D.C. Declares Dr. Anthony S. Fauci Day

Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases for over three decades, and public face of the fight against COVID-19 in the United States, is being honored in Washington, D.C. Thursday with a declaration in his honor by Mayor Muriel Bowser.

Dr. Fauci celebrates his 80th birthday on Christmas Eve, 2020. He’s spent the year helping Americans understand and implement the precautions that help slow the spread of COVID-19 and minimize the toll the disease takes on the nation before vaccines and herd immunity get the virus under control. In D.C., Mayor Muriel Bowser has issued a proclamation celebrating him and his work.

Happy Dr. Fauci Day, DC.

We are incredibly proud to count him among the many DC residents who are sacrificing so much to keep our communities healthy and safe pic.twitter.com/lv4RutMXNB

— Mayor Muriel Bowser (@MayorBowser) December 24, 2020

While Dr. Fauci has been a public figure for decades and has been a part of the battles against other infectious diseases, not many have been quite as polarized and stigmatized as COVID-19. He’s had to hire security to protect his family, as the president and surrogates have downplayed the virus and attacked anyone proposing strong protective measures.

In fact, he says that it’s even worse — by “an order of magnitude” — than the attacks he faced during the HIV/AIDS crisis, which was also politicized as an attack on the LGBT community.

Through it all, Dr. Fauci has managed to stay apolitical, barely responding to attacks by elected leaders, though he did warn in October that if Donald Trump’s re-election campaign didn’t stop misrepresenting him in their ads, using deceptive clips to make it seem that Fauci was praising the administration’s response to the pandemic, it “might backfire.”