Most 79 year old doctors have been retired for years. The healthy ones are traveling the world, and enjoying their grandchildren. Right now, they’re stuck inside like the rest of us except for one, Doctor Anthony Fauci the Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. I’m sure many people never heard of him before the coronavirus crisis. But he’s one of the most well known and respected medical experts in the world. He’s the scientist who finally got President Reagan to wake up to the AIDS epidemic in 1984 and was a leader in tracking HIV and developing treatments. He has been the leader in dealing with outbreaks of Ebola, SARS, MERS, and Zika. Now he’s dealing with coronavirus and Trump.
Fauci grew up in Brooklyn, New York the son of a pharmacist. He went the Regis High School, the Jesuit run high school on the Upper East Side of Manhattan where the smart kids went. He he attended Holy Cross College and medical school at Cornell. While he’s almost 80 years old, he could pass for 60. While small in stature, he’s the little big man of the crisis. He’s on the president’s task force set up to deal with the virus. But he’s been forced to walk a delicate political tightrope, trying to guide a deaf and blind man through a mind field without blowing us all up. Fauci stands behind Trump at his daily briefing with his arms folded and looking down most of the time. He knows they are all violating the rule to stay six feet apart. He’s asked the White House to change the arrangements for the briefings with no answer. When Trump finally lets him speak, Fauci has the unenviable job of correcting all the misinformation Trump has just spewed. That’s a tough assignment to stand up in front of a live television audience of millions, while Trump is breathing down your neck, and telling everyone what Trump just said is really not accurate. Everyone else who stands up there essentially just reports what Trump says, and repeats what a great job he’s doing.
While Trump keeps saying everything he’s doing is “incredible”, “fantastic”, “unbelievable”, and “tremendous”, Fauci uses one word over and over, “data”. It’s all about the facts, how we get them, how we analyze them to guide us to the next course of action. Facts are the basis of the truth which we all know gives Trump problems. Fauci has been asked in interviews how he navigates correcting a guy who doesn’t like to be told he’s wrong. In an interview with Maureen Dowd of the New York Times Fauci said he knows what people might be saying about him,“What the hell’s the matter with Fauci?…I’ve been telling the president things he doesn’t want to hear…It’s a risky business, But that’s my style…You know me for many years. I say it the way it is, and if he’s gonna get pissed off, he’s gonna get pissed off. Thankfully, he is not. Interestingly.” Fauci is smart enough to understand there are two audiences he’s addressing, the millions of concerned Americans who want the truth, and an audience of one who wants to hear only what he wants to hear. Fauci went on to say, “I don’t want to embarrass him…I don’t want to act like a tough guy…I just want to get the facts out…And he gets that. He’s a smart guy…He’s not a dummy.”
There have been reports that Trump has not been happy with Fauci upstaging him. When reporters asked why Fauci wasn’t at Monday’s briefing, Trump brushed it off saying he had just been in a meeting with Fauci. Fauci was back at the briefing yesterday again steering the discussion back to reality. Trump wants this over by Easter. He’s had it. He says it would be a beautiful time for the country to get back to business. Everyone wants to get back to normal. Fauci had to explain we can’t just arbitrarily stop what we’re doing to contain the virus. There may be parts of the country where restrictions can be lifted, but we have to get data from those areas to see if there is less of a problem there, or are there thousands of undiagnosed cases we haven’t found because of the lack of testing.
In past national crises, the country has looked to the president to lead us through and the danger and give us hope. Washington as the country was being created, Lincoln in the Civil War, FDR during the Depression and World War II, Kennedy during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Not many can live up to the greatness of these men in a crisis. Fortunately for us all, we have the tough kid from Brooklyn who grew up to be America’s Doctor.
Great article Micheal