On Call: A Doctor's Journey in Public Service

by Anthony Fauci

Influenza vaccines typically have between 40 and 60 percent effectiveness at best in any given flu season. Often, it is much less. The fact that they were projecting at least 90 percent effectiveness for the COVID vaccine was astonishing.

Everything that Denise and I witnessed in our formative years was geared toward the concept of consideration for and taking care of others. Our father taught us early in life that because we were fortunate, it was our responsibility to help people when we could and making money should not be a primary goal in life.

My basic research laboratory project was involved in the newly emerging field of human immunology, the study of the component of the body that protects one against attacks by infectious diseases and cancers.

By 2023, there would be more than eighty-six million HIV infections throughout the world with forty million deaths.

On September 24, 1982, the CDC used the term “acquired immunodeficiency syndrome”

In 1983, the French scientists Luc Montagnier and Françoise Barré-Sinoussi and their colleagues at the Institut Pasteur in Paris discovered the virus HIV, and in 1984, Gallo definitively showed that it was indeed the cause of the disease AIDS.

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.

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

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.