Fauci event in Marin draws fans and foes

Supporters and protesters gathered at Dominican University in San Rafael this week as the face of the national public health response to the COVID-19 pandemic took the stage.

Dr. Anthony Fauci, who retired in 2022 as the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, visited with former U.S. senator Barbara Boxer before a full house at Angelico Hall on Tuesday. He is promoting his new memoir, “On Call: A Doctor’s Journey in Public Service.”

“People would ask me, ‘Tony, what keeps you up at night? What’s your worst nightmare?’” he told Boxer. “I consistently said it’s a brand-new disease that somehow evolves and jumps species from an animal the way that the flu did.”

He recalled when COVID-19 cases began emerging after being reported in China.

“When the weeks went by, it became clear that it spread phenomenally easy from person to person,” Fauci said.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported there were 1.1 million deaths associated with COVID-19 and 6 million COVID-related hospitalizations in the United States by April 2023.

At Dominican, Fauci spoke of his experience advising President Donald Trump during the pandemic. He said Trump accepted there was a bad outbreak during the pandemic’s first couple of months, but that the president kept confusing COVID-19 with the flu and believed that the pandemic would end quickly.

Fauci said he began publicly contradicting Trump when the president started promoting the malaria drug hydroxychloroquine as a treatment for COVID-19.

“When he started saying things that were clearly not true, I felt that in order to preserve my personal integrity, but more importantly to fulfill my obligation to the American public, I had to say, ‘No, that’s not true,’” he said.

Fauci noted that Trump was less upset with him than his White House staff who he said tried to discredit him.

Fauci also spoke about when he dedicated himself to researching AIDS and HIV when little was known about them in the early 1980s. He said he suffered post-traumatic stress after being unable to treat the patients.

“Overnight, I had a situation where all of my patients were dying no matter what I did, it was like putting band-aids on hemorrhages,” he said.

While he discussed dark moments in his career, Fauci also expressed optimism about continued government funding for medical research. He noted the proposed federal budget cuts for his former workplace.

“I’m optimistic because I believe that the better angels of people are going to prevail and realize that this is the crown jewel of the federal government and we cannot let that linger,” he said.

Fauci also promoted collaborations between private companies and public agencies on drug and vaccine research.

“Well, we can only hope and pray that your vision is carried out,” Boxer replied at the end of her interview. “It’s in our hands, is it not?”

Dr. Matthew Willis, Marin County’s public health officer, sat in the theater’s front row to listen to Fauci. As a medical official, he said, he looked up to Fauci for guidance throughout the pandemic.

“I’ve watched Dr. Fauci communicate about the issues, whether it was the new vaccine rollout or shelter-in-place policies,” Willis said. “I always thought he was such an effective and clear communicator. I borrowed a lot from both his content and also his tone, his demeanor and his calm confidence.”

While Boxer and Fauci spoke inside Angelico Hall, a crowd gathered across the street to protest. The protest focused on the safety of COVID-19 vaccinations and Fauci’s history of promoting vaccine mandates.

Steve Kirsch, a tech entrepreneur and a prominent critic of COVID-19 vaccines,  joined the demonstration. Last year, he claimed in his newsletter that such vaccines killed one person per 1,000 doses, based on his interpretation of federal government data of vaccine adverse events. The fact-checking website PolitiFact accused him of misusing the data.

Asked what he would say to Fauci, Kirsch replied that he would ask to have a discussion with him.

“They all said they want to end the misinformation,” he said. “The only way to end the misinformation is for them to convince us that we interpreted the data wrong. So sit down and show us how we got the data wrong.”

Joining Kirsch was Angela Wulbrecht, who worked as a nurse for the University of California, San Francisco, for 17 years. She said she is involved in a class action lawsuit against the UC hospitals over their COVID-19 vaccine mandate for employees.

Wulbrecht said that the UC hospital staff knows about injuries caused by COVID-19 vaccines. Such injuries include the heart conditions of myocarditis and pericarditis, she said.

Wulbrecht said she almost died soon after she was vaccinated against COVID-19.

“At the 12-minute mark, I was in the back of an ambulance,” she said.

Wulbrecht said that she wants to get vaccine injuries researched.

“First of all, get them acknowledged and researched, and get them effective treatments as well as compensation for what’s happened to them,” she said.

Janine Pera, a Marin County resident who said she is a holistic health practitioner, got into a debate with a bystander over COVID-19 vaccine safety. She said that her friend died from Hodgkin lymphoma.

“He had four COVID shots and I’m very upset about his death,” Pera said.

The bystander asked if she had evidence the death was connected to the vaccinations.

“They need to show that it isn’t causing it,” Pera said.

In her interview, she expressed her frustration with Fauci.

“He’s been pointing fingers instead of taking responsibility for what he told the American people,” she said.

Neither Boxer or Fauci addressed the protesters during their conversation. Fauci could not be reached for comment after the event.

Dr. Sridhar Prasad, a pulmonologist for Kaiser Permanente, carried an armload of Fauci’s books after he heard him speak. He was impressed by Fauci’s support of public-private collaborations.

“The free market still needs to be able to provide goods and services, but the ideas seem to come consistently from scientists who are able to pursue inquiries without having to worry about the next quarterly earnings,” Prasad said.

Aubree Guthery visited from Mountain View to see Fauci.

“He seems very hopeful and that inspires hope in me when I feel like I’m less hopeful about our current situation,” she said.

“It was nice that Dominican allowed everybody to have a platform of free speech,” she said, referring to the protesters. “It’s unfortunate that this is our new reality, frankly, but I think everything was well-managed.”