Dr. Anthony Fauci A True Hero, And Should Be Time Magazine’s Person Of The Year For Upholding Science And Health!

Dr, Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases since 1984, is being mostly sidelined and ignored by President Donald Trump, who does not want to hear his insights and expertise on the infectious disease which has killed nearly 140,000 Americans in less than five months.

The CoronaVirus Pandemic is the greatest health crisis in the sense of deaths that we have seen in a century. While Fauci does not claim to have no imperfections, which we all do, he is certainly someone to be relied upon and respected, although many Americans who ignore science think he is a threat to Donald Trump’s reelection.

Fauci has served American public health in various capacities for more than a half century, and still has total energy as he nears 80 years of age this coming December. He has been an adviser to every President in the past forty years, and played a major role in dealing with the AIDS crisis, when it arose in the 1980s and after.

Fauci has been one of the most cited scientists in scientific journals for much of his career. He graduated first in his class at Cornell University Medical School in the mid 1960s. He has received over 30 honorary doctorates at universities in the United States and foreign nations. He has been the author, coauthor or editor of more than one thousand scientific publications, including several textbooks.

Sadly, he has had the need for a security detail, due to death threats and strong criticism from extremist right wing critics, including many on Fox News Channel. They do not have a clue on science or health, but promote the Trump agenda of ignoring the pandemic, as their only goal is to reelect Trump, despite his incompetence and lack of concern about the pandemic!

Dr. Fauci is a truly inspirational figure, and should be chosen as the Person of the Year by Time Magazine in December, and Joe Biden should utilize him in 2021 in a more respectful way than Donald Trump has displayed!

8 comments on “Dr. Anthony Fauci A True Hero, And Should Be Time Magazine’s Person Of The Year For Upholding Science And Health!

  1. Former Republican July 16, 2020 4:13 pm

    Shut Everything Down and Remove Trump

    It’s the only thing right now that can prevent an even worse catastrophe.

    https://washingtonmonthly.com/2020/07/16/shut-everything-down-and-remove-trump/

    Back when this was all beginning, people referred to COVID-19 as “a novel coronavirus.” That little phrase carried two important pieces of information, neither of which the president of the United States understood. It told us that this infection was not influenza or “the flu,” and it told us that human beings had no immunity against it because we had never encountered it before. What this meant was that the viral outbreak would keep spreading through the population with ease because literally everyone could be infected, and that we shouldn’t expect it to “magically disappear” over the summer.

    Scientists still have much to learn about this novel coronavirus, and they’ve made some mistakes in recommendations and treatments. But they’ve gotten the basics right. That’s why Alexis Madrigal of The Atlantic is correct when he writes: “There is no mystery in the number of Americans dying from COVID-19.”

    When people are exposed to a sufficient concentration of the virus, they will get infected, which is why anywhere that people congregate, there’s a good likelihood of an outbreak. We’ve learned that the virus spreads most efficiently in indoor spaces, particularly any place that doesn’t have good circulation or a fresh supply of air. It spreads from person to person best when people expel the virus a good distance from their bodies, by singing or talking loudly, for example, so choir practice and bars are particularly dangerous.

    We’ve all gotten used to the charts that show whether the rate of infection or testing or death is going up or down. We watched the charts grow in the Mid-Atlantic, Midwest and Northeast in the spring and then fall as hard quarantines had the desired effect. We watched the South and Southwest express skepticism about the seriousness of the problem and ignore this hard-won wisdom. Now they are the ones experiencing the infection spikes. It’s their hospitals and morgues that are overflowing. And they ought to know exactly what to do, because they witnessed what worked in the first instance.

    But they’re struggling. Partly this is a simple reflection of a regional difference between secular and religious culture. Partly it’s a reflection of how difficult it can be to admit mistakes and correct course. Mostly, it’s due to Republican leadership being afraid to contradict the president of the United States, especially wherever religious fundamentalism predominates. When skepticism about science and the educated elite is instinctual and tribal, it’s hard to get people to listen to reason, especially when their trusted leaders spend a lot of energy giving them bad information.

    As cases began to rise in the Sun Belt, some people at first took comfort that there wasn’t a corresponding rise in deaths. This was in part due to some improvement in treatment, so that some who would have died, had they been infected in March, were now surviving an infection in June. But, mostly, it was an illusion, and a simple function of the roughly three to four-week delay between getting sick and actually dying.

    As Mr. Madrigal points out, “America’s deadly summer coronavirus surge is undeniable. And it was predictable this whole time by looking honestly at the data.” Once the Sun Belt states opened up their economies, things transpired exactly how we were told they would. First there was a spike in reported cases, which was followed by a spike in hospitalizations, and finally a spike in fatalities. This was predictable because it isn’t remotely complicated. When people congregate, the infection spreads. It spreads because only a tiny percent of the population has already been infected and thereby has antibodies that can fight off the virus. If an infected person gives the virus to an average of more than one other person, the outbreak will grow. The only way to bring that number below one is to practice extreme social distancing. Obviously, masks can reduce the likelihood of person-to-person spread, but they are nowhere near as effective as a hard quarantine. When the outbreak is raging, the only way to get it back under control is to shut everything down and have people shelter in place.

    But, this doesn’t make the problem go away. It gets the problem down to a manageable level, where hospitals are not overwhelmed and perhaps testing and contact tracing can quickly identify and isolate future outbreaks. This was done in New York and Boston. It was done in Europe and Asia. But it is not being done in the Sun Belt, and it’s not even being done consistently in other regions where it proved effective.

    The main thing is that the virus will make a comeback as soon as we relax because we still have no immunity. So, even if the Sun Belt gets its act together and gets the virus under control, they can’t think anything is solved. As things stand, their outbreak is going to reinfect the regions that went through this once already.

    These are stubborn facts that won’t bend to wishful thinking and rhetoric. So, no, we can’t just reopen our schools. We can’t put kids on school buses and in indoor classrooms and not have outbreaks of the virus. We can’t go to bars or choir practice. It doesn’t work like that. The infection spreads wherever and whenever it has the chance. Medical outcomes may improve, but the complications of the disease are serious and lasting.

    If we want to get some semblance of normalcy, we have to do what other nations have done, and shut down until the infection rate is low enough to control through testing and contact tracing. We got halfway there and then we just gave up. It may be frustrating, but the answer isn’t complicated. We have to start over from scratch.

    That means people have to admit they were wrong. That means people who were misinformed have to get good information. And, obviously, it means that we have to replace the president. We can do that now, or we can wait until January.

    Do you want to know what waiting for January might look like?

    [New York City is and probably will remain the worst-case scenario. New York City has lost 23,353 lives. That’s 0.28 percent of the city’s population. If, as some antibody-prevalence surveys suggest, 20 percent of New Yorkers were infected, that’s an infection-fatality rate of more than 1.3 percent, which exceeds what the CDC or anyone else is planning for. To put it in the same terms discussed here, New York City saw 2,780 deaths per million people. A similar scenario across the South and West would kill over 550,000 more Americans in just a few months, moving the country to 680,000 dead. It is unthinkable, and yet, 130,000 deaths—the current national death toll—was once unthinkable, too.]

    Hopefully, better treatment will prevent the numbers from getting quite that high, but the price of leaving Trump in office until January 20, 2021 could be half a million lives. That’s why I said Nancy Pelosi would be doing the Republicans a favor if she impeached him again and gave them a chance to avoid renominating Trump as their standard bearer.

    It’s the only thing right now that can prevent a historic catastrophe.

  2. D July 16, 2020 5:47 pm

    ‘Dr. Fauci Made the Coronavirus Pandemic Worse by Lying About Masks’

    By Matt Novak (06.16.2020)
    https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/dr-fauci-made-the-coronavirus-pandemic-worse-by-lying-about-masks/ar-BB15zyW3

    Dr. Anthony Fauci has been hailed as a hero during the coronavirus pandemic, delivering thoughtful health advice while most members of the Trump regime have spread misinformation about covid-19. But there’s one area where Fauci let America down, hindering the public health response and giving the U.S. both the highest coronavirus case count and the worst recorded death toll in the world. Simply put, Fauci lied about whether masks were helpful in slowing the spread of the virus.

    Fauci was asked yesterday by financial news outlet The Street why the U.S. government didn’t promote masks early on during the pandemic. Fauci, who sits on the Trump regime’s zombie-like coronavirus task force, hinted that he knew masks worked, he just wanted any available masks to be saved for health care workers.

    “Well, the reason for that is that we were concerned the public health community, and many people were saying this, were concerned that it was at a time when personal protective equipment, including the N-95 masks and the surgical masks, were in very short supply,” Fauci said. “And we wanted to make sure that the people, namely the health care workers, who were brave enough to put themselves in a harm way, to take care of people who you know were infected with the coronavirus and the danger of them getting infected.”

    Fauci didn’t just fail to promote masks early on, he actively discouraged the use of masks, saying they didn’t work. Americans are now paying the price because too many people think masks are useless to combat the coronavirus. In reality, masks have been shown to help prevent the spread of covid-19, as the CDC now admits.

    All we need to do is look at the things that Fauci was saying back in February—a time before most Americans were taking the threat of covid-19 seriously and people like Donald Trump were assuming it was just a problem for the Chinese government.

    “There is no reason for anyone right now in the United States, with regard to coronavirus, to wear a mask,” Fauci told Spectrum News DC on February 14.

    It was something that Fauci would say repeatedly whenever he gave interviews in February, as the pandemic spread to countries like Germany, Italy, South Korea, Taiwan, and Japan. And Fauci may not have known it yet, but coronavirus was also spreading quickly in the U.S. By the end of February, over 20 countries had identified the coronavirus within their borders.

    Despite being remembered as level-headed during the early days of the crisis in the U.S., Fauci was incredibly slow to publicly recognize the threat from coronavirus. On February 17, he recalled stories of people asking whether it was safe to travel, ridiculing the idea that it might not be wise to get on a plane. But it was clear to anyone paying attention to news media outside of the U.S. that the coronavirus would soon be an international problem.

    First, a quick lesson in recent history: Human-to-human transmission of the novel coronavirus was confirmed on January 21, Chinese leader Xi Jinping said publicly that the health crisis from coronavirus “must be taken seriously,” on January 21, over 20 million people in China were put into lockdown on January 23, Disneyland locations in Hong Kong and Shanghai both closed in the last week of January, and countries like Australia were already setting up quarantine for some travelers in the first week of February. High school teachers returning to Australia from China were even giving classes by Zoom in early February, as Gizmodo reported at the time.

    By mid-February, the pandemic in Italy had gotten so bad that hospitals were becoming overwhelmed and case counts were rising exponentially. The Lombardy region of Italy went into lockdown and on February 23 grocery store shelves were stripped bare as people purchased food in a panic.

    With all of this going on around the world, February 17 was an incredibly late date to be making fun of people who were concerned about travel. But that’s precisely what Fauci did in the pages of USA Today.

    “I was getting calls from people in Sacramento saying, ‘Can I get on an airplane to go to Seattle?’” Fauci told USA Today on February 17. “Like, what? What does that got to do with anything?”

    We now know that the first identified American death from covid-19 was on February 6 in San Jose, California. And because the CDC wasted the entire month of February with faulty tests, no one knows just how widespread the disease already was in the U.S. during the first weeks of February. And it wasn’t just in February that Fauci dismissed the threat. As late as March, Fauci was still insisting that masks were bad for public health.

    “There’s no reason to be walking around with a mask,” Fauci told 60 Minutes on CBS during an interview that aired March 8. “When you’re in the middle of an outbreak, wearing a mask might make people feel a little bit better and it might even block a droplet, but it’s not providing the perfect protection that people think that it is. And, often, there are unintended consequences—people keep fiddling with the mask and they keep touching their face.”

    It’s no surprise that anti-mask advocates often use Fauci’s interview with 60 Minutes when they try to discredit masks as an effective tool on social media. And platforms like Facebook and Twitter are still filled with people who insist that you can actually hurt yourself by wearing a mask because you’re forced to inhale carbon dioxide. It’s a dumb and inaccurate argument, but it’s surprisingly common.

    Masks were the butt of jokes in early March, as people like Republican Rep. Matt Gaetz infamously wore a gas mask on the House floor while he went to vote on the $8.3 billion emergency spending bill passed on March 4. Gaetz and other Republicans appeared on Fox News to insist that it was all nothing but hype, something that some commentators like Laura Ingraham still claim, despite the fact that tens of thousands of Americans are still contracting the virus every single day.

    Other western countries like the UK were also initially skeptical of masks, leading to a terrible outbreak in England, exacerbated by a bungled response from Prime Minister Boris Johnson, a man who eventually survived his own bout with covid-19 after being moved to the ICU and given oxygen. The BBC, Britain’s public broadcaster, even aired anti-mask segments that insisted facemasks did nothing to stop the spread of coronavirus, including this one from March 22 that’s still available on YouTube.

    The UK currently has over 298,000 cases and at least 41,000 deaths, the fourth worst outbreak in the world. The U.S. has over 2.1 million cases and more than 116,000 deaths, with no signs of the pandemic slowing down.

    What would have happened if Fauci had been honest with Americans back in February, leveling with people that the U.S. didn’t have a good supply of facial coverings for health workers and that any N-95 masks should be reserved for doctors and nurses? Fauci could have explained that while masks worked, they needed to be reserved for health care professionals. The government was seizing most of the masks while they were shipped anyway, so it’s not like most masks were finding their way to stores.

    Instead, Fauci and other top government officials made fun of people who wanted to wear a mask. U.S. Surgeon General Jerome Adams even told people on February 29 to stop buying masks because they don’t work.

    “Seriously people- STOP BUYING MASKS!” Adams tweeted. “They are NOT effective in preventing general public from catching #Coronavirus, but if healthcare providers can’t get them to care for sick patients, it puts them and our communities at risk!”

    And, as a result, there was mass confusion when the government finally flipped and started to recommend masks for everyone, even if they had to make them at home. The CDC didn’t change its guidance on mask use until April 3, finally recommending that people wear masks, even if they’re homemade out of cloth.

    Fauci’s refusal to embrace masks has had a real impact on the way that Americans perceive the coronavirus fight. And, like everything today, even masks have become a partisan battleground. Roughly 70% of Democrats say they wear a mask “every time” they leave the house, according to a poll late last month by the Kaiser Family Foundation. Compare that with just 37% of Republicans.

    There have been subtle differences in the ways that each country has fought the coronavirus pandemic. New Zealand closed its borders and implemented a system to test residents. Kiwis then scaled up its track and trace program to identify close contacts, isolating them so that they didn’t get others sick. Taiwan also implemented track and trace procedures, but it put a special emphasis on masks to control community spread. Hong Kong put a heavy emphasis on “universal masking” as well, which is credited with keeping the spread of covid-19 to a minimum.

    Health officials in China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan even tried to warn western countries that they needed to wear masks, and it’s not the fault of the American people that they didn’t listen. Americans were hearing from their own health experts, not watching international news.

    “If you are going to a crowded place, put on a mask even if you are not ill because others may be, even if they have cough etiquette or sneeze etiquette, they may still get in touch with you,” Dr. Gabriel Leung, an expert on SARS and Director of the WHO Collaborating Center for Infectious Disease Epidemiology and Control, said at a press conference in Hong Kong on January 21, as Gizmodo reported at the time.

    But America’s own health officials, people like Anthony Fauci, were telling Americans that masks were useless. And Americans are going to pay the price in the months and years ahead, as there’s no guarantee that a covid-19 vaccine will even work if it’s developed. It doesn’t matter if his heart was in the right place in some effort to save masks for doctors and nurses, Fauci did real harm to public health in the United States.

    When all is said and done, Fauci might be remembered as a folk hero, but he sure has a lot of blood on his hands. And none of this is anywhere close to done.

  3. Ronald July 16, 2020 6:03 pm

    It is so simple to place blame and be accusatory, as if we all do not make mistakes. We all need to look in the mirror, and realize that we are all guilty of human error, and sometimes, it is, sadly, very costly!

    Yes, Dr. Fauci should have spoken up sooner, but he is human, and I do not see this as more than just a blunder, and while it has been deadly, a lot more of the blame lies with Donald Trump and his top advisors, as they created a situation that made it difficult to spread the truth about masks!

    If Trump had advocated masks, even in April, the pandemic would be a lot less deadly, so I say place the blame on him and his refusal to accept science!

    I still support Fauci for TIME Magazine Person of the Year!

  4. Pragmatic Progressive July 16, 2020 8:10 pm

    As Former Republican’s article points out at the beginning of the article, it was a new virus and scientists didn’t know as much about it as they do now.

  5. Princess Leia July 16, 2020 8:17 pm

    Our family ordered masks back in March. They had to be shipped from China because it was very hard to get them at that time. They weren’t as readily available then as they are now.

  6. Former Republican July 16, 2020 8:20 pm

    Any errors Fauci has made is a small anthill compared to Trump’s Mount Everest.

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