Mixed Signals: COVID Special — what the media got wrong & right, with Dr. Anthony Fauci

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Nayeema Raza: A lot of this Monday-night quarterbacking, we forget what the pandemic was actually like.

Ben Smith: I don’t want to be that guy, but it’s Monday-morning quarterbacking. The games are on Sundays.

Nayeema: Aren’t there also games on Monday night?

Ben: Monday nights. Yes, that’s the source of confusion.

Nayeema: There’s also Friday night. There’s just something every night.

Ben: How long have you lived here?

Nayeema: I don’t know. Not that long.

[MUSIC]

Ben: I’m Ben Smith.

Nayeema: Nayeema Raza.

Ben: And this is Mixed Signals from SEMA four Media.

Nayeema: There’s some genuinely great news today, as we’re taping this on Thursday. Wall Street Journal reporter, Evan Gershkovich and others are coming home in a prisoner swap with the Kremlin, with Moscow.

Ben: Yeah. I think Evan’s many friends in New York media are so relieved and happy to see this, as I’m sure as Paul Whelan’s family and so many others who have been eager to get these folks out. And Evan was just incredibly brave and public through this experience, and many journalists have been corresponding with him from jail. And just an unusually straightforwardly happy day. But today actually on this show, we’re going to be looking backward at some darker times.

Nayeema: Yes, we’re going to be talking about COVID. And I know it’s 2024 and not 2020, but the pandemic is such an important point, it is seared into the collective memories of people and the experiences of their own lives. But also as a point of departure for trust in so many institutions, including in journalism.

Ben: It’s in some ways a classic reason people don’t trust the media, which is we get things wrong. And particularly in these moments of absolute chaos in which we were calling sources who didn’t know any more than we did, and were calling us to try to figure out what was going on, that gets reflected in all sorts of conflicting chaotic media reports, many of them wrong, occasionally manipulated by government or private actors. But way more often just a product of the chaos of the moment. And then you can look back at that kind of chaos, and this is really true across all sorts of journalism, and you can kind of impose a conspiracy theory, you can impose an intention, and what really often is much more likely to be incompetence than malice.

Nayeema: The more Veep than Scandal, is...

Ben: Yes.

Nayeema: ... kind of what you’re talking about.

Ben: And that’s always the story.

Nayeema: I think there was a lot of clamp down of conversation, of scientific debate, and even of question asking actually in this time, that was a very fearful time. And while there’s been a lot of effort by the media and certainly by political opponents, to kind of investigate and tear the paperwork apart to find out the mistakes that government made at every turn, there’s been very little examination by the media, I think of our own mistakes, mishaps, what we didn’t know, and if we said that we didn’t know enough. And I think the failure to do that has created this vacuum that has been filled with a lot of people that don’t have necessarily... You know? All in guys kind of looking back at COVID, and we thought, okay, well we should actually as journalists, take a moment, take a beat, and look back at this moment with somebody who’s usually having to answer the tough questions. Dr. Anthony Fauci.

Ben: Yeah, our own congressional hearings here, but we’re on the stand.

Nayeema: We’re on the stand. We didn’t let him ask us enough questions if that’s the case.

Ben: Yeah, that’s true.

Nayeema: All right, let’s take a quick break, and we’ll be back with Dr. Anthony Fauci.

[MUSIC]

Nayeema: All right, Ben, in a moment we’re going to call up Dr. Anthony Fauci, who served as the director of the National Institute for Allergies and Infectious Diseases from 1984 to 2022. He doesn’t need much of an introduction, but in those 38 years of public service, he worked with 10 different administrations, seven different presidents, working on responses from HIV/AIDS, Ebola, and Zika. And he’s probably best known as being the face of the coronavirus response, when he became really a lightning rod that was loved by liberals, detested by conservatives. And he documents all of this in this latest memoir, On Call: A Doctor’s Journey in Public Service. What did you think of the book, Ben?

Ben: I was surprised how little it was about COVID, honestly. It was a real attempt to step back and reintroduce himself, explain himself, I thought, in a way. What did you think?

Nayeema: The other thing that featured in it was just his role as a communicator. How much of his job is to one, practice medicine, he keeps on kind of explaining that his job is to save lives, and two, to communicate, to calm the public. And he had done that so effectively through many administrations and many decades. The weirdest thing to me about the book was that historically he and the administration have been on the same side and the press has almost been on the other side of the equation. And in the Trump administration that kind of changed. He and Trump were at odds a lot of the time and the media was more empathetic to him.

Ben: Yeah, there was an impulse just to take the authority of sources seriously. I suppose it’s probably what covering the Catholic Church was like in the Middle Ages.

Nayeema: Do you think the media became a mouthpiece for-

Ben: Just sort of take the authority. Well, sometimes you should be a mouthpiece when somebody says this is a lifesaving drug and people should take it. It’s appropriate for the media to say the doctors say X. Right?

Nayeema: Yeah. I do think that there was not, and I felt throughout COVID that there was not enough discussion. Early on, I was like, “Oh, a lab leak theory? That seems kind of interesting.” And Marc Lipsitch from Harvard was talking a lot about it, and I thought the shutdown on that conversation was really interesting.

Ben: There was some sense where the media felt obliged to kind of patrol the conversation to keep crazy dangerous stuff at bay. And where they drew that line was often no conversation was permitted.

Nayeema: There’s a million things we could talk to Dr. Fauci about, but I really think the focus should be on the media and how did he think about using the media to communicate to audiences, to circle Trump, if at all. So we’ll ask him about that and about a lot more.

[MUSIC]

Nayeema: Dr. Fauci, thanks for being here with us. It’s really good to see you again.

Dr. Anthony Fauci My pleasure. Good to be with You.

Nayeema: And congratulations on the book.

Dr. Fauci: Thank you.

Nayeema: There’s something really interesting that your book documents a historical perspective, which is that yours was an apolitical position, and yet the job became highly politicized. When do you think it became politicized? Was it under the Trump administration only, or did it precede that?

Dr. Fauci: That is really a great question. There was always political differences. As you remember in the memoir, I talk about when there was a problem with a vaccine during the Bush administration, the Democrats started criticizing them as being incompetent. When there was a problem with vaccines being ready for the pandemic of 2009, the Republicans started saying that was Obama’s Katrina. There was always that throwing some digs at the other party.

But what happened and was crystallized during COVID and the Trump administration, was the profound degree of divisiveness. So I explained in the memoir, all along from the very beginning, the diversity of political opinions and ideology, from center, center left, center right, far left, far right, there was always that kind of diversity. But it was always in the context of civility, respect for each other, and respect for institutions. What culminated in the Trump administration, and I don’t blame this at all completely on Trump. It just happened during the Trump administration. I think he threw some gasoline on the fire, but I don’t think he created it, was that that diversity of opinion became divisiveness, where there was actually hostility, vitriol, and ad hominem.

Nayeema: What you’re describing as public health goes from being a political football to being a weapon. And the book itself, the reception has been that. You hear Rachel Maddow called it fascinating, she talked about critics being against you because you quote, represent expertise. The New York Post was focused on what they saw as you reversing course, agreeing that there were mistakes made on schools. Fox News focused not on the book, but on the congressional testimony that dovetailed pretty closely in June with the book where you were asked about the lab leak theory. So do you think that people’s opinions of you are framed or that this book has shifted something?

Dr. Fauci: I don’t know. I can’t answer that question, because I’m not in the minds of people. I think if people read the book trying to have an open mind, they may take a different perspective on me, possibly. But most of the time people would come in with a completely closed mind. I mean, you look at the Wall Street Journal review of the book, it was ludicrous. I mean, come on, give me a break. They hated the book before they opened the first page of the book. There’s no doubt about that. And I think that merely is a reflection of the divisiveness in our society. I mean, it’s a perfect reflection of that. I doubt that People reviewed the book, they even read the book.

Ben: Well, we read it, sir. So, yeah.

Dr. Fauci: I know you read it, but-

Ben: We do our best. But I have to admit, I did flip to the end. I kind of was like, “Where’s the COVID? Where’s the COVID?”.

Dr. Fauci: Yeah. See, that’s a problem.

Ben: But then I went back. I went back.

Nayeema: I was interested in the love story too, I have to say.

Dr. Fauci: Well, good. Because it’s a good love story, I think. But Ben, you are right. People do quickly look at the last two chapters. COVID under Trump was one year of my 83 years, and one year of my 54 years in public service.

Ben: I bet it felt like more than a year though.

Dr. Fauci: Well, yeah, it felt like more than a year. But if you read the book in the context only of COVID and the fact that I was put in the position in order to preserve my own professional integrity, and my responsibility to the American public, to have to publicly disagree with the President of the United States, because what he was saying quite frankly was not true. I felt I had to do that. And what that did is that unleashed a tsunami of hostility towards me on the part of the people who were the devout followers of Trump. Interestingly, if you read the book carefully, Trump did not get angry with me at first. He constantly tried to keep the relationship good, and he kept on saying, whenever we would finish a conversation, even when he would yell at me, he would say, “We’re okay, Tony, aren’t we? We’re good?”

Nayeema: He would in fact tell you he loved you.

Dr. Fauci: Yeah, exactly. Because I think he felt uncomfortable about fighting with me.

Nayeema: Do you think he did love you?

Dr. Fauci: Well, he used that word lightly. You know, when you say, I love you, it’s not like I really love you. It’s like, I don’t hate you.

Nayeema: Yeah. I presume you never set it back.

Dr. Fauci: No.

Ben: Did you find there was a flip side of that coin? Which was that in this polarized society, a lot of people on the other side put you on coffee cups and really, really deeply idolized you, and kind of turned you into this oppositional figure to everything they hated. Was that nice or did that make you uncomfortable too?

Dr. Fauci: No. I mean, what I tried to do, and I think successfully, was to focus on my mission. And my mission and my goal was to preserve and protect the health of the American public, as a physician, a scientist, and a public health official. If you focus on that, the extremes are just noise, and just the way Marjorie Taylor Greene says, I’m a criminal, I should be in jail. That’s as far off the wall as somebody saying, I’m the sexiest man alive and I have a donut that’s made with my image on it. Both of those extremes are ludicrous. So if I even focused and concentrated and took seriously either of those extremes, I would be distracted from what I should be doing. So I didn’t pay attention to either of those. I just paid attention to what my job was.

Ben: One thing, reading your book, we talked a lot about media on this show. I was struck by the extent to which your job in your career has always involved communicating with the media, and really specifically with COVID, your story. You first learned of it when a reporter calls you on January 1st. You were really shocked when you saw a photo of huge Chinese field hospitals in the media. But I also think we’re living in such a changed media environment from the one that you had come up in. And I’m curious through this process, what you feel you learned about us in some sense, and maybe what surprised you, what you feel you got wrong about this very strange new media world we’re all living in?

Dr. Fauci: Well, it wasn’t necessarily something that got wrong. It was a realization that the media that I was dealing with in the early 1980s, mid 1980s early... was prior to social media. And even though there were differences in media that leaned one way or the other, it was always quite well edited. So if something came out, it wasn’t just somebody sitting in their basement in their bathrobe, putting something on social media that then goes viral. It usually had a responsible writer who ran something by an editor. And then it came out in the news. That’s much, much different than this completely unedited social media where something that is egregiously incorrect gets thrown out, and all of a sudden you find yourself in a funny position.

I wouldn’t say funny, that’s the wrong word. In a disturbing position, of living in an arena of the normalization of untruths. Where there’s so much untruth out there that the general public shrugs their shoulders and say, “We can’t figure out what’s true.” And when you can’t figure out what’s true, then you get an erosion of the social order, and an erosion even of the democratic process. So that’s the thing that has struck me that’s different from the media, if you want to call it that, today and what it was in the 1980s.

Nayeema: Can you talk about how the changed media environment shifted incentives for you as a communicator? I mean, we live in a kind of shorter attention span world, nuance is hard to come across, especially on social media. Do you think that it made the public health messaging more reductive or more black and white than it needed to be?

Dr. Fauci: Well, I don’t know. I think it made it more confusing, because there were so many variations of the message. One of the things that people find hard to believe, I don’t engage in social media. I have never tweeted anything in my life, ever.

Nayeema: But you’ve been clipped millions of times.

Dr. Fauci: I have, but I have never tweeted anything in my life.

Ben: Do you have a secret account though, where you lurk?

Dr. Fauci: I have no account. I have zero. I have no social media accounts.

Ben: Doesn’t that put you at a disadvantage?

Dr. Fauci: No. I just think it’s a cesspool of untruth.

Nayeema: But aren’t you also cutting yourself off from the people that you need to reach the most, maybe?

Dr. Fauci: No, no. I mean, when I was director of the institute, the communications group used to get messages out on social media. But I personally have never engaged in social media. I think it’s a waste of time. I mean, I got so busy, I was sleeping four hours a night in the middle of the crises. I wouldn’t have time to drink water and go to sleep, much less start tweeting things.

Nayeema: Elon Musk who runs Twitter now, acts, you’ve been the subject of two of his top 40 tweets, if you were to rank them in terms of engagement. One was that the public panic over the coronavirus is quote, dumb, in March of 2020. He mentioned that not specific to you. Later on in December of 2022, he said his pronouns were, prosecute Fauci.

Dr. Fauci: Yeah.

Nayeema: Which kind of captured a lot of the anti woke kind of culture war sentiment of that moment, in terms of the pandemic, personalizing you, the sense of the deep state, and the gender issue, of course. What do you think the effect of someone like Elon Musk has been on public health?

Dr. Fauci: Yeah, I think it’s been negative. Because I think when he starts tweeting things like that, I mean, you’d like to ask him, “What triggered that? Do you know anything about Dr. Fauci? Have you taken the time to figure out who he is, what he’s done, what his history is, before you start tweeting, ‘prosecute Fauci,’”? I mean, you would think a man of his talent and his influence has something better to do with his time than do that. I would think so. But then again, I can’t get into his head, and quite frankly, I don’t care.

Ben: You and the public health establishment have obviously been the subject of a bunch of totally lunatic fringe criticism. But there’s also a threat, I think, of at least to me, reasonable criticism, which I think runs in the form that in the old days of sort of a one-way broadcast world, the job of a public health official was to get up and give what was sometimes a simplified message aimed at getting people to do a thing that would broadly be good for them. And in some sense, the early discussion of masks. Masks are needed for the hospitals, so we’re going to tell people not to put masks on personally, because we really need them for the hospitals.

That genre of communication is rooted in the public health tradition. And we’re now in this world where everything is contested and argued and chewed on in real time, and that kind of one-way communication just seemed like it didn’t work. It seemed like it provoked a backlash and an examination. And I mean, I wonder if elements of that were a mistake, if that kind of communication just doesn’t work anymore.

Dr. Fauci: Ben, I take a different perspective on what you said. Particularly in the arena of masks. And one of the things that we have to do better, we could have done better, and maybe if we tried to do better, it wouldn’t have made any difference, but clearly the public did not fully grasp... And let’s take responsibility. I’ll take responsibility for that as a public health person, that the public did not fully grasp the moving target nature of what we were dealing with. That things were changing right before our very eyes. What we knew in the first weeks in January, the third week in January, the end of January, the beginning of February, literally was changing.

And science, as you know, is a process that is a self-correcting process. That if the information you gather in the first week or two in January, you then have to make a statement or a recommendation or a guideline, based on the information as you have. In February and March, if that information changes, the scientific process dictates that you change what your recommendation, what your guideline is, based on the new information. That did not get communicated as well. And the public kept on thinking “Those scientists are flip-flopping. They don’t have any idea what they’re talking about.” That became a problem.

Ben: No, and I really understand that. And I think there’s something about this environment of no trust that made that worse. But I guess just as a citizen, why not say to me, “You know what? Maybe masks help, but the nurses and doctors need a more”? And it felt like there was a reluctance to just level with us and say that.

Dr. Fauci: No, no, you’re right, Ben. In fact, certainly we did not do everything perfectly. And if you go back on lessons learned, there are many things when you look back retrospectively, if you really in good faith want to have lessons learned, not the blame game, which is predominant what’s going on right now. Look at that congressional hearing that I went through a few weeks ago. It was pure vitriol, pure at ad hominem. It wasn’t, “How do we learn next time?” And one of the things you said, Ben, is important. It would’ve been better if we emphasize more, “Masks might be good. But given that there’s a shortage, we don’t think you should use it,” as opposed to being definitive and saying, “You don’t need to wear a mask.” I mean, I think you’re absolutely correct. Going back over that, we could have done better in our messaging.

Nayeema: Why did it take, do you think, so much time? Because we’re not talking about... I know you were busy Dr. Fauci, but we’re talking about many months. I know in more recent interviews you’ve kind of come back and said, “Well, we could have done more.” And certainly your book very much says it. Why do you think it’s so hard to do in the moment over the many months that this was unfolding? Did you feel that you were always on the defensive? What was actually playing out with you?

Dr. Fauci: No, I don’t know. I think we need to sit down as a group, public health officials, public representatives, and talk about that. I think one of the elements, but it’s not the total answer, so don’t by any means think that this is it, the general public craves firm definitive answers. They don’t like ifies, maybes, could have, should have. They really want definitive answers. That’s one of the reasons the CDC got in a lot of trouble. Because in their recommendation, they often said, “You could do this,” as opposed to “You should do this.” And there was a big pushback, like, “What the hell are you guys talking about, we could do it? Should we or should we not?” So the public likes clear, crisp, definitive answers to things. And there aren’t often crisp, clear, definitive answer to things.

Nayeema: We’re going to take a quick break, and we’ll be back with the rest of the interview with Dr. Anthony Fauci.

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Nayeema: There’s this moment in the book where Trump pulls you aside and he’s mad at you, tells you you’ve cost him fucking trillions of dollars.

Dr. Fauci: No. A trillion fucking dollars.

Nayeema: A trillion fucking dollars. Yes. By that, he seems to mean the stock market. But then tells you that you guys are fine, that you and him are okay. Your job, you’re a physician. You are running this important entity at the NIH, and your job is to save lives. There are people who were focused on wanting to build back the economy. Ron DeSantis, for example. Our job as journalists is to kind of be skeptical, to help convey critical public health messaging, but also to ask questions, to probe. Do you think the media did a good job in the pandemic, or did it become too much of a mouthpiece?

Dr. Fauci: I don’t think that you can use the word, the media, because the media today is not in my mind, the media that I knew in the late ‘70s, early ‘80s. The media itself is so divisive and fractionated. I mean, you turn on Fox News and you hear one thing, you turn on MSNBC, you hear another thing.

Nayeema: But do you think journalists that were covering this, whether it was Ed at the Atlantic or Donald McNeil or others, were they probing, were they pushing hard enough?

Dr. Fauci: Yes. I think that the media was probing. I have to say, I am not saying this because I’m talking to a bunch of journalists right now. But I have a great deal of respect for most of the media, the people I’ve dealt with. There’s no cakewalk when you talk to them. They don’t say, “Oh, you’re Tony Fauci. I know you for 30 years.” They don’t cut you any slack at all.

Ben: It did feel like in some sense, like the sort of mainstream conventional media, I’ll conclude myself here, I was at The Times at the time I wrote about it, specifically with the lab leak theory, in some sense participated in really shutting down that conversation and branding people who were floating the idea, as lunatics, in a way that I think was bad for us. It was probably bad for you in some sense. I’m curious how you explain that. Were we getting spun by you? Were we spinning ourselves?

Dr. Fauci: No, I don’t think you were getting spun. I had always kept an open mind. But as a scientist, my opinion is based on data and evidence. And there were people who were absolutely saying, it’s a slam dunk, it’s a lab leak, with no evidence whatsoever. And still to this day, there is no evidence whatsoever. I keep a completely open mind that it could either be one or the other. But when I look at the people who are saying it’s one, based on no data, versus evolutionary virologists saying, “We’re not certain what it is. There’s no definitive answer.” And as long as there’s no definitive answer, you need to keep an open mind.

However, if you look at the data that they’ve accumulated, it is strongly suggestive though not definitive, that it was a natural occurrence from an animal reservoir in the market. That doesn’t mean that if all of a sudden, a month, a year from now, someone comes up with definitive data that it’s a lab leak, I certainly would embrace that. But I don’t see any data right now that indicates that, except people definitively declaring it with no data.

Nayeema: But I think that there is a difference between the declaration and the asking of questions, right? And I think often the asking of questions got simplified to a conspiracy theory. I mean, you saw this when Senator Cotton in February of 2020, started to raise these questions about what China was hiding. And he kept his accusations super vague. And then the New York Times labeled it a conspiracy theory, the Washington Post accounts was that he kept repeating a coronavirus conspiracy theory that was already debunked. And they kind of saw the worst possible interpretation of his vague, potentially purposely vague accusations. Even asking, and the raising of questions, kind of was seen as the support of a conspiracy theory. And I know you always have said it’s possible, you believe that it’s natural.

Dr. Fauci: I can only speak for myself. I’m not going to be defending everyone who’s written something that’s closed mind. I clearly said from the beginning, I’m on record multiple times. I keep an open mind. I can tell you what my opinion is, but my opinion is not definitive fact. One of the things that’s interesting, is that this whole idea of conspiracies, the idea that a lab leak is possible, conceptually in and of itself is not a conspiracy theory. Because it’s a possibility. What people have done is they’ve taken that and infused into it, an incredible amount of conspiracy nonsense. One example, that Tony Fauci snuck into the CIA, similar to Jason Bourne, and actually tried to convince the CIA, to put down the lab leak theory. That’s a conspiracy. The idea of there being a lab leak in and of itself is not a conspiracy theory. It’s what they put into it. They made it conspiratorial.

Nayeema: And that’s the extreme version of that conspiracy theory. But the more in the middle question would be, the NIH had made a grant to EcoHealth Alliance. EcoHealth Alliance was then doing research that was increasing the transmissibility of viruses, gain of function research, at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Did the NIH, did Dr. Fauci, did others in NAID, have an incentive to downplay or under investigate the lab leak theory? Would you say that’s a reasonable question, or that’s a conspiracy?

Dr. Fauci: It’s a reasonable question, but there’s a bit of a conspiracy theory in it. Because if you look at the experiments that were done, the viruses that were studied, it is molecularly impossible for those viruses to have turned into SARS. You ask anybody that knows anything about virology. Those viruses are from the standpoint of where they are in the phylogenetic tree, no matter what you did with those viruses, they could not have turned into SARS. So I could say that somewhere, someplace in China, somebody could have been doing something that maybe led to SARS-CoV-2. But the one thing that almost every virologist who knows anything about virology will tell you, that the precursor virus was not a virus that was studied by the NIH grant. My frustration is not with people asking the question. It’s with the accusation. Definitively, Rand Paul, “The virus came from the NIH grant and you are responsible for the death of 4 million people.” That’s what I object to.

Nayeema: Right. But you’re happy to be asked about your incentives and the NIH’s incentives and disclosures.

Dr. Fauci: Of course. Of course.

Nayeema: In your book, you kind of keep coming back to the deep empathy you have for minorities and people of color, and their skepticism about vaccine. And you seem to have less empathy for people who fall prey to misinformation and conspiracies on this world of social media that you don’t-

Dr. Fauci: You’re making a value judgment.

Nayeema: I wasn’t making a value... I was going to ask you the question, which is, but there’s a quote in the book where you say, “While I had deep empathy for these communities of color, I had little tolerance for the dominant anti-vaccine movement led by conspiracy theorists who were determined to derail the work of scientists and physicians.” Now, I have a big distinction between the people who are putting out anti-vaccine misinformation and the people who are falling prey to them. Vulnerable people who have questions and fears who fall prey to them. And I can tell from the care with which you wrote that sentence, that I think you also distinguish between these two groups of people.

Dr. Fauci: I do. There’s a big difference between someone who asks a reasonable legitimate question, than someone who says that I and Bill Gates put a chip in the vaccine to monitor you. There is a big freaking difference there, folks.

Nayeema: Yes.

Dr. Fauci: Really big.

Nayeema: Yes. Huge. And that’s what I want to ask you about, is how do you talk to those people that are fearful, asking questions? How do you talk to them first, faster, better, than the people who are spreading misinformation, and the kind of what you call the dominant movement?

Dr. Fauci: I actually did a long podcast on that. I forgot who it was with, because I’ve done so many podcasts.

Nayeema: Oh, you’re not going to forget this one, are you, Dr. Fauci?

Dr. Fauci: No, I’m not going to forget it. How could I? Is that you should not give up on people. Because many people who seem like they are anti-vax, at their core are not. They just have reasonable questions that need to be answered. And one of the mistakes we make, and I try very hard not to fall into this trap, is that when people don’t want to get vaccinated, they’re vaccine hesitant. They’re not anti-vax at their core. And it is quite possible, and I’ve seen examples of this, where they really have reasonable questions. And if you sit down with them and answer the questions, and talk about concepts like risk benefit to them, you can win a considerable number of them over. You may not ever be able to win over the hardcore anti-vax, period, people. But you shouldn’t categorize them all in the same bucket, because there are a lot of different people.

Nayeema: I think, the words, “I don’t know,” I don’t think that the media said it enough. I don’t think public health said it enough.

Dr. Fauci: You’re right, you’re right.

Nayeema: Because if someone says, “We don’t know, but this is why it’s so important...” And “We know that you’re afraid of these things. It’s reasonable to have questions,” I think that’s the thing. People felt unreasonable having questions, and they found themselves ostracized from part of society, and they found themselves kind of falling into the misinformation environment.

Dr. Fauci: Yeah, right. That’s bad. That’s not good. I agree with you.

Ben: We’ve been asking a bunch of questions in some sense from our perspective as journalists, but we feel like we made mistakes during the pandemic that also that we should have published things we didn’t, that we should have pushed people more. But I guess from the other perspective, just to go back to this core spread of misinformation and bad information, that was in fact the reason a lot of social media were so aggressive. I mean, do you think there’s just really still thousands, hundreds of thousands of millions of people dying, because of that misinformation? I mean, how big a danger do you see public health misinformation as right now?

Dr. Fauci: Yeah. Ben, I’ll give the answer, then I got to stop, because I’m getting worn out. Nayeema’s wearing me out. So if you look at the data, it’s really unfortunate that if you look at people who decided for political reasons, they didn’t want to get vaccinated, Red State versus Blue State, Republican versus Democrat, that the differences in hospitalization and deaths among Republicans in Red States and Democrats in Blue States, is highly significant. So people have lost their lives because of deciding not to take a lifesaving intervention, based purely on ideological considerations. Peter Hotez in his book, did a modeling estimate of the number of people who died unnecessarily avoidable deaths by refusing to get a vaccine. And the estimate is somewhere around 220,000 people have died because of misinformation about vaccines. So I do think it’s a real issue. It’s not just theoretical. It’s a real issue.

Ben: Thank you so much, doctor, for doing this.

Nayeema: Thank you so much, Dr. Fauci. We really appreciate it. I really credit you that even in your retirement, you come back and are so willing to engage in these questions. I really do appreciate it.

Dr. Fauci: You’re welcome. It’s nice to be with you.

[MUSIC]

Nayeema: I was wearing him out, Ben.

Ben: I mean, I think it was really interesting and probably interesting for him to be asked questions that were not of the genre of “What a wonderful book, and I’m so sorry what these bad people did to you,” but really trying to probe and challenge the mistakes we all made.

Nayeema: Though, I mean, he gets asked challenging questions a lot, especially in Congressional-

Ben: He gets asked furiously...

Nayeema: Yes.

Ben: ... hostile questions, right? And in Congress, that’s not a back and forth. That’s a context where all you can do is defend yourself.

Nayeema: Yeah. I really liked the distinction between being willing to answer questions, versus being willing to engage with Conspiracists. I think there was a lot of nuance and what he said. And sometimes because of the way that Fauci is clipped and shared, he sounds overly defensive. But I think he really is willing to engage on the questions. And throughout, his position has always been a complex, scientifically informed one, of like, “Well, it’s possible, but it’s not probable. And here’s why.” And that just doesn’t play well in a social media environment.

Ben: I was surprised he’s not on Twitter. If the guy’s job is to be the communications director for the federal government, and the most important thing ever, if I was hiring a communications director, I might say, “You might not like social media, but this is the world we live in, and you got to be on it.”

Nayeema: If I were a retiree in my 80s, I would not be on Twitter. Even as a journalist in my 30s, I’ve thought about not being on Twitter.

Ben: I’m concerned like my father’s going to do nothing else in his retirement, honestly. But it’s obviously... Right, it sucks. It’s bad for your mental health, it’s no fun. But also, there’s a lot of really incredible conversation and journalism and challenging of authoritative point of views taking on there.

Nayeema: But he must’ve been briefed on that.

Ben: Yeah, but he has a really dismissive attitude toward it in a way that is, I think a little out of sync with... You know? Social media is really complex and has just utterly horrifying aspects, but also does sometimes contain little elements of the wisdom of crowds. And unearthing hidden databases of viruses that the Chinese were trying to hide, was part of that. And I do think there was something a little... I don’t know. I do think that he kept referring to the media of the 1970s, the 1980s, and that was a long time ago.

Nayeema: I think a lot of people of that generation kind of romanticize. But I do think you’re right, because you take Elon’s early tweets about the panic, and there’s a couple million people and probably some percentage of those bots, liking that, sharing that. And you’re maybe missing the opportunity to be in conversation with those people and to be a voice. And really, I mean, Fauci had 70 plus percent approval ratings. And so much so that Donald Trump started tweeting about it, saying, “Why don’t I get some credit for this?” So in 2020, he was somebody who I think actually would’ve been pretty effective. He’d actually be a good Twitter character.

Ben: He would’ve been great on Twitter. I mean, of course you can’t win. It was going to be divisive.

Nayeema: Yeah. He also doesn’t have time. Aren’t you glad that he’s instead in these meetings with Pfizer or Warp Speed trying to figure stuff out, versus tweeting?

Ben: It did make me feel like maybe a different person should be running Operation Warp Speed than the person in charge of communications. I don’t know, a very difficult job. A fundamentally impossible job. And in every country in the world, the guy who ran that response wound up being hated, because we all hated the period and it was a nightmare. And there’s an element of inevitability there.

Nayeema: Yeah. What I think I deeply respect, is that even in retirement, he’s willing to keep addressing these questions. I think in part, obviously around his legacy, in part, there’s some commercial value in writing a book. But really because if you’re a doctor, and the amount of burnout and suicide rates amongst medical professionals in this country, post COVID has gone up, and I think he’s trying to tell people it’s worth it somehow. It’s worth it somehow, despite everything, it’s worth it. You save lives. And that’s really what he was doing. He was doing his job of trying to save lives.

Ben: And he is. I mean, you really get this from the book. It’s a really consequential figure in contemporary American history. No doubt.

Nayeema: No doubt. Let’s take a quick break and we’ll be back with another consequential figure, and no, it’s not Max Tani, to wrap up today’s show with Blind Spots.

[MUSIC]

Ben: On our branded segment from Think With Google this week, we’re talking with Google VP of marketing, Josh Spanier, about the lasting impacts of the COVID Pandemic on the world of marketing. So we’ve been talking with Dr. Fauci on this episode about how the pandemic was a defining moment for the trajectory of the culture, for media, for politics, for trust in media. And I’m curious what you see as the big lasting shifts for marketing from the pandemic.

Josh Spanier: The pandemic changed marketing massively. We saw huge changes in behavior as everyone stayed home, watched TV, and spent more time on their phones and on their laptops. So in terms of accelerating digital shopping behaviors, for example, massive, massive change. And while those numbers have come down as people have gone back into the real world, it really supercharged a lot of the curves and trajectories we saw about people’s uses of technology and their comfort level. Even just ordering food to home became spiked massively during the pandemic. For me, one of the biggest learnings I had, was really around using computers to make graphics, animations, and content, that previously we weren’t thinking about as much. Prior to the pandemic, film shoots or production shoots, would take days and people would travel around the world, and you’d actually do these high end production shoots. In the pandemic, all of a sudden, none of the assets, none of the ads we had, worked.

You couldn’t show this stuff anymore. It was all people in crowds and then shaking hands and hugging, and that wasn’t appropriate anymore. So we had to actually really invest heavily in special effects technology, in companies that could basically build us assets incredibly fast, incredibly cheaply, it turns out, or incredibly price consciously, and scale that for the web. That’s been a really interesting development, which has really, really stuck, and has actually been transformative and been a long-term impact of the pandemic. It’s accelerated our approach to how we actually make content from the way we previously used to do it.

[MUSIC]

Nayeema: Usually we’d be joined by Max Tani right now to do Blindspots. But today we have someone in his stead. Someone who’s often carries a little bit less good news than Max Tani, which is our former colleague from the New York Times, Donald McNeil. He was a health and science reporter there, and is the author of the book, The Wisdom of Plagues

Ben: And Is The blind spot the next pandemic that we’re not seeing coming?

Nayeema: No. Though he did deliver some very important warnings about avian flu, and the need to not drink raw milk. Let’s hear that.

Donald McNeil: I mean, look, I think we have things to worry about right now. I think there is too little attention to H5N1. And clearly thousands of cows are infected with the disease that we had previously considered an extremely lethal disease in birds. And the government is basically taking the attitude that the British government did in the 1990s when it said, “British beef is safe, British beef is safe,” while mad cow disease is going around. And only when people began to die after five years of them saying that British beef was safe, did they kind of admit, “Well, actually it wasn’t safe, and that disease is lethal.”

The American government is saying constantly, the milk supply is safe, the milk supply is safe. They were saying that before they even knew that pasteurization killed the virus. And so far, nothing bad has happened, but the disease continues to spread, and I think they ought to stop protecting the dairy industry and start telling people, maybe you ought to think twice about drinking... You absolutely ought not to drink raw milk, and you ought to think twice about drinking... Maybe you ought to feed your kids soy milk or oat milk for a little while until we get this epidemic under control.

Ben: If there’s any solace, it’s the New York Times, Donald, was famous for having predicted 50 of the last two pandemics.

Nayeema: I mean, he predicted a pretty big one, so I think we should give him some credit...

Ben: Yeah, he did get the big one right credit. He sure did.

Nayeema: ... for COVID. But Max also warned us about this raw milk thing. So Ben, put away the raw milk. It’s time for your oat milk or almond milk or soy milk, or any other milk, really.

Ben: Or no milk at all, I think is Donald’s real advice here.

Nayeema: Just avoid milk. Remember those ads that were like, “Got milk?” Now it’s like, “No, do not get milk.”

Ben: And that is incredible marketing story for another day, by the way.

Nayeema: Is it? Okay.

Ben: It is.

Nayeema: I’m going to let you and Josh discuss that in the branded segment. I did ask Donald about this beat of covering pandemics, and what it feels like in between the big moments, in between the big crises that everyone’s watching, versus say, a politics beat. And here’s what he said.

Donald: People prefer to read about politics because it’s more exciting, but the truth is pandemics kill a whole lot more people than almost anything else does. So it’s crucial, but in between pandemics, it’s pretty boring. It’s like watching people build levees against the flood. I mean, there’s nothing more boring than watching people fill sandbags, but there’s nothing more terrifying than looking at a wall of sandbags waiting to see if water comes leaking out from inside it. And so you spend a lot of time preparing for these moments of panic. I think people are done with the pandemic. I mean, among my friends, they’re all sort of... I mean, they come away with these memories that I consider false, that they focus on the masks and the lockdowns, and the things that remind them of their irritation. They forget about their fears, the same way women often forget about childbirth and go on to have a second and third child. Even though at the time they gave birth to the first, they said, “I’m never doing that again.”

Nayeema: Well, that doesn’t bode well for the sales of Wisdom of Plagues, Donald.

Donald: No, it doesn’t. I know. Paperback is coming out, so now you can get it cheaper, but the sales of the Wisdom of Plagues are...

Nayeema: Of the Wisdom of Plagues.

Donald: ... not hitting anybody’s bestseller lists.

Nayeema: Well, thank you so much for taking the time to speak, Donald. I really appreciate it.

Donald: Thank you for inviting me.

Ben: I mean, that’s a real backlist publishing strategy there. I suspect that the Wisdom of Plagues will be in the bestseller list at some point.

Nayeema: On the next pandemic.

Ben: That’s right.

Nayeema: Yeah. You could read Camus’ The Plague, watch the Gwyneth Paltrow film where she eats something that has been infected or whatever, and read Donald McNeil’s The Wisdom of Plagues, as well as reading Dr. Anthony Fauci’s book. That’s it for the book Publicity tour of today’s episode. Ben, do you have a book you want to promote, actually, while we’re at it? You have a book.

Ben: I am off book tour.

Nayeema: Oh, come on, Ben. Ben’s book is called Traffic.

Ben: You should obviously read my book, Traffic.

Nayeema: Yes.

Ben: Yeah, which feels about as a million years ago as the pandemic itself.

Nayeema: That’s it for this week. Next week we’re going to be off. Ben, where are you going?

Ben: Going fishing in Maine.

Nayeema: Oh, nice.

Ben: There are no pandemics. Where are you going?

Nayeema: I am going to Aspen. Not to fish.

Ben: To hobnob.

Nayeema: No for Fellowship, Ben. It’s not hobnobbing. It’s a fellowship. And also, hiking.

Ben: Is it one of these sort of secret elite networking fellowships, perhaps?

Nayeema: It’s the Illuminati. Don’t worry, Ben. Don’t worry about it. All right.

Ben: Hopefully you’ll pick up some tips.

Nayeema: Hopefully. We’ll be back on August 16th with a fresh episode. Thanks for listening to Mixed Signals from Semafor Media. Our show is produced by Max Tani, Allison Rodgers, Sheena Ozaki, Alan Haburchak, and Andrea López-Cruzado. With special thanks to Britta Gallanis, Chad Lewis, Rachel Oppenheim, Anna Pizzino, Garett Wiley, and Jules Zirn. Our engineer is Rick Kwan. Our theme music is by Billy Libby. Our public editor is the person who was putting Dr. Anthony Fauci on donuts, it seems.

Ben: Definitely a bestseller.

Nayeema: If you like Mixed Signals, please follow us wherever you get your podcasts, and please feel free to review us.

Ben: If you’re watching on YouTube, give us a like and subscribe to Semafor’s channel.

Nayeema: And if Max Tani were here, he would tell you to sign up for the Semafor Media newsletter out every Sunday night.