The most economically consequential event of the past decade was the COVID pandemic. It saw countless heroic actions that will be forever unrecognized. Among those who were recognized were Katalin Kariko and Drew Weissman, who shared the 2023 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for the development of SARS-CoV-2 mRNA vaccines. A more controversial figure during that period was Dr. Anthony Fauci, the director of the NIH Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease, who became the public face of the US government pandemic response. Because of his visibility, he’s become a political magnet and whipping boy for opportunistic politicians like Marjorie Taylor Greene, who has told Fauci that he should be in prison for crimes against humanity. On the contrary,
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Joel Eissenberg considers the following as important: COVID pandemic response, Dr. Andrew Fauci, Healthcare, history, politics
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A more controversial figure during that period was Dr. Anthony Fauci, the director of the NIH Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease, who became the public face of the US government pandemic response. Because of his visibility, he’s become a political magnet and whipping boy for opportunistic politicians like Marjorie Taylor Greene, who has told Fauci that he should be in prison for crimes against humanity.
On the contrary, Fauci withstood groundless vilification to advocate for the best public health response based on the information available at the time. Here’s Fauci’s reflection:
“If you look at it in two separate buckets, the scientific bucket and the public health bucket, the preparedness and response over many, many years that led to our ability to develop and deploy a vaccine that was over 90% effective in less than 11 months is totally unprecedented. So we need to make sure we maintain our support for basic and biomedical research that allowed us to make that unprecedented accomplishment that saved millions of lives globally, certainly hundreds of thousands, if not millions in the United States.
“The area that we really need to look at lessons learned is our public health response, our somewhat fractionated response in the interaction between the federal response and the local response, which was somewhat different from place to place, that didn’t have a uniform set of principles, which made our response less uniform and less coordinated, I believe, than we saw in other countries. But that’s something we’re aware of and hopefully that can be corrected.”
*snip*
“If we had the kind of tsunami of hospitalizations and deaths that we had at one period of time, the only option that you had was to shut things down or we would’ve overwhelmed the hospitals and we would have to have made a Sophie’s choice of who gets a ventilator and who doesn’t get a ventilator.
“The real issue is that if you do — I don’t want to use the word “shutdown” because we never completely shut down — but if you do profound interruption of services and the steady flow of the regular social interactions that we’ve had, we’ve got to reexamine how long you do that for. Because the question is less, “Should we have shut down and shut the schools?” than “How long should we have kept things shut down and how long should the schools have shut down?”
“I think the initial decision to just put things to a halt until we somehow flattened that very disturbing accelerated curve was the right decision. The real questionable issue is how long we kept that up.”
These quotes come from an interview in which Fauci is asked for his expert opinion, not the data behind it. But the course of the pandemic, the decisions made and not made, and the events that followed from those decisions are well-documented. Based on the best available evidence at the time, Fauci provided clear and honest guidance. America owes him a great debt for his leadership in a trying time.