How history will remember the Fauci era

AIDS. SARS. H1N1 influenza. Ebola. Covid-19. Monkeypox. Infectious disease outbreaks often come and go, though some persist over the long haul, much like the man who has occupied the campus of the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland, as director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases since 1984: Dr Anthony Stephen Fauci.

I came of age in the 1980s — the age of AIDS — but in a way, this was the beginning of the age of Tony, as many call him, because he’d be there through all of it, for each and every one of the nation’s adventures with infectious diseases. The telegenic, calm guide with the unmistakably Brooklyn accent took heat from AIDS activists as they descended on the National Institutes of Health’s Building 31 in 1990. He hugged Nina Pham, a Dallas nurse, in front of cameras after she recovered from Ebola, to soothe a nation’s fears about the virus in 2014. He was a deadpan presence in the background of President Donald Trump’s news conferences on Covid-19. He advised presidents since Ronald Reagan on what to do in the face of these scourges.

As the Yale historian Frank Snowden has noted, from the middle of the 20th century until the advent of AIDS — during what he called “an age of hubris” — scientists had largely declared mission accomplished in terms of the battle against infectious diseases, as antibiotics put microbial threats distinctly into the past. If AIDS was the comeuppance for our arrogance as scientists, over the years, rightly or wrongly, Dr Fauci gave the impression that science could handle these challenges, eventually, through the methodological, step-by-step work of research and the application of what we learned expeditiously into the clinic, into the field.