Ever since Dr. Anthony Fauci appeared in front of the U.S. Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs, my social media feed has been inundated with scenes of the past. Doctors and nurses post picture after picture of their yellow-gowned bodies or N95-covered faces, all with the same message: if this wasn’t you during the COVID pandemic, no one cares what you think about Fauci.
These healthcare workers, serving images of themselves to the internet and its inevitable wrath, are providing testimony where Fauci will not. As he pleaded the Fifth Amendment to each of the questions, those who are not compelled to court feel compelled to something else. Sara Jennings, for example, a pediatric nurse who goes by @nursepeeps on Threads, posted pictures of herself in mask, goggles and face shield and wrote:
“Y’all forgot awfully fast about the days where so many died we ran out of body bags. I wrapped a tiny child in Home Depot plastic sheeting and carried her into the refrigerator truck. I wore garbage bags for PPE and sutured my one issued mask back together when it broke. So many died, my hospital forced ICU nurses to call in to grief counselors. So shut it with your Fauci hate.”
I remember, too. I was an intern, only just beginning to understand the hospital’s tunnel system when COVID-19 hit. My education on the South Side of Chicago in obstetrics and gynecology was fundamentally shaped by the pandemic. As I learned to deliver babies, I also learned to quickly don and doff personal protective equipment. As I learned to diagnose signs of fibroids on an MRI, I also learned to diagnose signs of respiratory failure in a woman who was pregnant and breathing hard.
That education did not stop in the hospital. My relationships, all of our relationships, were changed by the pandemic. A 3-month-old flirtation became my future husband when, on the eve of lockdown, we exchanged “I love yous” for the first time. I didn’t touch my mother for over a year.
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What healthcare workers want the world to see with these posts is, on the surface, a defiant support of Fauci. Indeed, they have medical expertise (like Fauci), and experience (like Fauci). But really, I think it’s about exhibiting and reliving our fear. That fear still lives so close to the surface, that, like a caged animal, we are always ready to pounce.
Unfortunately, it seems that Fauci’s critics are motivated by fear as well. They saw the vaccine as an untested threat and a dangerous oversight. Let me be clear: They are wrong. The COVID-19 vaccine saved 3 million American lives. Fauci will be remembered as one of the great heroes of public health and modern medicine.
But here is the problem with the Fauci outrage on all sides: It forgets about the hope.
When the COVID-19 vaccines were announced, we in the medical community felt, for the first time in nine desperate months, the first sliver of hope. My hospital had a lottery system, and by some miracle of luck, I was among the first to be vaccinated. I asked the nurse to take my picture as the needle went in, and it’s that picture I have been thinking of these past weeks, as my colleagues post image after image of their traumatized faces.
In the photo, I am masked and seated, with a volunteer bent over my bared left shoulder. I’d just come off a night shift, and my eye bags have eye bags, such was my fatigue. But I’m smiling back tears of unmitigated hope.
All of us who survived the pandemic — and this is all of us who remember it — carry its scars. No one has a right to use those scars to litigate the past. But we’d all do well to remember the moments of hope that dotted the unbearable. And we might just find that Fauci, with his poise and equanimity, was responsible for more than a few of them.
Dr. Alessandra Hirsch is a writer and assistant professor of obstetrics and gynecology at Columbia University Medical Center in New York City. She has written a memoir about her time in residency during the COVID-19 pandemic.
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