Like all humans, Dr. Anthony Fauci certainly has his faults.  But if it were up to me he’d have a room full of medals and the enforced respect of everyone in the world. 

He was at the front lines of slaying HIV-AIDS and COVID-19 into manageability territory over a series of many decades.   

Not with social media posts and TV sound bites, but with actual science. 

As a gay man of a certain age, I remember the righteous and justified anger and vitriol we initially met him with during the AIDS crisis. 

A time when the Reagan administration refused to see its urgency and blithely turned its back on mass death.

And how, as leader of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) at the time, he initially followed suit.

But what he didn’t do was turn a blind eye to ever-evolving facts.  Or nurse his bruised ego by trying to have his critics arrested and put in jail via a kangaroo court. 

Instead, he listened, learned and modified his opinions and the direction of his agency.  And went on to use medicine to save millions of future lives while helping to open the doors for life-extending treatments of so many others.

He did much the same with COVID, contrary to what Sen. Rand Paul and his blustering band of bull sh-tting bullies were saying this week during cross-examination that told more about the prosecutors than it did about the witness.

When your big reveal is that the person on “trial” gushed in his diary about meeting a movie star, then I and every other teenage girl would have been thrown in the slammer long ago. 

Along with more than a few boys and adult man-boys masquerading as public servants.

To the latter point, just equate bragging rights and personally autographed photos as the equivalent of a diary entry.

As for the supposed medical inconsistencies and accusations they were spewing, it quickly became apparent that not a one understood how proper research and medical treatments and cures and proper protocols work. 

And how pandemics go.

Take it from me, science is not a straight line.

How do I know that?

Well, I had the unfortunate great fortune to be treated for a serious medical condition that required me to go for seven weeks of radiation treatment five days a week in the basement of one of the best hospitals in L.A. in March, April and May of 2020. 

Also known as the very height of  the COVID-19 pandemic.

One week no one was wearing masks and you could take a loved one in with you.  Another you masked up and wore gloves and came and went solo.  Then it was full face paraphernalia and isolated waiting areas.  Then single cubicles, constant wipe-downs and ID checks around every corner by scary looking people with face guard body armor and clipboards. 

Supplies were plentiful, then low, then scarce.  Medical personnel the same.  Just when you’d get to know someone they’d disappear, never to be seen again.  You didn’t dare ask what happened to them for fear that someone would tell you the truth.

But then you did because you’re a human being and you wanted to know. 

So you could at least tell someone who knew them to send them your best.  

Because you knew they were at the front lines and did everything they could to help you. 

And in their own small way, did help you.

That’s not the way it seems to work for Sen. Paul and the bro-y Bot Boy Senators playing junior high level Perry Mason at Dr. Fauci’s expense. 

Here’s a link to an article from NPR that summarizes it.

It also quotes numerous experts about the risks of a hysterical non-science based,, vindictive approach to medical treatment and what it bodes for all of our futures.

I’m too disgusted with the know-nothing MAGA-ness of it all to enumerate.

All I can do is write about it and ask anyone who reads this and happens to know the Good Doctor, that I send my best…

And to say thank you.

For real.

Dido – “Thank You”

P.S. – For a palette cleanser, I turned off the news most of the rest of the week and caught up with a little indie horror flick called Obsession that has grossed close to half a BILLION dollars at the box-office, and a big budgeted Spielberg-directed horror thriller called Disclosure Day that has taken in half that amount.  There’s a lot to say on both.  At a later date.