Who is Dr. Anthony Stephen Fauci ?

Dr. Anthony Stephen Fauci is an American immunologist employed by the National Health Institutes of the United States. He was born on December 24, 1940.

For more than half a century, Dr. Fauci has been serving public health and has made significant contributions in the healthcare industry, especially in the research of dreadful diseases like HIV/AIDS and immune-related diseases.

Dr. Fauci is a scientist and the head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases at the National Institutes of Health. He is tagged as the leading expert in infectious disease. He was born in a medical family.

His father is a pharmacist and they owned a pharmacy as a family business. His mother and sister manned the register while Dr. Anthony Fauci was the one in charge in delivering the prescriptions. At a young age, he knew already that he will be working in the medical field.

Right after graduating from High School, he went to College of the Holy Cross for his pre-med and took up his medicine course at Cornell University Medical College. He completed his internship and residency at The New York Hospital-Cornell Medical Center.

Dr. Fauci has a successful career as an immunologist and a scientist. His work focuses on viral-related disease and has been at the forefront of the America’s effort to content viral-related diseases like the Ebola virus, MERS, SARS, swine flu, and the latest, coronavirus 2019 disease (COVID-19). ^{(1, 2, and 4)}

Dr. Fauci’s notable works and achievements

• He was a clinical associate in the Laboratory of Clinical Investigation of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases in the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland.
• He was the head of the new Laboratory of Immunoregulation in 1980s. He played a huge part during the outbreak of HIV/AIDS. At that time, he became the face of the federal government. He opened his doors to AIDS advocates and created new channels of access to experimental drugs for HIV/AIDS. ^{(2, 4)}
• He received a Presidential Medal of Freedom and a total of 45 honorary doctoral degrees from the universities in the United States and other countries.
• He has written some of the best read books in the field of medicine. Some of these books he written alone while some are co-authored. These include Harrison’s Manual of Medicine, Harrison’s Principles of Internal Medicine, Harrison’s Infectious Diseases, Harrison’s Gastroenterology and Hepatology, and Harrison’s Rheumatology, to name a few. ⁽³⁾
• In 2019, Dr. Anthony Fauci has ranked 41st most highly cited researcher of all time.
• He graduated top of his class from Cornell Medical College in 1966.

Dr. Fauci’s role in handling COVID-19 disease pandemic

Currently, Dr. Fauci is a member of the White House Coronavirus Task Force formed in January of this year, which aims to address COVID-19 pandemic.

He speaks to the White House Press Corps on the pandemic COVID-19 just this month.

Here’s significant points on an interview with Dr. Anthony Fauci’s take on COVID-19:

“video link“

• COVID-19 is different than a common cold – The confusion is about 10% to 30% of the common colds that you and I and everyone gets during the season happen to be a coronavirus. But, a certain subset of coronaviruses can cause extremely serious disease. They did it with SARS, they did it with MERS, and now in COVID-19, which has a high mortality rate.
• It targets the lungs – A person can present no sneezing, no sinusitis, fever, shortness of breath, you do a chest x-ray and you have pulmonary infiltrates; that’s not the common cold.
• Regular hand washing is the best way to prevent the infection – Wash your hands as frequently as you can. Respiratory-borne diseases like COVID-19 spreads either by droplets, gross droplets, someone coughs or sneezes on you, or even a bit of aerosolized where you can be sitting next to someone very closely and you don’t cough or sneeze but the virus can aerosolize.
• The median time for the symptoms to appear is 5.2 days – The range is somewhere between 2 and 14, 14 is much much more outer limit. When someone is suspected of being exposed, they either self-isolate or they get into the institutional quarantine for 14 days.
• Vaccines for COVID-19 are still being studied – The things that we are doing right now in the form of interventions are in the arena of vaccines and in therapeutics. I predicted that we would be about 2 to 3 months to go into phase 1 trials. And I think we’re going to beat that, I think we’ll be in probably about 6 weeks. Which, as a matter of fact, will be the fastest that anyone ever has gone from the identification of the sequence into a phase 1 trial of any vaccine that’s ever been done.
• So, we’ll do a phase 1 trial, we’ll do it in a number of our centers, including our center at the NIH that will take about 3 to 4 months, and then if successful, which I believe it will be, there’s no reason to believe it won’t be safe – we’ll go into what is called a phase 2 trial. The phase 1 trial is 45 individuals, the phase 2 trial, that is hundreds, if not a couple thousands individuals. It would take then about a year to year and a half to be fully confident that we would have a vaccine to be able to protect the American people.
• Vaccines will be given to the most vulnerable people – The standard approach when you have a vaccine, for example, for influenza we have limited vaccines, you give it to the most vulnerable and the most vulnerable clearly are the elderly and those with underlying conditions, and those generally are heart disease, chronic lung disease, kidney, diabetes, and obesity, and those who are on immune-suppressive drugs who might have an underlying cancer.
• The other thing that is important is that healthcare workers and those who are the front-line responders, because those are the ones in every disease we know that are most vulnerable. In fact, if you look in China, the people who were the most vulnerable before they have good PPEs were the healthcare providers. (5)
• Virus decides the timeline – President Donald Trump in one of his press conferences deliberately stated that he wants to end COVID-19 pandemic in Easter. Dr. Fauci has disagreed with Trump’s statement and stressed the reality that we are all facing right now. He said, “you don’t make the timeline, the virus makes the timeline.”
• No scientific evidence that the COVID-19 virus was made in a Chinese laboratory – There is a rumor that the coronavirus the world is currently experiencing right now is purposely made in a Chinese Lab. However, virus expert, Dr. Anthony Fauci brushed off this idea. According to him, every statement should be made according to sciencitic evidence, and right now there is no evidence to show that it is a manmade virus. There is no concrete scientific proof that the virus has been deliberately or artificially manipulated. What the evidence is showing right now is that the virus evolved in nature.

Dr. Anthony Fauci’s approach in dealing COVID-19 pandemic

Dr. Fauci is the go-to representative of Trump’s administration in battling COVID-19 pandemic. The United States citizens have high trust in him considering his stellar background in fighting virus-related diseases.

He said that the COVID-19 pandemic will get worse in the country. Being at the forefront of scientists’ efforts to provide correct information about COVID-19 pandemic, Dr. Fauci didn’t hesitate to correct the President.

He used a metaphor to describe his strategy on COVID-19 pandemic. He told the House committee this line, “You skate not to where the puck is, but to where the puck is going to be.” To keep the virus from spreading, Dr. Fauci advocated containment and mitigate to assess the damage once it gets loose in a community. He also gives emphasis on increasing testing and to develop treatments and vaccines.

Throughout his entire career as a doctor and an infectious disease specialist, Dr. Anthony Fauci has served six presidents and had never done anything other than reveal the exact scientific evidence and create policy recommendations accordingly.

He has been doing an immense job working long hours since the start of the pandemic. However, rumors about the division between Dr. Anthony Fauci and the White House continue to swirl.

In April 12, President Trump raised concerns about the possibility of dismissing Dr. Fauci, after the latter told in an interview that it could have saved more lives if the Trump administration has earlier ordered social distancing and stay at home measures.

It even got into a point where Trump tweeted to call to fire Dr. Fauci because of his statement. His concerns right now is that if the country will not blunt the infection rate by summer, then there will be a second wave of COVID-19 come fall and winter.

References

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthony_Fauci
2. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/21/opinion/sunday/fauci-coronavirus-trump.html
3. https://www.amazon.com/Books-Anthony-S-Fauci/s?rh=n%3A283155%2Cp_27%3AAnthony+S.+Fauci
4. https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2020/03/22/coronavirus-anthony-fauci-will-help-save-american-lives-column/2883981001/
5. https://youtu.be/gEU-EQxu5Xs