“You want to make sure that, in your desire to get back to normal, that we don’t leapfrog over some of the benchmarks we need to reach in order to get to the next stage,” said Dr. Anthony Fauci.
Since 1984, he’s been at the table and helping lead the fight to keep Americans healthy and virus-free. Now in the era of the COVID-19 pandemic, Dr. Anthony FauciTrusted Source has become the voice and symbol of both promise and resolve in the battle against the new coronavirus, Healthline has reported.
Dr. Fauci sat down with Healthline for an exclusive interview on Friday to talk about the COVID-19 pandemic, working with six presidential administrations, and what he does to deal with pandemic stress.
Dr. Anthony Fauci said, it’s interesting we are speaking today. On June 4, 1981, the first report of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention morbidity and mortality weekly report showed that five gay men, all from Los Angeles, had presented with a strange new syndrome. In 1984, when I became director of [the NIAID], it was the very beginning of an outbreak that we didn’t fully understand the full implications of. We thought incorrectly that it was restricted to the gay community and to injecting drug users.
We didn’t realize that throughout the world and in Africa it was bubbling up as a mostly heterosexual disease, which right now, today, fast-forward, more than 80 million people have been infected, more than 37 million people have died, and there are 37 million people living with HIV. That was my first interaction with the presidency, with the administration of Ronald Reagan.
So it wasn’t the explosive, immediate nature of COVID-19, which essentially impacts, directly or indirectly, everybody in the world because everyone feels they are at risk. That’s different than with HIV, when it was clear it was defined by a risk behavior and not something that was completely out of your control, like respiratory illness.
And then we had the anthrax attacks and the pandemic flu, and we had Ebola and Zika, so for better or worse I’ve had the opportunity to be involved in six different administrations through outbreaks, some of which were much more severe than others; some of which were threatening, but they didn’t really impact us like Ebola. You know, there were headlines, but there was never really any risk in the United States that there would be an outbreak. ♦
