Anthony Fauci: America's coronavirus 'hero' lets science do the talking

Anthony Fauci, the United States' top infectious disease expert, has led the country's response to every major epidemic since the outbreak of AIDS in the 1980s, long striving to ensure the science conveyed to the public is clear and accurate.

As millions of Americans turn to him during the coronavirus pandemic, the physician-scientist has had to acquire a new skill: The art of delicately pushing back against the bluster of his boss, President Donald Trump, without saying he's wrong.

Both men are in their seventies and both are proud of their New York upbringing -- but that's about where the similarities end.

With his calm, professorial demeanor, pint-sized Fauci is fast becoming a household name as the evidence-driven straight shooter in the administration's coronavirus taskforce.

During a televised meeting with pharmaceutical executives in early March, Trump -- who before he became president was famously skeptical of vaccines -- appeared to suggest one could be delivered to start immunizing the public against the virus in "three to four months." "You won't have a vaccine, you'll have a vaccine to go into testing," replied Fauci in the gravelly Brooklyn accent now familiar to the US public.

"Like I've been telling you, Mr. President, a year to a year and a half," he added, spelling out a more realistic timeline for clinical trials to determine a vaccine has a sound scientific basis, is safe, and can be scaled.

More recently Fauci has been tempering expectations about the prospects of antimalarial drugs hydroxychloroquine and chloroquine, which Trump last week hailed as a "game changer" after the medicines showed early promise in small-scale studies in France and China.

Asked a day later whether he agreed, Fauci stressed it was too early to say and that any "anecdotal evidence" still needs validation in randomized clinical trials.

Fauci, for his part, has consistently downplayed these public yet polite disagreements, telling the respected Science magazine that he and Trump were largely in agreement on substance but mainly differed in emphasis.

"The next time they sit down with him and talk about what he's going to say, they will say, by the way, Mr. President, be careful about this and don't say that," he said. "But I can't jump in front of the microphone and push him down."