ONE CAMPAIGN / VACCINE EQUITY / COVID-19

Pass the Mic: A Conversation with Julia Roberts and Dr. Anthony Fauci.

Seven months ago, we launched the Pass the Mic campaign with our client ONE to increase awareness of the need for a coordinated response to COVID-19 and to demand action from our global leaders.

Today, we now have a light at the end of the tunnel. We have a vaccine. However, we face the simple and devastating fact that, if vaccination against COVID-19 is not made available equitably across the globe, the world has no chance of ending this current pandemic. Now more than ever we need global coordination.

As we allow ourselves some optimism at the reports of rich countries already distributing vaccination orders for millions of people this week, it’s disheartening to read that poor countries face long waits for the same vaccines.

We experienced this with the HIV/AIDS fight when therapeutics were available for decades in London but not Lagos, New York but not Nairobi, allowing a preventable and treatable disease to kill 32 million people.

So a reminder — in the form of a throwback to Pass the Mic on May 21st of this year — when 43 people with massive social media followings donated their platforms to experts, scientists, and political leaders to explain why none of us will be safe until all of us are safe.

Disclaimer: The following conversation between Julia Roberts and Dr. Anthony Fauci took place in Spring of 2020.

Julia Roberts: How rad that we have maybe the coolest man on the planet right now. Wow, and there’s the room. This is intense. Does anybody else have a…

Dr. Anthony Fauci: Hello, hi there.

JR: Good morning.

AF: Good morning.

JR: Oh, this is such a thrill. How are you?

AF: Pretty good, I guess. It’s a little bit like running on fumes for a couple of months, but…

JR: I would imagine. How much sleep do you get?

AF: I get reasonably good, like five and a half hours now. Last month I was getting three, and three doesn’t work any more than two or three days in a row, and I started to really feel like I was falling apart.

JR: I’m sorry, sir, but you are not allowed to fall apart.

AF: [chuckle] I won’t, I promise.

JR: You are the one individual who cannot fall apart right now. This is a thrill for me because there are very few experts of anything in the world, I think, and you truly have emerged as a personal hero for me. Just to have this little corner of your time for us is such a joy, so thank you.

AF: Well, thank you. It’s my pleasure to be with you, Ms. Roberts, and thank you for doing this, it’s very important. The whole idea about the rest of the world beyond our developed world capabilities and response is absolutely critical, we often forget about that.

JR: So what do you think are the most important things that people can know and do right now inside of this storm that we’re in?

AF: As a public health person, as a scientist and a physician, the only thing I can do is give my best public health scientific and medical opinion based not just on opinion, but on scientific evidence. And the scientific evidence clearly indicates that physical separation has worked, but not completely. If you look at the curves in our country, it isn’t like everything is dramatically going down. New York got hit very badly, but they’re starting to come down now. Now is not the time to tempt fate and pull back completely. There is a golden mean there. You don’t want to stay locked down forever.

JR: So now talk to me about people in developing countries.

AF: So this gets to a more fundamental problem that we have to deal with, and that is the extraordinary health disparities in the developing world. Right now, if you take Southern Africa, Sub-Saharan Africa, or parts of Asia and South America and even parts of the Caribbean, as areas that don’t have the healthcare system to be able to respond the way one can respond in New York or LA or New Orleans or Chicago, we have really a moral responsibility for people throughout the world. If you’re in the developed world… And we did that when we developed the PEPFAR program. We felt that we had a responsibility to the developing world, that they should not suffer more or die more easily just because of where they happen to have been born and where they live. Sometimes when you’re in a period of stress, that’s difficult to get that across.

AF: The world, including the developing world, is going to get by this when we get good therapies and a good vaccine. I’m in the process now, as many of my colleagues are, in developing vaccines, either individually or in association with a variety of pharmaceutical companies. We need to make a commitment right now that when we do the vaccine trials, we need to include the developing world in those vaccine trials. We can’t make a vaccine for ourselves and only know how well it works in ourselves. We’ve got to do it and include them. There is what I consider the moral commitment to do this, but also there’s enlightened self-interest. And the enlightened self-interest is that if you don’t control an outbreak in the developing world, it’s going to come right around and bite you the next season. So unless you completely stop this, you’re not going to wall yourself off from the developing world. So for those people who don’t feel a moral commitment, think about it the other way. There’s another reason to make sure we take care of our brothers and sisters who don’t have it as well as we do.

JR: I love that when you’re talking about the developing world, you say “we”. That if we don’t look at this as one world fighting this together, then we really won’t get a handle on it the way that we have to. That’s the dream-dream scenario for me.

AF: It might be dream-dream, but it’s what we really need to do. I had the privilege and the honor back in 2002 of putting together the PEPFAR program for President Bush, and there were a lot of people who felt you couldn’t get those things done in Sub-Saharan Africa, it’s just such a hopeless case that you’ll never be able to do it. And boy, did we prove everybody wrong because the PEPFAR program has saved millions and millions of lives. And the Sub-Saharan African and people in Asian countries and in the Caribbean, they rose to the occasion. You give them a little bit to help themselves and they’ll do it much better than you could do it yourself. So we shouldn’t think about it as, “We’re going rescue them.” We should think about it as that we’re going give them the opportunity to help themselves because they can help themselves much better. We just need to give them the opportunity to do that. And I think the PEPFAR program is really a good example of that.

JR: Well, and don’t you think… You talk about getting back to normal. Don’t you think what might help us as a society is accepting the fact that normal is never going be exactly what it once was, and to accept that and maybe shape that in a positive way moving forward?

AF: Well, I really like the way you put that. I’m going plagiarize you later on in the day, [chuckle] if you don’t mind. No, I think you put it in the right way by saying we should look at it almost in a positive way. People say, “Do you think we’ll be back to normal this summer?” And I say, “I don’t really think so because it may be a new normal, but it’s not going be the way we had it before.” We’re talking about an appreciation for what something like this has done and can do, and take care to get back to as much as normal as we possibly can. And if the new normal is to be in awareness of our vulnerability to these types of things, that’s looking at it in a positive, potentially constructive way.

JR: Golly, you’re really my personal hero right now. Dr. Fauci, take good care.

AF: You too, Julia, it was really a great pleasure. Take care of yourself and good luck to you and your family.

JR: Thank you very much.