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Dr. Anthony Fauci — The Truth Whisperer

How to be a purveyor of facts and truth in the ultimate den of iniquity

Anthony S. Fauci, M.D. (Wikimedia Commons)

1. How the heck does he do it?

For the past year, during the worst pandemic in generations, we have watched a miracle-worker, a saint, a physician, and a scientist working hip-deep in the muck of an administration that doesn’t believe in science, facts, or honesty.

Fauci is one of the world’s leading experts of infectious diseases and has been described as America’s most trusted doctor. He has directed the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) since 1984.

When the COVID-19 pandemic broke out at the beginning of the year, Fauci was the obvious person to lead the national response to the virus. Instead, Trump tapped Mike Pence to lead the White House Coronavirus Task Force. The same Mike Pence who bungled his state’s response to HIV and killed thousands when he was Governor of Indiana.

Yet Fauci has maintained his composure and continued working with this administration despite its blatant disregard for science and public health. How does he do it?

2. Daylight between Fauci and the administration

Fauci’s recent comments about the U.S. having to prepare for “a whole lot of hurt” has garnered a lot of attention, including in the international press.

Fauci’s comments are in sharp contrast to Trump’s mantra, his continual unsupported claims, that the U.S. is “rounding the turn” in its response to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Fauci’s assessment is the one we should be listening to:

“We’re in for a whole lot of hurt. It’s not a good situation. All the stars are aligned in the wrong place as you go into the fall and winter season, with people congregating at home indoors. You could not possibly be positioned more poorly.”

This distancing between Fauci and Trump, however, is not a new development as some press accounts seem to imply.

In early October, Fauci corrected Trump’s misrepresentation (during a presidential debate) of Fauci’s stance on masks.

A couple of weeks prior, in mid-September, Fauci had to take an opposite stance from Trump’s unfounded claims that the U.S. was “rounding the corner” and that a vaccine would be available before the November 3rd presidential election.

In mid-August, when Trump was claiming without evidence that the US will be in “good shape,” Fauci said, “We certainly are not where I hope we would be, we are in the middle of a very serious historic pandemic.”

In July, Fauci said that it was not helpful for him to say anything contrary to Trump because “all of a sudden, you don’t hear from me for a while.” Clearly, Fauci was concerned about being silenced and a resulting inability to communicate critical public health information to the public, just for displeasing Trump.

In June, Trump wanted to slow COVID-19 testing because the case and fatality numbers were increasing and making him look bad. Fauci, however, had to point out a “disturbing surge of infections” in many parts of the country — and to support the many senior medical officials who recommended accelerating testing instead.

There has always been daylight between Fauci and Trump. That is inevitable when the president is uninformed and uninterested in science, medicine, facts, or public service and health.

The question remains, how does Fauci do it?

3. What powers Fauci

Fauci has been director of the NIAID since 1984. He joined the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in 1968 and has continually served in some capacity on behalf of public health to this day. He has advised every US president since the 1980s: Reagan, G.H.W. Bush, Clinton, G.W. Bush, Obama, and this one. What keeps Fauci moving?

Anthony Stephen Fauci was born the second child of Stephen and Eugenia Fauci, on December 24, 1940, in Brooklyn, New York. His parents were first-generation Italian Americans and lived in an apartment upstairs from their pharmacy. Stephen was a pharmacist, educated at Columbia University. Mom Eugenia and older sister Denise worked the register while Anthony delivered prescriptions and played baseball, and basketball, and football.

Fauci attended Regis High School in the Upper East Side of Manhattan, where he captained the basketball team despite being only 5’7” tall. He then took up premed studies at the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts (the city where I happen to work, and the school where my lab mates happened to have graduated or taught). Fauci graduated in 1962 with a bachelor's degree in Classics with a premed track. From there, he went on to Cornell University Medical College in New York City, where he graduated first in his class in 1966. Fauci then completed his internal medicine internship and residency at the New York Hospital-Cornell Medical Center.

Fauci was clearly driven to excel from a very young age in various areas of his life, whether sports, or academics, or medicine.

After completing his residency, Fauci went on to start his career at the NIH in 1968. He was a senior investigator at the Laboratory of Clinical Investigation (LCI), where he developed successful drug regimens for previously fatal diseases such as polyarteritis nodosa, granulomatosis with polyangiitis, and lymphomatoid granulomatosis. These successes lead to his promotion to chief of the Laboratory of Immunoregulation in 1980, and finally, under Reagan, director of NIAID in 1984. This is the position he holds to this day.

As director of NIAID, Fauci leads the national response to the HIV-AIDS epidemic under Reagan and G.H.W. Bush, the West Nile virus under Clinton, the anthrax scare, and SARS under G.W. Bush, and the swine flu pandemic under Obama. And now we see that Fauci has been sidelined during our current pandemic by this president.

Fauci will turn 80 years old at the end of this year. During this pandemic, he has been getting up at 5 am, looks at about a thousand emails during breakfast, then heads to his office at the NIH in Bethesda, Maryland. He is there until 1 pm when he used to go to the White House for meetings prior to Trump's farcical daily press conferences (which have thankfully stopped).

Fauci then either went home or back to the office where he worked until the early hours of the morning. For a time, he was working 20-hour days and getting by with 3 hours of sleep. He credits his wife, Christine Grady, a nurse and bioethicist at the NIH, with reminding him to sleep and take care of his body.

The following interview that Fauci gave to Science Magazine in late September details some of the “truth to power” that Fauci has to do to ensure that facts and reality are represented during meetings with Trump and his administration. This short interview is worth the time to read to get a little insight into the Alice in Wonderland world that this administration has become and Fauci’s unpleasant role in it:

4. We need more Faucis

We often like to think of our society as a meritocracy, a kind of Darwinian marketplace. The best athletes might go to a professional sports team or to the military. The smartest might go into academia. The most pious might become clergy. But we need our best people, who combine the physical endurance and grit of the best athletes, the intelligence of our top academics, and the moral and ethical compass of our most upright ministers, to serve the whole people in government.

I don’t think I answered the question of how Fauci does what he does. I barely gave an outline of who he is and what he does. I don’t know if people like Fauci are born or made. What I do know is…

We need more Faucis.

5. Thank you

Thank you for reading, and please share!

If you enjoyed this article about Fauci, please check out a couple of other articles I think you’ll love:

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