Nina Pham was tired, weak and on heavy medication. The first person to contract the Ebola virus on American soil had been taken by ambulance to the National Institutes of Health, where she was being treated in the safest room of the country’s perhaps most prestigious medical facility. Mrs. Pham did not know who her doctor was. Anyway I wouldn’t have recognized him with his protective armor.
The stranger in a Hazmat suit that Mrs. Pham personally cared for six years ago is now the most well-known and recognized doctor in the country: Anthony Fauci.
“I just remember it was such a reassuring presence,” he said in an interview. “The fact that I had so much confidence gave me the strength and confidence in myself that I would gain that.”
2020 was the year that millions of Americans became familiar with Dr. Fauci’s way of sleeping. It began with the leading national infectious disease expert who heard reports of a mysterious and new type of coronavirus spreading in Wuhan, China. He ended up injecting himself into the camera to confirm a vaccine developed at a miraculous rate.
Dr. Fauci had priority in part because there was at least one thing in his life that didn’t change this year: the country’s most famous bureaucrat is still a practicing physician.
On Thursday, before turning the sleeve days before his 80th birthday, Dr. Fauci explained why he was vaccinated. He wanted the public to feel “extremely confident” that he was safe, he said. He also needed the shot to do his job. He remains a physician at the NIH Clinical Center who treats patients two or three days a week.
As many relied on Dr. Fauci, citing his experience for four decades helping to navigate the country through AIDS, bioterrorism, Ebola, swine flu and outbreaks of infectious diseases that could have been health crises, others resented his popularity and rebelled against his messages. He was periodically sidelined by President Trump and vilified by the president’s most ardent supporters to the point that he required security.
“I’ve never distinguished myself for being the one and only voice in this,” Dr. Fauci to Senator Rand Paul (R., Ky.) During a bitter hearing in Congress in May. “I am a scientist, doctor and public health official. I give advice based on the best scientific evidence. “
The key to understanding Dr. Fauci was a word easily ignored in this answer: doctor.
“He always told me that the most important thing for him was to take care of patients,” said John Gallin, longtime director of the NIH Clinical Center. “He thought the privilege of helping people when they were sick was the most rewarding and the last thing he would ever give up.”
Patient treatment is “an important part of my identity,” Dr. Fauci earlier this year.
Photo:
Alex Edelman – Swimming pool through CNP / Zuma Press
The pandemic consumed Dr. Fauci so much that he took breaks in his rounds from March. But for most of the past nine months, between briefings on the coronavirus task force, countless media appearances, and the occasional Instagram chat with a celebrity, Dr. Fauci made time to see patients in the hospital. Some of them had serious cases of the disease that was also fighting outside the hospital.
“Every once in a while, usually when I go home alone or when I run away with my wife, I say to myself, Boy, would I like to go back to the emergency room to take care of the patients?” Dr. Fauci said in an interview earlier this year. “This is such an important part of my identity.”
This balance he maintains between research and clinical work is the defining characteristic of his career. During his time at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, even before he was the director, Dr. Fauci has believed that treating one patient can help treat many patients. It is a lesson that was deepened to him at the beginning of his career.
“We were able to do something that people said can’t be done: you can’t do clinical medicine while doing very basic research,” he once told an NIH historian about his first influential work. . “This is absolutely wrong.”
This philosophy turned Dr. Fauci in a medical aspect. His race as a clinical researcher was once called an “endangered species” in the pages of the New England Journal of Medicine, and that was in the 1970s. You can be clinical or scientific, according to conventional wisdom, but not both.
Dr. Fauci disagreed. He was so committed to pursuing both that he refused to give up his practice when he became the director of NIAID. And he made clear the frantic first days of this pandemic that he planned to resume the regularly scheduled rounds on Wednesdays and Fridays as soon as possible. Then he did.
“Having Tony Fauci as a doctor,” said Steven Sharfstein, president emeritus of Maryland’s Sheppard Pratt health care system, “you were lucky.”
Dr. Sharfstein, who met daily with Dr. Fauci in the early 1980s, remembers him weeping openly over the death of a young AIDS patient they had been treating. His colleagues say Dr. Fauci has never forgotten that people are not data. “They were more than numbers in a study,” Dr. Sharfstein said.
Dr. Fauci with protective gear, as he helped treat a patient with Ebola in 2014.
Photo:
NIAID
One of her many patients in half a century of outbreaks, epidemics and pandemics was Nina Pham, a nurse in Dallas, Texas, who helped care for a man who died of Ebola in October 2014. Two days later , the fever increased. Take her to the NIH, Dr. Fauci said.
Mrs. Pham was isolated in the hospital’s Special Clinical Studies Unit, a biocontainment facility built after the Sept. 11 attacks, and there was fear in the air when she arrived. As director of the Medicare-eligible institute, Dr. Fauci was not a natural choice to care for a patient with Ebola. But for him, it was a no-brainer.
“I didn’t like the idea of asking my staff to put themselves at risk of becoming infected if I wasn’t willing to do it myself,” he once said.
Dr. Fauci did her best to make her family feel comfortable in deeply uncomfortable times, she said. Before others his age had to be taught how to zoom, he learned FaceTime so they could be in regular communication. He still emails regularly with patients in the 1970s, even with the inbox flooded in 2020. But the most reassuring thing he did for Mrs. Pham happened before she remembered meeting him. Shortly after Mrs. Pham’s admission, Dr. Fauci shared a message with the world: she predicted she would be an Ebola survivor.
Eight days after she was taken to the hospital, Mrs. Pham came out with a hug from Dr. Fauci.
“I trusted him with my life,” said Mrs. Pham, “and I would do it again.”
But even when she was discharged, as promised by Dr. Fauci, her doctor did not end her. A few months after the Ebola fright, a report appeared in the journal Annals of Internal Medicine about Mrs. Pham, who is now a clinical consultant for an insurance broker. Dr. Fauci was one of the authors.
His team had collected enough data about his case to turn a serious hospitalization into scientific knowledge. They saved lives as they learned to save more lives.
“That’s essentially what we do here,” Dr. Fauci said.
Write to Ben Cohen at [email protected] and Louise Radnofsky at [email protected]
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