Happy 80th Birthday, Dr. Anthony Fauci! You think he’ll be working? Of course, he will.

NIAID, CC BY 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons

One of the shining lights in this challenging year has been the calm messaging of Dr. Anthony Fauci. 80 years old on Thursday and still going strong, Dr. Fauci has been a leader in infectious diseases for five decades, and he shows no sign of letting up now.

There is no option to get tired. There is no option to sit down and say ‘I’m sorry, I’ve had enough’

This year may be many Americans’ first introduction to Dr. Fauci, but he has been well known as an infectious disease specialist for nearly fifty years. He worked at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) for nearly a decade before five cases of AIDS were reported by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in 1981. At the time, the AIDS virus did not even have a name; a new disease was a compelling challenge for a go-getter with a career already on the rise. Dr. Fauci committed himself to finding a cure for AIDS, but he needed to surmount more than just scientific obstacles. “It went from bright sunlight to darkness,” Dr. Fauci told the Washington Post, “because virtually everyone died.”

It seems Anthony Fauci never shies away from the human component of the illnesses he works so hard to defeat. Among the diseases for which he has pioneered treatment is Ebola. Dr. Fauci knew that people would be afraid of contact with those who had survived it, so he made a point to give a big hug to the US nurse who was famously infected and cured of Ebola — in full view of the news cameras that waited to photograph her as she left the NIH.

These days, Dr. Fauci considers addressing public concerns about the safety of the new life-saving vaccines as part of his work.

“I have never really seen anything like this,” Dr. Fauci says of this coronavirus, even during his work on AIDS, H1N1, MERS, Ebola, and the original SARS virus (technically, the current coronavirus is called SARS-CoV-2; the fact that this coronavirus is another SARS type virus is a hint as to why the new vaccines could be developed so fast).

Dr. Fauci is driven to understand everything about this unpredictable and deadly disease.

Dr. Anthony fauci speaks at w White House coronavirus briefing.

Wikimedia

Dr. Fauci’s unwillingness to go along with the Trump administration’s ‘happy talk’ about COVID-19 garnered him some criticism among Trump fans, and he has been criticized for what the president’s followers call ‘mistakes.’ But for those who know to rely on Anthony Fauci’s expertise, honesty, and dedication, his consistent message, based on the best evidence available, has been a welcome beacon in trying times.

In fact, some see Dr. Fauci as an antidote to Trump’s misinformation.

And he is not afraid to change his message as the data is upgraded. For instance, Dr. Fauci originally recommended closing schools. But as evidence emerged that schools caused less community transfer than expected, he changed his focus to those areas which were proven to spread the coronavirus. That’s the way trustworthy scientists work; they give the best answers they can with reliable, available data, and they keep working to deliver better answers.

That is just the way Anthony Fauci plays it. Godspeed, Dr. Fauci. And Many Happy Returns of the Day!

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