MEDUSTORY

MEDUSTORY Anthony Fauci

ARTISTS: PERI REN & WENDY ZHANG

“Dr. Fauci’s work on the treatment of polyarteritis nodosa and granulomatosis with polyangiitis [is] among the most important advances in patient management in rheumatology over the previous 20 years. ”

- Stanford University Arthritis Centre

Quick Facts

Early lifE • Family ran a neighbourhood pharmacy HigH ScHool • Captained the high school basketball team, but his career ended early because of his short stature • Took four years of high school Latin, three of Greek, and two of French HobbiES • He enjoys fishing, playing tennis, and cooking • Relieves stress in his office by “shooting hoops” in a toy-sized net • One day as he was fishing on the Potomac River, he got so excited about a fish on the line that he flipped over the canoe

Born: Christmas Eve, 1940

Fauci starting writing prescriptions “by the time he was riding his bike”

Started medical school at Cornell 1962 Joined the National Institutes of Health 1968

Fauci firmly believed that “one gets unique insights into disease when [one] actually physically [interacts] with patients.” He explained that he would never tell healthcare workers to do something he would not do himself. During this outbreak, he went so far as to set aside a few hours on most days to help treat Ebola-infected healthcare workers. Beginning in 2015, Dr. Fauci showed exceptional leadership in handling the Zika virus epidemic as the head of NIAID. Fauci spearheaded small cohort studies performed by the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD) to help confirm that Zika was the cause of the affected individuals’ birth defects. The year is 1981 —Anthony Fauci is hard at work investigating abnormal cases of severe immunosuppression in individuals presenting with pneumonia and Kaposi’s sarcoma, when he realizes that this novel disease has the potential to “explode into a worldwide catastrophe.” From this point forward, his lab rapidly shifted away from their work on Wegener’s granulomatosis to elucidate the pathophysiology of AIDS, a term that Fauci helped coin. Fauci’s publication established the defect of CD4+ T-cells in HIV infections, and became the most cited paper in medicine in 1989.

Zika & Ebola

1981

2014-2015

Appointed Director of National Institute of Allergy & Infectious Diseases (NIAID) 1984

COVID-19

Following the emergence of SARS-CoV-2 in early 2020, U.S. President Trump announced the creation of the President’s Coronavirus Task Force, which included the ranks of Dr. Anthony Fauci. Since then, Fauci has been working to educate and inform the public about COVID-19, with hundreds of appearances online and in the news. Although he has not received support from all individuals, Fauci has stood as the key representative for the U.S. government on COVID-19 research. When commenting on his persistence, Dr. Fauci said in an interview: “When you are dealing with the White House, sometimes you have to say things one, two, three, and four times, and then it happens. So, I am going to keep pushing.”