Nina Pham was tired, weak, and heavily medicated. The first person to contract the Ebola virus on American soil was taken by an ambulance to the National Institutes of Health, where she was treated in the safest room of the nation’s most prestigious medical institutions. Mrs. Pham did not know who her doctor was. He wouldn’t have recognized him in his protective armor anyway.
The stranger in a heavy suit who took personal care of Mrs. Pham six years ago is now the country’s best-known and most renowned doctor: Anthony Fauci.
“I just remember it was such a calming presence,” she said in an interview. “The fact that he was so confident gave me the strength and confidence that I was going to overcome that.”
2020 was the year in which millions of Americans became acquainted with Dr. Fauci’s behavior at the nightstand. It started with the nation’s foremost expert on infectious diseases, hearing reports of a mysterious, new type of coronavirus spread in Wuhan, China. It ended with his injection into the room to guarantee a vaccine developed at a miraculous rate.
Dr. Fauci had priority in part because there was at least one thing in his life that has not changed this year: the country’s most famous bureaucrat is still a practicing physician.
On Thursday, while wrapping his sleeve a few 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 a shot to do his job. He remains a attending physician at the NIH Clinical Center, which treats patients two or three days a week.
As many have expressed faith in Dr. Fauci, citing his four decades of experience, helping to navigate the country through AIDS, bioterrorism, Ebola, swine flu and outbreaks of infectious diseases that could have been health crises, others -they felt dissatisfied with his popularity and criticized his messages. He was regularly marginalized by President Trump and denigrated by the president’s most ardent supporters to the point where he demanded security.
“I never made myself the only voice in this regard,” Dr. Fauci told Sen. Rand Paul (R., Ky.) During a bitter congressional hearing in May. “I am a scientist, doctor and public health official. I offer advice in accordance with the best scientific evidence. “
The key to understanding Dr. Fauci was an easy word to overlook in this answer: doctor.
“He always told me that the most important thing for him was patient care,” said John Gallin, longtime director of the NIH Clinical Center. “He believed that the privilege of helping people when they were sick was the most rewarding and the last thing they would ever give up.”
Treating patients is “an important part of my identity,” Dr. Fauci said earlier this year.
Photo:
Alex Edelman – Pool Via Cnp / Zuma Press
The pandemic consumed Dr. Fauci so much that he took breaks from his March tours. But in most of the past nine months – between information about the coronavirus workforce, countless media appearances and the occasional Instagram chat with a celebrity – Dr. Fauci has taken the time to see patients in the hospital. Some of them had severe cases of the disease they were fighting outside of the hospital.
“From time to time, usually when I drive home alone or run away with my wife, I say to myself, boy, I want to go back to the emergency room, taking care of the patients,” Dr. Fauci said in an interview at the beginning. this year. “This is such an important part of my identity.”
This balance that he maintained between research and clinical work is the defining feature of his career. As long as he was at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, even before he was director, Dr. Fauci believed that treating one patient could help treat many patients. It is a lesson that was dug into him early in his career.
“We managed to do something that people said you can’t do: you can’t do clinical medicine while doing basic research,” he once told an NIH historian about his first influential work. “It’s absolutely wrong.”
This philosophy made Dr. Fauci a medical issue. His race as a clinical investigator was once called an “endangered species” in the New England Journal of Medicine – and that was in the 1970s. You could be a clinician or a scientist, according to conventional wisdom, but not both.
Dr. Fauci disagreed. He was so committed to pursuing both that he refused to give up the practice when he became director of NIAID. And he stated in the frantic first days of this pandemic that he intended to resume his regularly scheduled rounds on Wednesday and Friday as soon as possible. Then he did it.
“Having Tony Fauci as a doctor,” said Steven Sharfstein, president of Maryland’s Sheppard Pratt Health 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 were treating. His colleagues say that Dr. Fauci never forgot that people are not given. “There were more than numbers in one study,” said Dr. Sharfstein.
Dr. Fauci in protective gear, while helping to treat an Ebola patient in 2014.
Photo:
NIAID
One of her many patients in a half-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, her fever increased. Take her to the NIH, said Dr. Fauci.
Ms. Pham was isolated in the hospital’s Special Clinical Trials 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 an Ebola patient. But it was crazy for him.
“I didn’t like the idea of asking my employees to take the risk of getting infected if I wasn’t willing to do it myself,” he once said.
Dr. Fauci has struggled to make her family comfortable in deeply uncomfortable times, she said. Before others his age could be taught how to grow, he learned FaceTime so he could be in regular communications. She still sends emails regularly to patients from the 1970s – even to the flooded e-mail box in 2020. But the most reassuring thing she did for Mrs. Pham happened before she remembered meeting her. he. Shortly after Mrs. Pham was admitted, Dr. Fauci shared a message with the world: He predicted she would be a Ebola survivor.
Eight days after she was thrown into 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 Dr. Fauci promised, her doctor did not finish with her. A few months after the Ebola outbreak, a report about Ms Pham, who is now a clinical consultant for an insurance broker, appeared in the Annals of Internal Medicine. Dr. Fauci was one of the authors.
Her team collected enough data about her case to turn a terrible hospitalization into scientific knowledge. They saved lives while learning how to save more lives.
“That’s basically what we’re doing here,” said Dr. Fauci.
Write to Ben Cohen at [email protected] and Louise Radnofsky at [email protected]
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