Anthony Fauci will finish at the end of this month a career in public service, spanning five decades, marked by the HIV pandemic at the beginning and the new coronavirus at the end, always under the principle of “fidelity to science.”
In a lengthy interview with The Associated Press, Fauci said he was excited about the prospects for breakthroughs like next-generation Covid vaccines, but also worried that the lies marked a “profoundly dangerous time” for public health and science. .
“Lies abound and we have almost normalized them,” he said. “I am concerned about my own field of knowledge, but also the country”, she developed.
Fauci, who turns 82 on Christmas Eve, has been a medical scientist at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases for 54 years, 38 of which were as director.
Being able to explain scientific complexity in simple and direct terms, Maw has advised seven US presidents, from Ronald Reagan to Joe Biden, in a long series of outbreaks: HIV, Ebola, Zika, bird flu, pandemic flu , until the anthrax attacks in 2001.
“Stay true to the science and never be afraid to tell someone the truth, but there are inconvenient truths where there is a chance the messenger could get hurt,” Fauci said, adding: “This shouldn’t be a concern. to move on. To tell you the truth”.
With typical understatement, he added: “This has served me very well with one exception where the truth has generated great hostility towards me from a presidential administration.”
For all his influence on national and international responses to infectious disease, it wasn’t until the novel coronavirus pandemic in early 2020 that Fauci became a household name in virtually every household, giving the latest updates to the daily press at the White House and in frequent interviews with the media.
But Fauci ended up contradicting Donald Trump, then in the White House, as he sought to downplay the severity and threat of the virus and promote unproven alternative treatments.
Trump and his allies began attacking Fauci, who even received death threats. As the world prepares to enter another year with Covid-19, Fauci remains a target for the far right, but he also remains a trusted voice for millions of Americans.
Under his direction, researchers at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) laid the scientific foundation for the rapid development of powerful vaccines against the novel coronavirus.
An analysis published last week by the Commonwealth Fund found that vaccines saved 3.2 million lives in the US alone and prevented 18.5 million hospitalizations.
With a new wave of infections on the way for the winter, Fauci is disappointed that only 14% of people eligible for the booster shot, updated and protected against the omicron strains, have been vaccinated.
“This doesn’t make any sense when you know you have a vaccine that saves lives,” he said.
But he is also already thinking about next-generation vaccines, which will improve infection prevention, citing promising developments such as nasal vaccines.
Aside from the political attacks, the public struggled to understand why their own health advice and others changed as the pandemic progressed, such as masks not being deemed necessary at first and later made mandatory.
Fauci said that one of the lessons of the pandemic is the need to communicate better, to understand that it is normal for messages to change as scientists make discoveries.
“This doesn’t mean it’s turning a corner. It means it’s following the science,” he explained.
For decades, Fauci has been involved in life-saving scientific breakthroughs. As a Junior Investigator at the National Institutes of Health, he helped develop highly effective therapies for the treatment of the rare but now fatal blood vessel disease known as vasculitis.
Then came the AIDS crisis with days that Fauci, who treated patients at an NIH hospital, recalls as “very dark and very difficult,” explaining: “As a doctor, you’re trained to heal people. And we weren’t healing to nobody”. The whole world was dying in front of us.”
Fauci created a Division of AIDS that, along with pharmaceutical companies and universities, led research into drugs that ultimately turned HIV into a manageable chronic disease.
Later in the George W. Bush presidency, Fauci helped develop PEPFAR, a presidential emergency relief plan, to get HIV drugs to poor countries. This program is credited with saving more than 20 million lives in the last 20 years.
But it took years to get the first AIDS drugs, and in the late 1980s and early 1990s, angry activists protested what they saw as government indifference.
Fauci met with activists and made it standard practice for patient representatives to have a say in government decisions about medical research.
Unfortunately, he says, this experience cannot help bridge the political divisions that are undermining public health.
The AIDS activists “were theatrical. They were iconoclastic. They were provocative. They confronted. All of that. But the central message they conveyed was a correct message,” he said. “This is completely different from what is being seen now with the covid, where lies, conspiracy theories, distortions of reality abound.”
Despite this rancorous atmosphere, Fauci is enthusiastic about recent scientific advances against diseases, such as vaccines for malaria, tuberculosis and, perhaps one day, HIV. That is why he declares that he will not retire, although he will leave public office.
“I will continue to teach, write and try to encourage and inspire people to pursue science, medicine and public health,” he said. “There are many things that are open that need to be closed one day, because that is what science is going to do.”
Source: TSF
