On Call: A Doctor's Journey in Public Service

by Anthony Fauci

That experience taught me crucial lessons. Just because no one had ever done something like this before did not mean it could not be done. I also realized how important it was to cultivate relationships with people who are in a position to make things happen. Importantly, to win over the skeptics, I learned that the cause for which you are advocating

must be legitimate, worthy, and not motivated by self-interest; your arguments must be evidence based; and you must be truthful and consistent in your reasons for asking for resources. People quickly see through anything less than that.

When a person is treated with two or more drugs that individually are effective, the virus finds itself “boxed in” and ultimately suppressed, so long as the patient continuously takes the combination of drugs.

You can watch them all in action in the Academy Award–nominated documentary film How to Survive a Plague, directed by David France.

It was easy to understand that it could be tempting to tell the president or his staff what you thought they wanted to hear so as not to disappoint them. That is exactly why it was crucial to be truthful and consistent in providing information based purely on scientific evidence and best judgment, and nothing else.

I would get to meet the man responsible for the sugar cubes saturated with polio vaccine that had protected millions and millions of people from contracting polio throughout the world.

The era of highly effective and lifesaving anti-HIV treatment had begun. AIDS was no longer an inevitable death sentence.

By 2007, more than ten years after effective combination anti-HIV therapy became available,

Without a doubt, this represents one of the greatest achievements in medical research and implementation in the history of medicine.

This high-level suppression of the virus was ultimately shown to totally eliminate the possibility that a person with HIV would pass the infection on to an uninfected sexual partner. HIV Denialism An insidious phenomenon that reared its destructive head early in the AIDS saga was what came to be known as HIV denialism:

the belief, contradicted by overwhelming and conclusive medical evidence, that HIV does not cause AIDS.

I could not help feel an even greater conviction that it was our moral responsibility to help the wonderful people of this region who were suffering so greatly.

There’s an old quote by Hippocrates that goes like this: “It is more important to know what sort of person has a disease than to know what sort of disease a person has.”

An immunogen that continually changes is in the correct shape only part of the time. It needs to be set or fixed in the right shape to do its job.

Moderna on a vaccine platform called mRNA. It is highly adaptable and can be ramped up quickly and modified as viruses evolve into new variants. This was a sea change from the slow and arduous classic way of influenza vaccine development that includes isolating the virus and growing it in fertilized eggs,

the mRNA process is faster and more precise. When cells in the body make proteins, they do so by sending coding messages (m) to the complex protein-producing apparatus of the cell. The instructions in that message come from RNA, which provides the cell with the information it needs to make the correct protein.

“The patient is no mere collection of symptoms, signs, disordered functions, damaged organs, and disturbed emotions. The patient is human, fearful, and hopeful, seeking relief, help, and reassurance.”

“Illegitimi non carborundum.”