Larry Kramer: Fauci is a murderer and his response to AIDS pandemic was a total failure

Trump lost, OP.

Fauci and Birx should not have to bear the weight of the Trump administration's fuckupS.

“How did I meet Larry? He called me a murderer and an incompetent idiot on the front page of the San Francisco Examiner magazine.”

Speaking as he passed through a fever check on his way into the White House, Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, recalled some of his fondest memories of his friend Larry Kramer, who died early Wednesday morning.

Nearly every anecdote in our brief interview had the same plot: the country’s best-known AIDS activist publicly abusing the country’s best-known AIDS doctor — and then privately apologizing afterward, saying he hadn’t meant it, that it was just how to get things done.

“It was an extraordinary 33-year relationship,” Dr. Fauci said. “We loved each other. We would have dinner. I would go see him in the West Village, he would come down to Washington.

“But even recently, when he got pissed at me about something, he said to some paper, ‘Fauci’s gone over to the dark side again.’ I called him up and said, ‘Larry? What the….’ And he’d say, ‘Oh, I didn’t really mean it. I just wanted to get some attention.’”

Nobody stirred up attention for a cause quite like Mr. Kramer did.

An open letter to the San Francisco Examiner in 1988, Dr. Fauci said, was the first time he’d heard of Mr. Kramer, a playwright who had founded two activist groups: the Gay Men’s Health Crisis; and Act Up, the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power.

Addressing Dr. Fauci in the letter, Mr. Kramer wrote: “Your refusal to hear the screams of AIDS activists early in the crisis resulted in the deaths of thousands of Queers. Your present inaction is causing today’s increase in HIV infection outside of the Queer community.”

“I thought, ‘This guy, I need to reach out to him,’” Dr. Fauci recalled. “So I did, and we started talking. We realized we had things in common.”

Mr. Kramer’s name-calling wasn’t personal, Dr. Fauci explained.

“I was the face of the federal government. I was the one out there trying to warn the public, and he was, too. That was his way of saying, ‘Hello? Wake up!’ That was his style. He was iconoclastic, he was theatrical — he wanted to make his point.”

Over the years, they were often asked to appear together, often on television news programs.

“We were on ABC’s ‘Nightline’ and Ted Koppel asked me about AZT,” Dr. Fauci said, referring to the first anti-H.I.V. drug. “And Larry said, ‘You guys in the government don’t know anything. You’ve got it all wrong!’”

Dr. Fauci would get in a cab to go home, and later the phone would ring. “It would be Larry saying, ‘How do you think we did?’ I’d say, ‘Larry, you just trashed me in front of 10 million people.’

“And he’d say, ‘Oh, I was just trying to get some attention.’”

As they became friends, Mr. Kramer tried to push Dr. Fauci into joining him in activism.

“During the administration of George H.W. Bush, he told me, ‘Tony, you should chain yourself to the gates of the White House,’” Dr. Fauci said. “I said, ‘Larry, how would that help? I can go talk to President Bush any time. He’s a friend.’

“He said, ‘You should still do it.’”

In 2001, with Mr. Kramer suffering from both hepatitis B and side effects of his H.I.V. medication — he had the disease for at least six years before effective triple-drug cocktails became standard practice — Dr. Fauci became his doctor.

Mr. Kramer had told him he was not doing well, and doctors were baffled.

“I said, ‘Come to the N.I.H. We’ll work you up.’” Dr. Fauci recalled. “He was really at death’s door. We realized he needed a liver transplant.”

‘We Loved Each Other’: Fauci Recalls Larry Kramer, Friend and Nemesis (continued)

Mr. Kramer went on a transplant list. But there was a public debate over whether he should get a scarce donor organ, because patients with H.I.V. had long been considered less likely to survive, despite the introduction of effective medications.

And at 66, Mr. Kramer was older than a typical transplant candidate. Nonetheless, he got a new liver that December at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center.

That not only set a precedent for H.I.V. patients and older patients, but also abruptly reversed the decline in Mr. Kramer’s health.

“He really bounced back,” Dr. Fauci said. “It gave him multiple more years of life.”

The relationship between the two men played out in Mr. Kramer’s literary works as well as in his political activism.

Mr. Kramer’s autobiographical play in 1992, “The Destiny of Me,” includes a character based on Dr. Fauci.

“He’s named Anthony Della Vida — Tony Of Life,” Dr. Fauci said. “He told me he wanted the actor who was playing me to come down to Bethesda and go on hospital rounds with me and learn my mannerisms.

“He made the character a mix of goodness and rigidity. To him, that’s the federal government — rigid.”

“On opening night, he invited my wife and me, and he’s so sensitive about our friendship,” Dr. Fauci added. “I was standing around at the reception afterward with all these activists — Peter Staley, Gregg Gonsalves, Mark Harrington — and he comes up to me sheepishly and says, ‘Do you hate me?’”

“I said, ‘What, Larry, it was a good play.’”

“He said, ‘Well, I was a little hard on you.’”

“I said, ‘Larry, you’re always doing that to me, anyway!’”

Kramer did not hold his tongue, he was not supposed to.

Op, the evolution of their relationship to respect snd friendship is well known among gays of a certain age. Maybe it’s not as well known in Moscow.

It speaks very highly of Fauchi he was able to be friends with Larry Kramer.

So Kramer was a bare backing cunt too? I actually did not know that, I thought he was doing it all for his friends who had HIV.

This pos needs to be permanently banned from DL.

OP - that's from 1988. And this isn't the first time this article was posted here at DL because I remember seeing this a few months ago.

Later Kramer's remarks became much more tempered:

"He was not the best for us in the beginning," Kramer said, blunt as always. "He was very slow, and he was the enemy of the activists for quite some time." Kramer persisted throughout the 1980s, forming the Gay Men's Health Crisis to help the sick, and then the provocative collective ACT UP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power), when nothing less than radical politics would push the government into developing new drugs. "All the drugs that are out there are out there because of AIDS activism," Kramer told me, "and our pressuring the drug companies, and Fauci, and anyone else we could get a hold of." It was Kramer, he said, who persuaded Fauci to identify AIDS, publicly and formally, as a plague. Fauci became an ally and friend—a good friend

Gaaaaaa!

Fauci is the perfect DC bureaucrat. He continues to fail upwards.

Thread closed r12, perfection.

Man gives his life to public service. Is crucified.

Out of context bullshit posted by someone who does not know what he’s talking about- Kramer talked like that about everyone- everyone. In Fauci’s case he made up. Kramer was an activist, not a physician scientist.

[quote] Man gives his life to public service. Is crucified.

Is that what we are calling sacrifice now-a-days?

Dr Fauci and his team gave us the "bad" drugs (AZT,Bactrim) early in the AIDS crisis out of desperation,

There was nothing else. We had to do something. Anything.

Larry is a crank (and man he is) but he's like the canary in the coal mine. Always was.

I have great respect , despite obvious flaws, for both men.

Larry is no more. Died last year.

I forgot he was dead. My bad r18.

Kramer was playwright who majored in English. He was not a pathologist.

[quote] Those of us over 50 well remember Fauci as the man who pushed AZT on gay men, killing thousands.

How did AZT kill thousands OP?

AZT sustained a few people to the next molecules. BUT, for many, AZT was heavy and hastened the death of people declining inevitably with AIDS.

Oh [italic]please.[/italic]

Larry Kramer was a complete hysteric with the worst borderline personality disorder I have ever heard of in my life.

[quote]Those of us over 50 well remember Fauci as the man who pushed AZT on gay men, killing thousands.

[quote]AZT sustained a few people to the next molecules. BUT, for many, AZT was heavy and hastened the death of people declining inevitably with AIDS.

Huh?

[quote]Early long-term higher-dose therapy with AZT was initially associated with side effects that sometimes limited therapy, including anemia, neutropenia, hepatotoxicity, cardiomyopathy, and myopathy. All of these conditions were generally found to be reversible upon reduction of AZT dosages...The paucity of alternatives for treating HIV/AIDS at that time unambiguously affirmed the health risk/benefit ratio, with inevitable slow, disfiguring, and painful death from HIV outweighing the drug's side-effect of transient anemia and malaise.

AZT is still used today. I don't know that those two are talking about.

Huh?

Whuh?

Also from OP:

𝗜 𝗱𝗼𝗻'𝘁 𝘄𝗮𝗻𝘁 𝘁𝗼 𝗴𝗲𝘁 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝘃𝗮𝗰𝗰𝗶𝗻𝗲

I live in Los Angeles, I've talked to quite a few others who feel the same way.

I'm very nervous how this vaccine was fast tracked and I have no trust in Big Pharma.

Im an otherwise healthy 50 year old who gets regular Covid tests, always wears a mask outside and abides by CDC guidance.

Am I wrong to feel this way?

R27 how many people are you stalking on DL?

Just keeping an eye on the trolls, r28.