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      Fauci Speaks His Mind on Trump’s Rages and Their ‘Complicated’ Relationship

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      In a new book, Dr. Anthony S. Fauci recounts a career advising seven presidents. The chapter about Donald J. Trump is titled “He Loves Me, He Loves Me Not.”Three months into the coronavirus pandemic, Dr. Anthony S. Fauci was at home in northwest Washington when he answered his cellphone to President Donald J. Trump screaming at him in an expletive-laden rant. He had incurred the president’s wrath by remarking that the vaccines under development might not provide long-lasting immunity.That was the day, June 3, 2020, “that I first experienced the brunt of the president’s rage,” Dr. Fauci writes in his forthcoming autobiography.Dr. Fauci has long been circumspect in describing his feelings toward Mr. Trump. But in the book, “On Call: A Doctor’s Journey in Public Service,” he writes with candor about their relationship, which he describes as “complicated.”In a chapter entitled “He Loves Me, He Loves Me Not,” Dr. Fauci described how Mr. Trump repeatedly told him he “loved” him while at the same time excoriating him with tirades flecked with four-letter words.“The president was irate, saying that I could not keep doing this to him,” Dr. Fauci wrote. “He said he loved me, but the country was in trouble, and I was making it worse. He added that the stock market went up only 600 points in response to the positive Phase 1 vaccine news, and it should have gone up 1,000 points, and so I cost the country ‘one trillion dollars.’” (The president added an expletive.)“I have a pretty thick skin,” Dr. Fauci added, “but getting yelled at by the president of the United States, no matter how much he tells you that he loves you, is not fun.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      A Lesson From Covid on How to Destroy Public Trust

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      Big chunks of the history of the Covid pandemic were rewritten over the last month or so in a way that will have terrible consequences for many years to come.Under questioning by a congressional subcommittee, top officials from the National Institutes of Health, along with Dr. Anthony Fauci, acknowledged that some key parts of the public health guidance their agencies promoted during the first year of the Covid-19 pandemic were not backed up by solid science. What’s more, inconvenient information was kept from the public — suppressed, denied or disparaged as crackpot nonsense.Remember the rule that we should all stay at least six feet apart? “It sort of just appeared,” Fauci said during a preliminary interview for the subcommittee hearing, adding that he “was not aware of any studies” that supported it. Remember the insistence that the virus was primarily spread by droplets that quickly fell to the floor? During his recent public hearing, he acknowledged that to the contrary, the virus is airborne.As for the repeated assertion that Covid originated in a “wet market” in Wuhan, China, not in an infectious diseases laboratory there, N.I.H. officials were privately expressing alarm over that lab’s lax biosafety practices and risky research. In his public testimony, Fauci conceded that even now there “has not been definitive proof one way or the other” of Covid-19’s origins.Officials didn’t just spread these dubious ideas, they also demeaned anyone who dared to question them. “Dr. Fauci Throws Cold Water on Conspiracy Theory That Coronavirus Was Created in a Chinese Lab” was one typical headline. At the hearings, it emerged that Dr. David Morens, a senior N.I.H. figure, was deleting emails that discussed pandemic origins and using his personal account so as to avoid public oversight. “We’re all smart enough to know to never have smoking guns, and if we did we wouldn’t put them in emails and if we found them we’d delete them,” he wrote to the head of a nonprofit involved in research at the Wuhan lab.I wish I could say these were all just examples of the science evolving in real time, but they actually demonstrate obstinacy, arrogance and cowardice. Instead of circling the wagons, these officials should have been responsibly and transparently informing the public to the best of their knowledge and abilities.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      New Report Underscores the Seriousness of Long Covid

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      The National Academies said the condition could involve up to 200 symptoms, make it difficult for people to work and last for months or years.One of the nation’s premier medical advisory organizations has weighed in on long Covid with a 265-page report that recognizes the seriousness and persistence of the condition for millions of Americans.More than four years since the start of the coronavirus pandemic, long Covid continues to damage many people’s ability to function, according to the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine, a nongovernmental institution that advises federal agencies on science and medicine.“Long Covid can impact people across the life span, from children to older adults, as well as across sex, gender, racial, ethnic and other demographic groups,” it said, concluding that “long Covid is associated with a wide range of new or worsening health conditions and encompasses more than 200 symptoms involving nearly every organ system.”Here are some of the National Academies’ findings, drafted by a committee of 14 doctors and researchers:How many people have long Covid?The report cited data from 2022 suggesting that nearly 18 million adults and nearly a million children in the United States have had long Covid at some point. At the time of that survey, about 8.9 million adults and 362,000 children had the condition.Surveys showed that the prevalence of long Covid decreased in 2023 but, for unclear reasons, has risen this year. As of January, data showed nearly 7 percent of adults in the United States had long Covid.Diagnosis and consequencesThere is still no standardized way to diagnose the condition and no definitive treatments to cure it. “There is no one-size-fits-all approach to rehabilitation, and each individual will need a program tailored to their complex needs,” the National Academies said, advising that doctors should not require patients to have a positive coronavirus test to be diagnosed with long Covid.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      A Summer Guide to Covid Testing, Symptoms and Treatment

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      Experts say cases could rise in the coming weeks. Here’s what to know about symptoms, testing and treatment.As the so-called “FLiRT” variants of the coronavirus continue to gain traction, doctors and researchers are bracing for a potential rise in cases this summer. KP.2, one of these variants, now accounts for 28.5 percent of cases, and data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention shows a small increase in Covid-related emergency room visits and positive tests.Here’s what to know about symptoms, testing and treatment if you do fall ill:Symptoms to watch out forThere’s no evidence that symptoms of the FLiRT variants and other recent strains are any different, said Aubree Gordon, an infectious disease epidemiologist at the University of Michigan.The symptoms still include sneezing, congestion, headaches, sore muscles, nausea or vomiting. Many people also report exhaustion and a general “blah” feeling.In general, the more immunity you’ve built up from vaccination or past infections, the milder your next bout with the virus is likely to be. (Though it’s possible to experience more intense symptoms with a new infection than you’ve had in past Covid cases.)The symptoms of Covid can look similar to those caused by allergies or other infections. The best way to tell the difference is to test.When (and how) to testIn an ideal world, experts said, people would take a Covid test as soon as they develop symptoms or learn they were exposed, and then test again a day or two later. But if you only have a limited number of at-home rapid tests, there are a few ways to maximize their usefulness: Test immediately if you have a fever and a cough, said Dr. Davey Smith, an infectious disease specialist at the University of California, San Diego.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      The One Thing Voters Remember About Trump

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      What one thing do you remember most about Donald Trump’s presidency? In April as part of the New York Times/Siena College survey, we called about 1,000 voters across the country and asked for their most prominent memory of the Trump years. Here’s what they said, in their own words. “His honesty” Trump supporter in 2024 […] More

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      What to Know About New Covid Variants, ‘FLiRT’: Symptoms, Vaccines and More

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      Experts are closely watching KP.2, now the leading variant.For most of this year, the JN.1 variant of the coronavirus accounted for an overwhelming majority of Covid cases. But now, an offshoot variant called KP.2 is taking off. The variant, which made up just one percent of cases in the United States in mid-March, now makes up over a quarter.KP.2 belongs to a subset of Covid variants that scientists have cheekily nicknamed “FLiRT,” drawn from the letters in the names of their mutations. They are descendants of JN.1, and KP.2 is “very, very close” to JN.1, said Dr. David Ho, a virologist at Columbia University. But Dr. Ho has conducted early lab tests in cells that suggest that slight differences in KP.2’s spike protein might make it better at evading our immune defenses and slightly more infectious than JN.1.While cases currently don’t appear to be on the rise, researchers and physicians are closely watching whether the variant will drive a summer surge.“I don’t think anybody’s expecting things to change abruptly, necessarily,” said Dr. Marc Sala, co-director of the Northwestern Medicine Comprehensive Covid-19 Center in Chicago. But KP.2 will most likely “be our new norm,’” he said. Here’s what to know.The current spread of CovidExperts said it would take several weeks to see whether KP.2 might lead to a rise in Covid cases, and noted that we have only a limited understanding of how the virus is spreading. Since the public health emergency ended, there is less robust data available on cases, and doctors said fewer people were using Covid tests.But what we do know is reassuring: Despite the shift in variants, data from the C.D.C. suggests there are only “minimal” levels of the virus circulating in wastewater nationally, and emergency department visits and hospitalizations fell between early March and late April.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Biotech Exec Gets 7 Years in Prison for False Claims About Rapid Covid-19 Test

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      Prosecutors said Keith Berman falsely claimed he had invented a blood test that could detect Covid-19 in 15 seconds. His lawyer said he had put “genuine effort” into developing such a test.The former chief executive of a biotechnology company who, during the early days of the pandemic, falsely claimed that he had invented a blood test that could detect Covid-19 in 15 seconds was sentenced on Friday to seven years in prison for securities fraud, federal prosecutors said.From February 2020 to December 2020, the former executive, Keith Berman, 70, of Westlake Village, Calif., engaged in a scheme to defraud people into investing in his company, Decision Diagnostics Corporation, by claiming the test could detect Covid using a finger prick sample of blood, prosecutors said.In March and April 2020, Mr. Berman issued 12 “false and misleading” news releases describing the rapid Covid test, which his company called GenViro, prosecutors wrote. Decision Diagnostics’ stock price jumped by more than 1,500 percent during the period, prosecutors said.In reality, prosecutors said, Mr. Berman had “privately confided in a friend the test could not actually detect Covid-19.”Prosecutors accused Mr. Berman, the sole director of the publicly traded medical device company, of capitalizing on people’s fears about the pandemic in an effort to resuscitate the company’s fortunes.Mr. Berman’s scheme resulted in about $28 million in investor losses, prosecutors said. Mr. Berman was indicted in December 2020, and he pleaded guilty in December 2023 to securities fraud, wire fraud and obstruction of an official proceeding.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      A Steadying Force for The Africa Center is Stepping Down

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      Uzodinma Iweala, chief executive of the Harlem institution, will leave at the end of 2024 after guiding it through pandemic years and securing funds.After guiding The Africa Center through rocky pandemic years and securing a huge chunk of funding for a major construction project, the leader of the Harlem institution is stepping down.Uzodinma Iweala, who is in his seventh year as chief executive of the Africa Center, will depart at the end of 2024.Iweala’s leadership helped to settle an institution with a tumultuous past of various mandates, locations and even names. It was formerly known as the Museum for African Art, which The New York Times’s co-chief art critic, Holland Cotter, called the “source of some of the most conceptually daring exhibitions of its era,” and before that, the Center for African Art. Faced with a delayed opening date during the pandemic, Iweala expanded its programming to include lectures and visits from heads of state, outdoor dance parties, films and author talks. All of it was aimed at connecting with the African diaspora and changing the way Americans interact with the African continent.Iweala, who as a writer and medical doctor has a nontraditional background for an arts institution leader, said he planned to focus on new creative projects including finishing a book. His multifaceted background and personal history — he is Nigerian-American and has lived in Nigeria — were regarded by many in the arts community as a good fit for an institution trying to transform itself into more than a museum or gallery. In an interview last year, the Studio Museum in Harlem’s Thelma Golden called him “visionary.”“I’m really proud of what we’ve been able to build over the past few years, especially in a challenging environment,” Iweala said. “It’s the right time to leave for me and for the institution.”Under Iweala, the Center has partnered with the Museum of Food and Drink on an exhibition as well as independent curators to offer “States of Becoming,” a 2022-23 exhibition that featured 17 African artists from the continent and diaspora. He partnered with the University of Cape Town to help organize a media index to track how Africa is covered in the media and created the Future Africa Forum that offered discussions with presidents, philanthropists and other leaders during the U.N. General Assembly meetings in New York.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More