Many activists vividly remember their initial antipathy toward Fauci, followed by the respect they felt toward him in response to his direct interactions with them, the people for whom this research was literally life-and-death. The AIDS activist community is well represented in the film, which includes commentary by Peter Staley, Robert Vazquez-Pacheco and Michael Manganiello. Here, the force pushing against Fauci and the establishment’s slow progress is ACT UP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power). With nearly 40 years of ongoing involvement, there’s much more to be said about what was learned in researching and treating AIDS. There is, of course, a subset of the audience (the one I’ve already said won’t watch this documentary) that would argue that evidence of mistakes is proof that Fauci should have been fired long ago, but one of the most persuasive cases the documentary makes is that the scientific method requires learning from those mistakes. In both cases, Fauci was the face of the medical establishment’s response to a public health crisis, and in both cases mistakes were made and Fauci was castigated in the media and in increasingly vocal protests. While the 2014 Ebola outbreak-that-wasn’t is given some time in Fauci, the documentary is built more around the juxtaposition between Fauci’s time leading the government response to the AIDS crisis in its earliest days and his handling of similar responsibilities as word broke that a contagious virus had caused the shutdown of a major Chinese city. Fauci and that some audiences will, with some searching, find some of the things they need to continue to pillory him, but that second audience isn’t going to watch Fauci anyway. I’d say that some audiences will find everything they need to continue to admire Dr. Hoffman and Tobias approach Fauci as something of a Tale of Two and a Half Pandemics, a chronicle of a public servant whose career has been characterized by endless hard work - 12-hour-days, six days a week - and who is regularly accused of being a murderer. While it’s occasionally stuck in very rote biographical details and frequently limited by a race to theaters and TV that doesn’t necessarily align with any real ending to the documentary’s story, Fauci has an actual structural focus that’s smartly considered and interesting, even if it left me with myriad questions. This occurred right around the time pundits (primarily, if not exclusively, on one side of the political divide) and Twitter trolls went beyond calling Fauci “wrong” and began maligning him as a “partisan hack” - and for being short.įauci, a new doc from National Geographic Documentary Films directed by John Hoffman and Janet Tobias, does not delve deeply into the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases’ height, and somewhat thankfully it doesn’t engage in nonstop hero worship directed at the public face of the government’s response to COVID-19. Anthony Fauci over the past 18 months gradually soared past the hyperbolic into the realm of the sadly comical.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |