Nat Geo documentary on Anthony Fauci is too one-sided to be taken seriously

As America’s leading infectious disease expert, the silver-haired octogenarian Dr Anthony Fauci was thrust into the global spotlight last year because of the pandemic. His face was ubiquitous in the world media’s coverage of the unfolding disaster. Dr Fauci’s popularity has ebbed and soared since then, his views revered and reviled.

A new documentary by John Hoffman and Janet Tobias, titled Fauci, attempts to profile the renowned immunologist and his distinguished career. The focus of the story mainly shifts between two events, ones that Fauci himself refers to as the bookends of his career – the AIDS epidemic that shook the US and the world in the 1980s, and the ongoing global COVID-19 pandemic. Alongside, it attempts to reveal personal details about the man, his traits, his approach towards his work. Fauci happens to be the primary voice in the film. The other most frequent ones happen to be his wife and one of his daughters. Needless to say, he comes across looking like a good old fellow who has led his country through some difficult times across six American presidencies. He has been criticised often, but he has taken it all on the chin, adapting and evolving with the times. A regular bloke from Brooklyn who happened to become an American hero, only because life threw him the challenge and he stepped up to it. It is all good, really, until you realise that there is all there is to it.

While the film does shed some light on the criticism that has been levelled at him over the years, in many ways it also seems like a defence of him against them in some way.

Now because the man himself is gentle, his glorification is gentle as well. Fauci is not a distasteful hagiography by any stretch. It is a polished docu-feature that puts together newsreel and archival footage over the years to tell you pretty much what you would have found out by reading all the reference links at the foot Fauci’s Wikipedia page. The family voices help fill out a few personal details, and celebrity cameos by the likes of Bill Gates and Bono give his story a booster shot.

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The serious omissions include the allegations of Fauci’s own involvement in gain-of-function research at the Wuhan lab, from where the virus is suspected to have somehow escaped initially. Now I did not need to watch a documentary to believe that Fauci really does not seem the kind who would profit off the world’s misery in any way. Still, the allegation is a serious one, and touching upon it in the documentary and deconstructing it would only have added to the film. The most fascinating moments of the film are when it looks at Fauci standing up to Donald Trump, though there is criminally little explored of that blockbuster dynamic, compared to the rest of Fauci’s career highlights. In the film, like in all those live interviews, Fauci seems to not comprehend Trump’s behaviour one bit, but he is also matter-of-fact in his description of him. “I don’t know why the president is like this, but this is how he is. I just have to adapt, and do my job the best I can,” is the vibe he gives off. Any such interaction is potentially gold. Just look at former FBI director James Comey, who wrote a book about his experiences with Trump, then had a two-part fiction show made out of that book. One suspects a Dr Fauci-President Trump movie or show would be at least as fascinating as The Comey Rule , if not more. That is the kind of Fauci content we need far more than a polite documentary that does not reveal much more than we already know. Fauci is streaming on Disney+ Hotstar. Pradeep Menon is a Mumbai-based writer and independent filmmaker.