Kramer attacked Fauci relentlessly in the media. He called him an "incompetent idiot" and a "pill-pushing" tool of the medical establishment. Fauci did not have control over drug approval though many people felt he was not doing enough. Fauci did make an effort in the late 1980s to reach out to the LGBTQ+ community in New York and San Francisco to find ways he and the NIAID could find a solution. Fauci was also praised for engaging with AIDS advocates, and he helped to make experimental AIDS treatments more accessible. Though Fauci was initially admonished for his treatment of the AIDS epidemic, his work in the community was eventually acknowledged. Kramer, who had spent years hating Fauci for his treatment of the HIV/AIDS epidemic, eventually called him "the only true and great hero" among government officials during the AIDS crisis. Fauci was criticized over what some said was a delayed response from the U.S. government to the HIV/AIDS epidemic, including delays in the promotion of experimental HIV/AIDS drugs. In 2014, Sean Strub of HuffPost criticized Fauci for "delaying promotion of an AIDS treatment that would have prevented tens of thousands of deaths in the first years of the epidemic" and accused him of "rewriting history." Political commentator Helen Andrews defended Fauci's actions during the epidemic in a 2021 article, writing: Fauci was the main architect of President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR), an HIV/AIDS program responsible for saving over 20 million lives in the developing world. 2009 swine flu pandemic In a meeting with reporters on September 17, 2009, Fauci predicted that the H1N1 virus causing the 2009 swine flu pandemic could infect as many as one in three Americans, more than the amount of Americans usually infected by the seasonal flu. Ebola congressional hearing On October 16, 2014, in a United States congressional hearing regarding the Ebola virus crisis, Fauci, who, as the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) had been discussing the importance of screening for weeks, testified that NIAID was still some distance away from producing sufficient quantities of cures or vaccines for widespread trials. Specifically, Fauci said, "While NIAID is an active participant in the global effort to address the public health emergency occurring in west Africa, it is important to recognize that we are still in the early stages of understanding how infection with the Ebola virus can be