Yasmeen Abutaleb - Nightmare Scenario: Inside the Trump Administrations Response to the Pandemic That Changed History

To Ibrahim, Mom, Dad, Ehab, and Maryam

To Colleen, Connor, and Megan

August 27, 2020

CONFIRMED US COVID-19 CASES: 5,800,000

CONFIRMED US COVID-19 DEATHS: 180,000

Anthony Stephen Fauci slid the blade of a bronze letter opener under the flap of a white legal-sized envelope and slit it across the top. Inside was a single sheet of paper, folded into thirds. When he pulled it out and opened it, a cloud of white powder wafted into the air. It settled downward, coating his chin, his tie, his suit, and his desk.

Fauci froze in his black leather chair, quickly assessing his predicament. He could be covered in nothing. Or he could be covered in death.

There are three possibilities here, he thought. This could be anthrax. Theres an antibiotic I can take for a month and a half, and Ill probably be fine. This could be a hoax, someone trying to scare me. Ill be fine. But if its ricin, thats bad. There is no antidote. A dose of purified ricin equivalent to a few grains of salt is enough to kill someone. If its ricin, Im screwed. Im a dead duck.

Fauci cautiously walked to his office door and yelled for his assistant, Kimberly Barasch, to summon his security detail. Moments later, a security official came barreling down the hallway to find Fauci standing in the doorway, covered in powder.

Dont go any farther! he barked at Fauci. Stay in the room! He didnt want Fauci to contaminate anything or anyone else.

Several other officials clad in hazardous material suits arrived soon after Barasch and one other person nearby had to evacuate, a cautionary step to ensure that no one else got hurt. The team covered Fauci in a chemical spray to decontaminate his clothing and prevent the mysterious substance from drifting farther into the air. Then they led him into another office, where they had set up a portable shower.

It was August 2020. The seventy-nine-year-old doctor, one of the most famous people in the United States at the time, stripped to his underwear and was doused with chemicals in an effort to save his life. He was then instructed to take off his underwear and finish cleaning the remainder of his body by himself.

This was shaping up to be one of the deadliest years in US history. And each day, thousands of letters addressed to Fauci arrived at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, where he was the director. The vast majority of these letters praised him, while a small number called him some version of Satan and wished him dead.

And then there were the letters sent to his house in suburban Washington, D.C., presumably by internet sleuths who had found his address online. He carried those envelopes to the NIH office each day, placing them in a pile on his desk until he had a brief moment to relax and look at them. This letter had been sitting in that stack, with his home address typed in a strange font.

These were extraordinary times, and Fauci was omnipresent in public six months into the novel coronavirus pandemic. Bespectacled and bookish, for months he had been explaining to Americans that yes, this virus was very much something to worry about, even as President Trump and his top aides had insisted it would all go away and everything would be fine. Fauci had never been more loved. Or more hated. He had become Americas doctor but also a foil to the mercurial and tempestuous president who was waging a war against science, a war that the United States was losing badly. The virus had killed more than 180,000 Americans as of that day, and close to 6 million others had become sick.

Faucis public and private pleas for the American peopleand the White Houseto take the virus more seriously had made him an acutely polarizing figure. It was a far cry from the dark days of the AIDS epidemic in the 1980s, when Fauci had become the target of activists ire. Back then, protesters outside his office window had shouted, Fire Fauci! Fire Fauci!, but those same protesters had believed deeply in science.

This was something entirely different. Now he was receiving death threats. His wife and daughters were receiving various forms of harassment, including obscene texts and letters. So there he stood in something that looked like a swimming pool for toddlers, naked and stunned, unsure as to how it would all end.

Fauci had no idea that another envelope with white powder had arrived in the mailbox of Robert Redfield, the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. And between ten and twenty letters were arriving each week at the home mailbox of Deborah Birx, the White Houses Coronavirus Task Force coordinator. Some of them instructed her to hang herself. The existence of these letters, however, was kept confidential.

How had it come to this? What had happened to the country?

After Fauci finished the decontamination process, he was given a hazmat suit to wear. He is five feet, seven inches tall, but the suit had been designed for someone 7 inches taller. As he made his way down the hallway to the elevator and into the basement to go to the NIH showers to further rinse off the decontaminant he had been sprayed down with in his office, the legs of the suit dragged on the floor behind him.

After a twenty-five-minute shower, Fauci put on surgical scrubs and a coat. He called Dr. Christine Grady, his wife, best friend, and confidante. Please dont get upset, he told her, explaining the situation. Dont panic.

A scientist and medical expert herself, Grady knew, just as Fauci did, that there were only three options: anthrax, ricin, or a hoax. Her husband could either be completely fine or soon fall fatally ill.

Faucis security detail drove him back home, where he waited with Grady for the toxicology results.

A few hours later, his phone rang and he was given the all clear. No proteins had been detected in the powder. That meant it wasnt anthrax or ricin or anything else poisonous. It appeared to be a hoax, some sort of cosmetic or makeup powder.

Fauci took a deep breath and exhaled. His office was being decontaminated. So he continued his work from home.

Ever since Trump had heard about the coronavirus in January, he had been determined to will it away, as he hadoften successfullywilled away so many other problems in his presidency. There were brief flashes of humility, when he and his top aides would tell people to brace for a hard few weeks and promise that the country would come out stronger afterward. But these moments were few and far between, drowned out by the drumbeat of misinformation and dangerous proclamations that the virus was no big deal and people should go about living their lives.

Instead of emphatically recommending that people wear masks to protect themselves and othersa simple act that studies predicted could have saved tens of thousands of livesTrump eschewed them, viewing face coverings as a sign of weakness and some kind of political symbol. Instead of heeding the advice of top scientists and public health officials, he and his aides took their willingness to change recommendations as they learned more about the never-before-seen virus as an opportunity to discredit and ignore them. And instead of uniting the country to fight a common enemya microscopic assassin threatening to destroy the countrys health, economy, and well-beinghe used it as a wedge to further divide an already deeply fractured nation.

Trump did not act alone. He was enabled by a cadre of advisers, cabinet members, friends, and family who shared his view about the virus and in some cases harbored an even greater disdain for the governments scientific and public health experts than the president himself did. Even those who knew the right thing to do lost sight of the bigger missionprotecting the country against the virusand instead became consumed with trying to keep their jobs and win the November presidential election, no matter the cost.