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The New York native tells WNYC about what battling the HIV/AIDS pandemic taught us about battling infectious diseases in the United States.

GothamistA non-profit newsroom, powered by WNYC.Gothamist Listen LiveDonate NewsDr. Anthony Fauci on the ‘capabilities of ending HIV’ in NYC and beyondBy Sean Carlson and Amina SrnaPublished Dec 2, 2022ShareFacebookTwitterRedditEmailNever miss a story Email address By submitting your information, you're agreeing to receive communications from New York Public Radio in accordance with our Terms . MICHAEL REYNOLDS/EPA-EFE/ShutterstockBy Sean Carlson and Amina SrnaPublished Dec 2, 2022ShareFacebookTwitterRedditEmailWe rely on your support to make local news available to all Make your contribution now and help Gothamist thrive in 2026. Donate today Gothamist is funded by sponsors and member donationsThursday was World AIDS Day. It's dedicated to raising awareness of the HIV/AIDS pandemic and mourning those who have died of the virus and disease. Before he was the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, Dr. Anthony Fauci was the National Institute of Health's first director of its office of AIDS research back in 1988. Fauci joined WNYC’s Sean Carlson to talk about the long and complicated battle against the HIV/AIDS pandemic and what it was like in New York City when the pandemic was at its height in the late 1980s and early 1990s.The transcript, published below, has been lightly edited for clarity.Sean Carlson: Doctor Fauci, thanks so much for joining us.Dr. Anthony Fauci: My pleasure, good to be with you.There are about two generations now of people who weren't around or were too young in the late ‘80s, early ‘90s, at the height of the HIV/AIDS pandemic, to really know what was going on. Can you talk about what that moment in time was like for New York City in particular?It was really a very dark period, I must say. I began in Washington in the fall of 1980, and the early winter of 81/82, taking care of a large number of persons with this new disease, that at that time didn't even have a name, we were calling it gay related immunodeficiency, and certainly didn't have an ideology because HIV was not identified until 1983/84. And those very early years were really terrible because so many, many young, mostly men who had sex with men, were being admitted to hospitals throughout the country with New York City being one of the epicenters.Staying at the local level here. What was the response like from officials here in New York City? We should note that you're a native of New York as well.In general, authorities — with few exceptions — many authorities were slow to recognize the threat of this and were slow to put substantial resources and attention to it. And it took, you know, a lot of effort from the activists and some of us in the scientific community to get proper attention paid and have the country as a whole take this very seriously.In those early days, you clashed with AIDS activist groups, most notably Larry Kramer, the founder of the Grassroots Activist Group, AIDS Coalition to Unleashed Power, also known as ACT-UP. What do you think that experience taught you about how public officials should work with the communities most affected by certain diseases?Well, I think it was one of the most important things that I've done in my professional career was to get past the theatrics and the confrontation and the iconoclastic activities of the activists and listen to what they had to say because what they had to say made perfect sense, that the government, the regulatory issues, the scientific issues needed to have input from the community. From the gay activists, from ACT-UP, from other organizations who are on the ground in the trenches. And what we learned from that and what I learned, and I said it's one of the, I think the most important things that I've done was to listen to them and then incorporate them into the dialogue of the discussion of how to design clinical trials, how to make more flexible the regulatory elements that were inadvertently preventing the availability of potentially life saving interventions for persons with HIV. Ultimately, that became one of the great success stories of HIV/AIDS, was the complementary role of the activist community with the US government, particularly the scientific and regulatory community, and that serves as a model for many other diseases. It was quite a success.Speaking of other diseases and maybe what you took from in the early days of the AIDS pandemic, one of the saddest things to me is the misinformation about it. How HIV spread, who could get it. Could you talk about those misconceptions or, or maybe how that public messaging experience prepared you for what happened with COVID?Well, there was an element, but it was relatively restricted to deliberate disinformation about HIV. Mostly what was referred to as aids denialist, which were a group of scientists who should have known much better, who are, you know, propagating the false narrative that HIV didn't cause AIDS, and that was the thing that was causing the problem was the dr...