are ill, and you ask them how much time they actually spend with their physician, and it's minuscule, which is really unfortunate. Scientific and technological advances have subsumed the personal interaction between a physician and a patient.

Hur: It’s one thing to be in the scientific field, but I think it’s completely different to be an effective science communicator. Aspiring communicators like me and Nora want to know, what are the most effective ways to educate and inform the general public about big health crises or the scientific topics of Covid without sparking skepticism or fear and making sure that it’s accurate?

Fauci: Scientists sometimes have difficulty when they’re dealing with an audience — particularly when they’re dealing with a moving target — to make it crystal clear what some people don’t understand. Because, quite frankly, the science literacy in this country, even among brilliant people who are brilliant in other areas, is really low. They don't understand that science is a process that gathers information, data, and evidence upon which you can make a decision or you can make a recommendation. As data and evidence change, science is self-correcting. If you really are following the science, you will change or modify what you tell the public, particularly when you’re dealing with an evolving outbreak, and if ever there was a changing, evolving outbreak, it was Covid. People really wanted to use this as an even bigger wedge in society. It became that the scientists don't know what they're talking about. “They’re flip-flopping,” they said. “They told us in January that Covid didn’t spread very rapidly, so you don’t necessarily need to wear a mask.” And then you find out that vaccines do dramatically save lives, and then as the epidemic goes on, you find out that the variants change. It doesn’t protect you as well against infection, but it definitely protects you against severe disease. And the naysayers, the anti-vaxxers, say, “You told us that if we got vaccinated, we wouldn’t get infected, and I got infected. Therefore, you’re a liar.” No, you didn’t die. That’s the important thing.

The principles of communication that I have found as a scientist is, first of all, you’ve got to know your audience. Even the best of my colleagues, not infrequently, treat their audience like a scientific audience that’s reading a paper in a very highly-regarded, peer-reviewed journal. You don’t want to talk down to people, but you’ve got to know who you’re talking to. Are you talking to intellectually sophisticated people at Amherst, or are you talking to a group of frightened people who don’t have an education? They just need to know what’s going on with the disease. So A, know your audience. B, you’ve got to stick with some crystal clear messages. I know that when you go into a room — and I’ve done this maybe 500,000 times — and you’re trying to explain to a patient what’s going on, if you don’t focus on what the critical issue is, and you give them 20 issues, they will latch on to the one that they’re most familiar with and completely forget the most important thing. Be very refined and specific about the message. The other thing that I tell my students is one of the big mistakes we make in health and science is that you sometimes have a tendency to show how much you know about something. The purpose of communication is to not convince the person to whom you’re communicating how smart you are. The purpose is to get them to understand what you’re talking about. And so often scientists, unwittingly and innocently, feel that they’ve got to show that they really understand. I’ve seen so many situations where a person gets up and starts talking as if they were writing a scientific paper in a major journal, and then they walk out and they feel good about the presentation, and then you talk to the audience, and they say, “He’s a really smart guy, but I have no idea what he was talking about.” When somebody thinks you’re really smart, but they have no idea what you’re talking about, that’s bad.

Lowe: You are clearly no stranger to contagion and diseases of the body. I want to pivot to talking about a social scourge — a mind-related problem that is plaguing the country. You express concern in your book about how “complete fabrications become some people’s accepted reality.” You call it “a crisis of truth.” How can science communicators compete when sometimes it’s our very own government that's contributing to the spread of disinformation?

Fauci: You’ve asked an absolutely critical question that is very painful for me because today in our society, we are totally compounded by social media and the normalization of untruths. There is so much mis- and disinformation that is spread by social media that a person who’s involved in it has no idea what's true or not: If you don’t know what’s true or not, there is no truth. When there’s no truth, anybody can say whatever they want to say and say it enough times that it becomes true for a lot of people.

Unfortunately, we have seen that not only among the so-called rank and file of the country, but we’ve also seen that among leadership, where people say things that are egregiously untrue and proven to be untrue. When somebody can say something that’s on tape or written and then deny that they said it, or just blow it off, we’re really in a serious problem. There are some similarities here to Europe in the 1930s when you were having the rise of Nazism and fascism in Germany and Italy, where they kept on saying things over and over and over again that were untrue, and then all of a sudden, people had no idea what was true. Then you had an authoritarian government, and we had one of the worst periods in our history. I get worried about that. I get very worried about that.  

I feel bad that as someone who’s now a public figure, I don’t have a good answer for you. The one thing that I am impressed with is that the people who spread misinformation and disinformation, at least from my observations, are extremely energetic about it. People in the medical and scientific profession say, “What can we do about it?” I say, “Well, you really have to be more proactive yourself in spreading correct information.”

The people who are spreading the misinformation and disinformation, it’s almost as if they don’t have a day job — that’s all they do! People like yourselves who have responsibilities as students, like my colleagues who have responsibilities in the medical and scientific profession, can’t spend all our time trying to counter misinformation and disinformation, so I’m not so sure what we can do except encourage people to put a little bit more effort into talking about critical thinking of science.

Critical thinking is really very important, and that’s what you’re learning here at Amherst and other institutions of higher learning.

Law: You were saying one of the ways to push back against disinformation was to be very clear about the correct information. But you’re also talking about the fact that science is a process and what you say one day could change the next based on the data that you have. During Covid, how did you deal with communicating that uncertainty while also recognizing that you were talking to this panicked country that’s looking to you for answers, and you don’t exactly have answers that are as clear cut as they hoped? How do you balance that? Because there is that risk of them going to a more concrete answer, which is not based in reality or fact.

Fauci: You just have to be as transparent, open, and honest about what you know and don’t know. There’s nothing wrong with saying, “I don't know.” But the difficult aspect of it is that you can’t assume that people aren’t trying to twist or turn the words. Let me give you an example: At the beginning of an outbreak, when you have one case in the country or two cases, and the press will come to you and say, “Should we be doing anything different right now?” And the answer is, well, “No, you shouldn’t do anything different right now. However, this could change, and if it does change, you’ve got to be ready to modify your behavior.”

So at the beginning of the Covid outbreak, when people were asking the scientists when there was one case or two cases in the country, the scientists said, “Right now, hold tight. I wouldn’t do anything different — however, it could change.” When things got bad, the people who were trying to discredit scientists said, “Look, you told us we shouldn’t do anything. You were hiding things from us.” No, I did say, “However, it could change.”

People claim scientists don’t know what they’re talking about, and that feeds into the anti-science theme that seems to be growing. There was always a little bit of an anti-science feeling among some people. But now it’s starting to really amplify itself, particularly with social media.

Kang: How would you respond to uncertainty at the beginning of an outbreak, especially during Covid, but also now with the measles outbreak in Texas and all over the world? How would you, as a scientist, approach uncertainty when it comes to new viruses and new diseases?

Fauci: Well, measles is a different story. First of all, measles is one of the most effective vaccines ever made. It’s 97% effective when you get two doses. Number two, it’s one of the safest vaccines. Well, what about Covid? Covid has two aspects that are different from measles. One, we’ve had multiple variants of Covid from the original virus in January 2020 to multiple variants that have occurred over the last five years, so it’s not like measles. Two, the duration of immunity against infection is measured in months. None of it is lifelong. So when people say, “You guys lied to us, you said to take the vaccine and you’re not going to get infected, and everybody’s getting infected!” The fact is, the virus is changing, and vaccines are protecting mostly the vulnerable people from getting seriously ill. That’s where you get the confusion in the public about, “Are vaccines good for you?” There are people out there who say that the Covid vaccine caused more deaths than Covid, and all you need to do is just look at the data, and the data is spectacularly obvious.

That’s the reason why I rely so much on people at your stage in life. And here’s where the situation gets complicated. There should be diversity of opinions, even diversity of ideology. Not everybody has to be a progressive liberal; not everybody has to be center-left. You can be center-right, and you can be quite conservative. There is nothing wrong with that. As long as everybody deals with the same set of facts and you don’t make up things that are not factual, you could have your own opinion and your interpretation. But what we’ve had is the complete distortion of what’s true. And that gets to what I was saying about us living in an arena of the normalization of untruths, and that’s really very, very dangerous. And I don’t know what the solution is. Maybe you guys can help me.

Hur: You’ve already kind of touched on it, but what is the balance between simplifying topics too much? Because if you simplify it way too much, the public misses out.

Fauci: It’s a delicate balance, and you have to continue to evaluate that balance, depending on your audience. And there’s a wide range. The one thing we want to be careful of is when you say science literacy might be low. People say, ‘“Oh, so you think we’re illiterate.” No, you could be the most brilliant person in the world, and from a scientific standpoint, you are somewhat science illiterate. You don’t understand the fundamentals of science. When someone tells you something, do you have the capability or even the interest to try and analyze it? Somebody will say, “You know, I heard that vaccines get people killed.” Okay, so where did you get that information? “Well, I got it on TikTok.” Is that the source of information you want to trust about something that’s as serious as whether you’re going to afford yourself and your family a life-saving intervention, like a vaccine? In the middle of the pandemic, are you going to listen to TikTok, or are you going to try to go to more well-established sources?

Lowe: On behalf of us four, I would just like to express our extreme gratitude for your time. This has been illuminating in many ways.

Fauci: My pleasure.