If any heroes emerge from the COVID-19 outbreak, one of them will likely be a man widely considered one of the heroes of the AIDS epidemic – Anthony Fauci.
Fauci, who has been unafraid to speak the truth about the new coronavirus strain and counter the misinformation put out by Donald Trump, has been director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases since 1984, but he was dealing with AIDS almost from the time it was identified.
He joined NIAID, which is part of the National Institutes of Health, as a senior researcher in 1972, after completing medical school and his residency. “Over a period of 10 years, from 1972 to 1981, I was a rather successful clinical immunologist-type person with a clinical interest in infectious disease,” he told the Science Speaks blog in 2011. Then he started reading about gay men in major American cities developing Pneumocystis pneumonia, something seen in cancer patients and people with severely depressed immune systems.
When he read the second report on the outbreak of PCP in gay men who seemed healthy otherwise, “It was the first time in my medical career I actually got goose pimples,” he told the blog. “I no longer dismissed it as a curiosity. There was something very wrong here. This was really a new microbe of some sort, acting like a sexually transmitted disease.” He began treating and doing research on the men with these infections.
“As soon as I began seeing these patients with this mystery disease with no name, I decided I needed to change my career direction,” Fauci told The Lancet last year. “My mentors were shocked that I was abandoning a promising career, but my priority was admitting these unusual patients, studying them, and hopefully helping them. I had gone from saving the lives of people with autoimmune diseases to admitting patients with a virus with a near 100 percent mortality. The frustration and bleakness of those years was almost suffocating. Those were the darkest years of my career.”