Jon CohenScience’s COVID-19 reporting is supported by the Pulitzer Center and the Heising-Simons Foundation.On 23 September at 8 p.m., Anthony Fauci was standing in his living room in Washington, D.C., still in his suit and tie, chatting on his cell phone with an assistant, exasperated that his day was far from over.
It had begun at 6 a.m. and included testifying at a three-hour-long Senate hearing on COVID-19. In the early evening, he spoke with actor Alan Alda about the pandemic on a live-streamed event.
Fauci, head of the U.S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) and a key scientist on the White House’s Coronavirus Task Force, still had to read and reply to more than 200 e-mails in his inbox.