Republican politics-even beyond Donald Trump-has deteriorated into the gutter. The recent Congressional hostile grilling of the famed scientist, Dr. Anthony Fauci, is a far cry from doing the nation’s legislative business.
Dr. Fauci has clearly earned his standing in the medical world. As a physician with the National Institutes of Health (NIH), Fauci served in the American public health sector for more than fifty years and has acted as an advisor to every U.S. president since Ronald Reagan.
After completing his medical studies and residency in1968, Fauci joined the National Institutes of Health (NIH) as a clinical associate in the Laboratory of Clinical Investigation (LCI) in the
National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID). He became head of the LCI’s Clinical Physiology Section in 1974 and, in 1980, was appointed chief of the NIAID’s Laboratory of Immunoregulation. He became director of the NIAID in 1984, a position he held until he stepped down in 2022, while retaining his position as chief of that laboratory.
During his tenure as director of the NIAID, Dr. Fauci made contributions to HIV/AIDS research and other immunodeficiency diseases, both as a research scientist and as NIAID director. In 2003, an Institute for Scientific Information study indicated that, in the 20 years from 1983 to 2002, he was the 13th most-cited scientist among the 2.5 to 3 million authors in all disciplines worldwide who published articles in scientific journals during that period. Dr. Fauci was the world’s 10th most-cited HIV/AIDS researcher in the period 1996-2006.
Dr. Fauci was also one of the first people involved in the early, perilous days of AIDS research, before anyone could diagnose the cause of the disease that killed everyone it infected. At first, he was vilified by AIDS activists for leading this infectious disease agency, which was seemingly not doing much to address this deadly disease. Fauci engaged these activists in New York and San Francisco to look for ways NIAID could find a solution. He helped to make experimental AIDS treatment more accessible, and he led federal HIV/AIDS research and became a hero to many AIDS activists.
Dr. Fauci was a key architect of the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR), a partnership between the United States government and African countries that contributed to a transformation of health systems across the continent. President George W. Bush sent Fauci to Africa in 2002 to explore the possibilities of bringing lifesaving drugs and treatment to people in Africa that were under siege by the infectious disease, AIDS. Fauci came back with a plan for a $15 billion investment over five years that would be sustained, with bipartisan support, through multiple presidencies, that is, until Elon Musk and President Trump restructured the program and made severe cuts in its funding.
Several studies show the devastating effects of the Trump administration’s destruction of USAID, which had provided most of the funds for PEPFAR. USAID funding helped save 91 million lives between 2001 and 2021. The Lancet, the British medical journal, projected that ongoing global health funding cuts from the destruction of USAID by Musk and Trump could lead to a cumulative total of 9.4 to 14 million preventable deaths by 2030, including 4 million children under five years of age.
As an advisor to President Trump during the first year of the COVID pandemic, Dr. Fauci advocated for the CDC recommendations that everyone wear masks in public and that schools and other facilities close. In the Congressional hearing, Republican Senators lambasted Fauci with the old complaints of causing undue national harm by requiring masks and closing schools and other facilities, including many workplaces. And Republican Senators repeatedly invoked the old trope that Fauci’s agency funded the Chinese lab that leaked the virus, which Dr. Fauci covered up-although there is no conclusive proof that supports this as a cause of the outbreak.
As The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists reported in September of 2020, the first year of the COVID Pandemic, “the grotesque inadequacies of the Trump administration’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic have been well and widely documented . . . An examination of relevant national statistics shows that the Trump pandemic response has led to the unnecessary deaths of more than 100,000 Americans (of the first 205,000 COVID deaths).”
Yet, these Republican Senators support Trump, who caused lives to be lost, and vilify Dr. Fauci, who helped save millions of lives.
