Following is a partial transcript of this video, which runs about 15 minutes.
Presenter: Hello, I'm Dr. Linda Reid. Welcome to the medicine for the layman series at the National Institutes of Health. Today we're going to be listening to Dr. Anthony Fauci. He's going to be talking about AIDS -- the acquired immunodeficiency syndrome.
Rohin Francis, MBBS: We keep hearing about how we're in "uncharted waters" with COVID-19, which is true. You'd have to be even older than an American presidential candidate to have seen a pandemic of this scale before. But it's not accurate to say that this is all new territory.
For those of us that have been knocking around the world of medicine for a while now or those with an interest in history, there's a lot about this that's eerily familiar. We've been here before.
And we didn't really learn.
People in countries like the U.K. and the U.S. have been expending energy, shouting at their respective governments for their responses to the pandemic.
But the truth is that the damage was done a long time before a bat, a pangolin, and a human decided to have a three-way in Wuhan.
Scientists have been warning that it was only a matter of time before a virus like this one went on a world tour. And they were ignored. What's worse, in many countries, they saw their funding cut.
Governments have been ignoring scientists saying things they didn't want to hear since time immemorial. So why would it be any different now?
Enjoy your time in the sun, epidemiologists. Once this is all over, people are going to go right back to not knowing who you are and caring more about Kylie Jenner than Edward Jenner.
Society had become complacent. We whooped so many diseases' RNA asses that a pandemic simply wasn't a realistic concern.
In very recent memory, we dealt with a previously unseen virus that started killing people without a cure in sight, could be spread by unwitting asymptomatic carriers, the government dragged their feet before finally suggesting that covering up might prevent its spread, minority groups were worst affected leading to inaccurate speculation, desperate people started turning to unproven therapies, conspiracy theorists cashed in, the British eventually ran a landmark treatment trial, and at the heart of the battle against this virus was a certain Anthony Fauci.
I don't mean SARS-1 or H1N1. I'm, of course, talking about HIV and AIDS.
I've always been fascinated by this period in history. I think partly because most medical historians tend to gravitate towards the truly wild olden days of medicine when doctors were clearly just legal trolls that competed with each other to invent the most ridiculous ideas and pretend that they were therapies:
Goat testicles surgically inserted inside your scrotum? Yes, please! I'll take two.
So more recent history often gets a bit overlooked -- even though it was just as momentous. Of course, Fauci isn't the only public official involved with COVID-19 that was also involved in the response to HIV. Dr. Deborah Birx is the current White House coronavirus response coordinator and on HIV and AIDS at the NIH in the '80s. And Vice President Mike Pence, who chairs the same committee, undermined government policy meant to curb the spread of HIV when he was governor of Indiana -- delaying the implementation of preventative measures, making an outbreak worse than it should have been.
Indiana's response is regarded as a key failure in dealing with a virus. And Pence is now in charge of America's response to COVID-19.
The pace at which HIV spread was totally different to COVID, of course, but the parallels of countries ignoring red flags popping up all over the world and reassuring people that there have only been a few cases to the current situation are striking.
There aren't many currently practicing household names in medicine. Anthony Fauci is about as close as they come. His name adorns the monstrous tome in medical students' rooms. He has dedicated his life to medical research and policy, and I've been aghast by the vitriol directed towards him, not only from the public that he serves but from within the White House itself. He's been the subject of memes and conspiracy theories -- similar to ones about Bill Gates or George Soros -- that he's some nefarious puppet master.
But they're billionaires, he's a doctor, a researcher. I wondered how he stays so unfazed by it. Well, because this isn't his first rodeo. Many Americans died from HIV because the government moved too slowly, that is true, and Fauci himself found himself in the firing line. Activist Larry Kramer took out a full-page ad in the paper calling Fauci an incompetent idiot and a murderer. And just like today, he was branded a pill-pushing suit of the pharmaceutical industry.
, is an interventional cardiologist, internal medicine doctor, and university researcher who makes science videos and bad jokes. Offbeat topics you won't find elsewhere, enriched with a government-mandated dose of humor. Trained in Cambridge; now PhD-ing in London.