My Theory

The Republicans don’t like Dr. Fauci and I think that it goes all the way bad to the 1980s when he stood up to President Reagan.

Anthony Fauci Quietly Shocked Us All
New York Times
By Peter Staley
December 31, 2022


The first time I met Dr. Anthony Fauci was at the International AIDS Conference in Montreal during the summer of 1989. ACT UP, the AIDS activist group I was a part of, had scared the bejesus out of conference organizers by seizing the stage during the opening session, then made things worse by disrupting various scientific presentations. Many, if not most, AIDS researchers wanted us hauled away and never heard from again. Little did they know that Dr. Fauci, who was leading the response at the National Institutes of Health, had been meeting with members of ACT UP since shortly after our founding two years earlier.

The regular meetings he had with an ACT UP member, Bill Bahlman, continued even after Larry Kramer, one of the group’s founders, wrote an open letter to Dr. Fauci in The Village Voice calling him a murderer and comparing him to the Holocaust organizer Adolf Eichmann. But there Dr. Fauci was, meeting with me and my comrades, branded radical homosexuals, to discuss our policy proposal for upending longstanding Food and Drug Administration strictures against public access to drugs before they are approved.

[…]

Over the years, the dinners to hash out unfinished AIDS work continued. After Mr. Hill tragically died in 1997, Dr. Fauci and his wife, Christine, started hosting the activist dinners at their house. Dr. Fauci shocked all of us, quietly working with President George W. Bush to start the U.S. President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, or PEPFAR, the most effective international public health program in our nation’s history, saving the lives of 20 million people thus far.

Dr. Fauci walked through the fire with us, and his friendships with AIDS activists deepened with time, bound by a shared trauma. In those early years, while some in our community were accusing him of not caring enough about AIDS, he didn’t tell us about the hundreds of gay men he had tried to save under his care at the N.I.H. hospital. Until this month, he still did rounds there, a clinician above all else.

The Atlantic magazine wrote…

It’s a professional credo that helps explain how the 79-year-old doctor has managed to stick around as the head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases through six American presidents of both parties, beginning with Ronald Reagan, whom he alerted to the HIV/AIDS epidemic. But the traits upon which Fauci built his reputation during past administrations could be his undoing in this one, as he guides Donald Trump through the worst pandemic in a century.

I believe he made a number of enemies with his work on AIDS/HIV, for the Republicans AIDS was the “Gay Disease” and Dr. Fauci stood up to them, and the Republicans have a long memory.

They were already predisposed to hating him and then COVID came along and it add the gas to the simmering fire.