Although Dr. Anthony Fauci has served as the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases since 1984, he hasn’t exactly become a household name until 2020.
The obvious reason for this is his role as as a federal advisor on the nation’s scientific and medical response to the COVID-19 pandemic, but recent months have seen that role grow more complicated as his recommendations increasingly differ from the desires of the Trump administration. As The Washington Post reported there has been at least a month long period since early June in which he and President Donald Trump did not speak.
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In that time, the Post also reported on a list of perceived mistakes Fauci made throughout the pandemic released by the White House in an attempt to discredit him.
To critics, this list both failed to take into account the lack of readily available information about the coronavirus in those early months and ignored Fauci’s own warnings against treating recommendations at the time as definitive and unchangeable.
In response to this White House list, those who support Fauci are sharing endorsements and experiences with him that put that support into perspective.
As we can see here, an immunologist at The Jackson Laboratory named Derya Unutmaz tweeted on Fauci’s behalf.
As The Fort Worth Star Telegram reported , his statements of support would be echoed 10 days later in a letter signed by 3,500 public health experts.
As the letter stated, “Since the beginning of the pandemic, [Fauci] has remained one of the world’s most trusted scientists on COVID-19, daily explaining in lay terms the complexity of an illness we still don’t fully understand. And he has done so by placing science front and center in the public discourse. Attempting to marginalize highly respected researchers such as Dr. Fauci is a dangerous distraction at a time when we most need voices like his.”
Support has also come from those who knew Dr. Fauci from his work advising the federal government during previous presidential administrations.
For instance, here we have a tweet from Valerie Jarrett, who served as a senior advisor to President Barack Obama.
However, it would seem that Dr. Fauci doesn’t just have friends in high places.
This tweet comes from a man named Luke Messac who emailed Dr. Fauci with a request for an interview on his undergraduate thesis about the paradigm shift in how the U.S. government responded to the HIV/AIDS crisis that emerged during the 1980s.
As this person revealed, not only did Dr. Fauci respond to all of his questions, but he also read the thesis in its entirety and sent a thorough review of it back to Messac.
Speaking of the AIDS crisis, some supporters called attention to the way Dr. Fauci spearheaded a change in how the U.S. government conducts clinical trials.
Although it may seem obvious now that one would need AIDS patients to access medication for the disease to determine what treatment is appropriate, NPR reported that actually implementing this way of thinking in the government’s clinical trials took an amendment in official policy that only happened as a result of Dr. Fauci working with activists at the time.
This increase in access of patients to experimental treatments both changed how medicine is practiced in America and saved an untold number of lives.
When Americans where being affected by Ebola virus outbreaks that devastated western Africa, Dr. Fauci personally treated them at the Clinical Center of the National Institutes of Health.
As Science Magazine reported , he would set aside two hours a day whenever possible to treat Ebola patients both as a means of better understanding the disease and demonstrating to the clinic’s staff that would wouldn’t ask them to do anything he wasn’t willing to do himself.
As Adam Phillippy from NIH said, “This is what leadership looks like.”
But while all of the supporters we’ve seen thus far have found reason to admire Dr. Fauci, one woman came forward with a much more direct and personal impact he’s had on her life.
As Johnna Paraiso wrote on Facebook, her father nearly died from an illness that left him weak and losing weight for reasons that baffled even specialists for three months.
That is, until one doctor discovered through research that he had a rare immune disorder called Polyarteritis Nodosa and recommended a drug regimen discovered from a single research study. This allowed Paraiso’s dad to live 30 more years than expected.
And who was that doctor? Anthony Fauci.
As Paraiso said, “Because of Dr. Fauci, my family was blessed to keep my dad with us for a long, long time and be in photos like this one with his siblings. I’m grateful.”
