Dr. Fauci was thrust into the spotlight in January of 2020 as well as being appointed to lead the task force for the handling of the Corona Virus 19 and subsequently, has taken a lot of heat to include a lot of bashing about his intelligence.
The COVID-19 virus as everyone knows originated – discovered, as the original place of birth was in another infectious disease laboratory in another city in China – in Wuhan’s Huanan live animal market, China.
It’s worth pointing out here that the original lab was capable of handling this virus – proper isolation, PPE, etc.
I have chosen to call Dr. Fauci “The Good Doctor” as I believe it fits better than being labeled as he has been since January. The term “The Good Doctor” is a cliché referring to any physician.
However, the earliest origination that I have found dates back to Dr. Samuel Johnson, 1709–1784 and a century before Johnson’s birth. A biography of Thomas Fuller, 1608–1661 attached to a three-volume set of his works dated 1662, refers to Fuller as “The Good Doctor” more than a dozen times, but it seems to have been written sometime in the 1800s.
Recently, I stumbled on a post on Facebook that led me to wonder about a few things. One. Is it true? We all know that a good percentage of the things posted on Facebook tend to be Social Emotionally Engineered to rial ones emotions, causing distress, which leads to a chain reaction and a world populous ranting and raving about something that has zero value or truth to it. This tactic has been used since the early days of personal computing and what led to the I Love You virus spreading around the world in a matter of hours. Social Emotionally Engineering can be attributed to a lot of what I feel is wrong within today’s society.
As I’m sure most of us have heard something or the other on Facebook and then proceeded to carry it with us for discussion elsewhere as well as seeking someone of some sorts of authority to answer the question for us. Is it true? As you can imagine, the people of authorial answers, are inundated with the same questions, day-in, day-out. I don’t want to get to involved with Social Engineering for this post as that is not the topic that made me chose to write this article, nor do I want to discuss the corona virus as I have written about that subject six times now.
Dr. Anthony Fauci was born December 24, 1940 – yes, that makes him 80 years old – in Brooklyn, New York City, New York to Stephen Fauci and Eugenia Fauci, owners of a pharmacy. His father was a Columbia University trained pharmacist, his mother and sister Denise worked the register. The first thing that I want to point out here is, while America, or should I say the new generation that is not quite sure what gender they are, are bashing The Good Doctor, I will ask “when is the last time you went to the store and forgot to buy something that you intended to buy?” Hopefully that concludes today’s lesson on not bashing the super intelligent.
Any person that has been through more years of university than most can count can tell you, you become scatter-brained by all of the knowledge that you have pumped into your head and are now struggling to retain for later use, as well as all of the knowledge that you are acquiring along the way in your chosen career.
The Good Doctor began his career in the field of being a physician and immunologist (Immunology is a branch of biology that covers the study of immune systems in all organisms. Immunology charts, measures, and contextualizes the physiological functioning of the immune system in states of both health and diseases; malfunctions of the immune system in immunological disorders, such as autoimmune diseases, hypersensitivities, immune deficiency, and transplant rejection and the physical, chemical, and physiological characteristics of the components of the immune system).
In 1968, The Good Doctor joined the National Institutes of Health as a clinical associate in the Laboratory of Clinical Investigation at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. In 1974, he became Head of the Clinical Physiology Section, of Clinical Investigation, and in 1980 was appointed Chief of the Laboratory of Immunoregulation. In 1984, he became director of NIAID, a position he still holds as of 2020. In that role he has the responsibility for an extensive research portfolio of basic and applied research on infectious and immune-mediated illnesses. He has turned down several offers to lead his agency’s parent, the NIH, and has been at the forefront of U.S. efforts to contend with viral diseases like HIV/AIDS, SARS, the 2009 swine flu pandemic, MERS, Ebola and now COVID-19.
He played a significant role in the early 2000s in creating the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief and in driving development of bio-defense drugs and vaccines following the 9/11 terrorist attacks. The Good Doctor has been a visiting professor at many medical centers, and has received thirty honorary doctorates – now I’m am not a scientist, but I am certain, without attending the traditional classroom, obtaining Thirty Honorary Doctorates is nothing to sneeze at! and would certainly make for some fascinating wall art – from universities in the U.S. and abroad. He has also been advisor to every U.S. president since Ronald Reagan and hence why this writing is taking place today. He has served in his capacity for more than fifty years. To me, this represents a lot of scatter-brain time.
The Good Doctor, former chief resident from 1971-1972, was bestowed the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civil award, in recognition for his efforts to advance the understanding and treatment of HIV/AIDS from former president George Bush Jr. on June 19, 2008.
So where is all of this going? The answer is simply complex.
You see, The Good Doctor has been advising presidents for many years, it should not be a surprise that The Good Doctor would inform president Trump that he could be expected to face backlash over a new mysterious virus.
In the days long before Mr. Trump became president, President George W. Bush was on vacation in the summer of 2005 at his ranch in Crawford, Texas, when he began flipping through an advance reading copy of a new book about the 1918 flu pandemic. He couldn’t put it down.
When he returned to Washington, he called his top homeland security adviser into the Oval Office and gave her the galley of historian John M. Barry’s “The Great Influenza,” which told the chilling tale of the mysterious plague that “would kill more people than the outbreak of any other disease in human history.” “You’ve got to read this,” Fran Townsend remembers the president telling her. “Look, this happens every 100 years. We need a national strategy.”
Thus was born the nation’s most comprehensive pandemic plan. A playbook that included diagrams for a global early warning system, funding to develop new, rapid vaccine technology, and a robust national stockpile of critical supplies, such as face masks and ventilators, Townsend said.
The effort was intense over the ensuing three years, including exercises where cabinet officials gamed out their responses, but it was not sustained. Large swaths of the ambitious plan were either not fully realized or entirely shelved as other priorities and crises took hold. But elements of that effort have formed the foundation for the national response to the corona virus pandemic underway right now.
“Despite politics, despite changes, when a crisis hits, you pull what you’ve got off the shelf and work from there,” Townsend said. When Bush first told his aides he wanted to focus on the potential of a global pandemic, many of them harbored doubts. “My reaction was — I’m buried. I’m dealing with counter-terrorism. Hurricane season. Wildfires. I’m like, ‘What?’” Townsend said. “He said to me, ‘It may not happen on our watch, but the nation needs the plan.’”
Over the ensuing months, cabinet officials got behind the idea. Most of them had governed through the Sept. 11 terror attacks, so events considered unlikely but highly-impactful had a certain resonance.
“There was a realization that it’s no longer fantastical to raise scenarios about planes falling from the sky, or anthrax arriving in the mail,” said Tom Bossert, who worked in the Bush White House and went on to serve as a homeland security adviser in the Trump administration. “It was not a novel. It was the world we were living in.”
According to Bossert, who is now an ABC News contributor, Bush did not just insist on preparation for a pandemic. He was obsessed with it. “He was completely taken by the reality that that was going to happen,” Bossert said.
In a November 2005 speech at the National Institutes of Health, Bush laid out proposals in granular detail, describing with stunning prescience how a pandemic in the United States would unfold. Among those in the audience was Dr. Anthony Fauci, the leader of the current crisis response, who was then and still is now the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.
“A pandemic is a lot like a forest fire,” Bush said at the time. “If caught early it might be extinguished with limited damage. If allowed to smolder, undetected, it can grow to an inferno that can spread quickly beyond our ability to control it.”
The president recognized that an outbreak was a different kind of disaster than the ones the federal government had been designed to address. “To respond to a pandemic, we need medical personnel and adequate supplies of equipment,” Bush said. “In a pandemic, everything from syringes to hospital beds, respirators masks and protective equipment would be in short supply.”
Bush told the gathered scientists that they would need to develop a vaccine in record time. “If a pandemic strikes, our country must have a surge capacity in place that will allow us to bring a new vaccine on line quickly and manufacture enough to immunize every American against the pandemic strain,” he said.
Bush set out to spend $7 billion building out his plan. His cabinet secretaries urged their staffs to take preparations seriously. The government launched a website, www.pandemicflu.gov, that is still in use today. But as time passed, it became increasingly difficult to justify the continued funding, staffing and attention, Bossert said.
“You need to have annual budget commitment. You need to have institutions that can survive any one administration. And you need to have leadership experience,” Bossert said. “All three of those can be effected by our wonderful and unique form of government in which you transfer power every four years.”
Then president Bush’s remarks from years ago still resonate. “If we wait for a pandemic to appear,” he warned, “it will be too late to prepare. And one day many lives could be needlessly lost because we failed to act today.”
The moral of this story is. While the many countries are attempted to bash our current president and The Good Doctor, they have all forgotten that they were warned many years ago and that congress through it’s difficulties to maintain a single thought for more than twenty-four hours, failed to maintain what should have been a plan that would have knocked this current pandemic to its knees months ago.