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what I have from https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2024/07/anthony-fauci-covid-trump-white-house-response/678491/

THE FIRST THREE MONTHS
What I saw inside the government’s response to COVID-19

By Anthony Fauci
JUNE 16, 2024

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On new year’s day 2020, I was zipping up my fleece to head outside when
the phone in the kitchen rang. I picked it up to find a reporter on the
line. “Dr. Fauci,” he said, “there’s something strange going on in Central China. I’m hearing that a bunch of people have some kind of pneumonia. I’m wondering, have you heard anything?” I thought he was probably referring to influenza, or maybe a return of SARS, which in
2002 and 2003 had infected about 8,000 people and killed more than 750.
SARS had been bad, particularly in Hong Kong, but it could have been
much, much worse.

A reporter calling me at home on a holiday about a possible disease
outbreak was concerning, but not that unusual. The press sometimes had
better, or at least faster, ground-level sources than I did as director
of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, and
reporters were often the first to pick up on a new disease or situation.
I told the reporter that I hadn’t heard anything, but that we would
monitor the situation.

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Monitoring, however, was not easy. For one thing, we had a hard time
finding out what was really going on in China because doctors and
scientists there appeared to be afraid to speak openly, for fear of
retribution by the Chinese government.

In the first few days of 2020, the word coming out of Wuhan—a city of
more than 11 million—suggested that the virus did not spread easily from human to human. Bob Redfield, the director of the Centers for Disease
Control and Prevention, was already in contact with George Gao, his
counterpart in China. During an early-January phone call, Bob reported
that Gao had assured him that the situation was under control. A
subsequent phone call was very different. Gao was clearly upset, Bob
said, and told him that it was bad—much, much worse than people imagined.

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“We don’t know what’s going on with this virus coming out of China right now,” I told the group assembled in a conference room at the National Institutes of Health. This was January 3, just 48 hours after the
reporter had called me at home. The scientists sitting around the table,
led by Vaccine Research Center Director John Mascola, knew what I was
going to say next: “We are going to need a vaccine for whatever this new virus turns out to be.”

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Anthony Fauci is a physician, an immunologist, and an infectious-disease expert. He was the director of the National Institute of Allergy and
Infectious Diseases from 1984 to 2022, and is the author of On Call: A Doctor’s Journey in Public Service.
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