After a certain number of protests, he looked out at NIH one day as ACT UP and other protesters were storming the gates, and he thought, "These guys, they dress crazy and they say terrible things, but they're mostly from New York like I am. And let me think about this for a minute: If I had a disease in which the result was that I would die no matter what, and the government was telling me, 'You can't try anything that might work under any circumstances,' I'd be ramming down the doors, too."
In 1989, Fauci and then-U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Louis W. Sullivan (right) announced results of studies showing that the antiviral drug AZT had delayed the onset of disease in some people with HIV.
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So at that point, he decided to talk to these leaders more frequently, to go up to New York and meet with them, to go to San Francisco. And he came to realize ... they had a point. And even more importantly, they had some people who understood the system way better than anyone who worked for him. ...
Fauci, once he understood that the activists weren't saying, "Let's get rid of the whole system,' but, [rather], 'Let's open it up a bit so that we can have some relief while we press on to get the ultimate answer.' " He said, "Jesus, that makes perfect sense." And he proposed something called "parallel track," which was these sort of two systems — the old system and the new melded in. And that's what was adopted, and it worked.