Last April, Dr. Anthony Fauci started receiving death threats against him and his family. The threats against the nation’s top infectious disease expert prompted the department of Health and Human Services to provide protective services for Dr. Fauci. Later in an interview with Dr. Sanjay Gupta, on August 2020 Fauci said: “Getting death threats for me and my family and harassing my daughters to the point where I have to get security is just, I mean, it’s amazing”. Dr. Fauci has championed public health for more than 4 decades. The local and international community knew Dr. Fauci long before the pandemic mostly because of his fight against other deadly diseases including AIDS, Zika, and Ebola among others. For the medical community that looked at Fauci as a leading scientist and an honest man with integrity, this was outrageous.
Not surprisingly, Dr. Fauci showed us what a real stoic does. On April 2, 2020 Dr. Fauci responded to the death threats to his family to Savannah Guthrie “I’ve chosen this life…there are things about that are sometimes disturbing but you just focus on the job you have to do and put all that other stuff aside and just forge ahead.”
In another interview, published in the New York Times on January 24, 2021 https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/24/health/fauci-trump-covid.html, he concluded that “Even if I wasn’t very effective in changing everybody’s minds, the idea that they knew that nonsense could not be spouted without me pushing back on it, I felt was important. I think in the big picture, I felt it would be better for the country and better for the cause for me to stay, as opposed to walking away.”
The main idea in this brief summary about Dr.’s Anthony Fauci management of threats is that he was able to manage his anger under pressure. Yes, he was angry. Anybody would be. But how does he respond? Not yelling at the journalist, not quitting his job, not threatening back. He stoically, calmly (temperance) goes back always to his goal: keeping the American people safe. That was his responsibility as a physician and scientist. Dr. Fauci said in another interview on Australian television on November 11 (The Hill): “Well, it’s obviously been very stressful. To deny that would be to deny reality. But I’ve gotten through it by really focusing like a laser beam on exactly what my goal is.” Dr. Fauci knows that he can’t control other’s actions. He can’t change others people’s minds. He knows his responsibility and calmy keeps doing his job.
As Epictetus said in 135 A.C. “Some things are in our control and others not. Things in our control are opinion, pursuit, desire, aversion, and, in a word, whatever are our own actions. Things not in our control are body, property, reputation, command, and, in one word, whatever are not our own actions.“
Enchiridion I
