Dr. Anthony Fauci – the former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases – and CNN Anchor Jim Acosta met at JMU on Monday for a discussion about how the COVID-19 pandemic unfolded. WMRA's Randi B. Hagi reports.
Students, faculty, and community members packed into James Madison University's Wilson Hall to hear Dr. Fauci speak about his preeminent career in public health, including advising seven presidents, from Reagan to Biden, on diseases from HIV to COVID.
Fauci recounted the early mayhem of the pandemic.
ANTHONY FAUCI: In New York City … where they brought in freezer trucks, that generally are for sides of beef, to put the bodies in because they didn't have enough room in the morgue. … That is something that you must immediately put a stop to.
Acosta asked him what it was like countering some of President Donald Trump's false statements, such as his advice to take hydroxychloroquine or assertion that COVID would just disappear.
FAUCI: I felt it was my responsibility to maintain my personal integrity, to maintain the integrity of the scientific community. … It was not a pleasant thing to get up in front of a camera … and say something that's in direct contradiction to the President of the United States.
He called misinformation and disinformation the, [quote] "bonafide enemy of public health."
FAUCI: When that leads people to not get the proper medication or the proper care, then it causes lives to be lost.
At the end of the talk, JMU President Jonathan Alger presented Fauci with the Madison Award for the Public Good.
