Disclaimer: This article may contain the personal views and opinions of the author.
Dr. Anthony Fauci just received the Hutch Award on Tuesday. It is an honor given to those who fight through adversity.
The Hutch Award has typically been awarded to Major League Baseball players who “best exemplifies the determined spirit of the late Fred Hutchinson, a pitcher and manager who died of cancer in 1964 at age 45.”
Fauci is the second person to not be a Major league player to receive the award. The first non-Major League player to receive it was President Jimmy Carter, in 2016.
Fauci was honored by throwing out the ceremonial first pitch for the Seattle Mariners, but the crowd didn’t share the same sentiment of honoring Fauci.
As Fauci walked out on the field, he was met with boos from the crowd.
Fauci sat down for a Q&A with his colleague and friend, Dr. Larry Corey while accepting his Hutch Award.
The conversation they had was mostly centered around Fauci’s career and his work during the COVID-19 pandemic.
A clip of the Q&A shows Fauci and Corey talking about the first lab-confirmed case of COVID in the United States. A traveler returning home to Seattle from Wuhan, China brought over the “ancestral strain”, nicknamed, WA1, by scientists.
Fauci then jokes that it was actually himself who created the strain.
“We’re at the epicenter of the initial outbreak, WA1, Washington one, is considered the ancestral model strain,” Corey said.
“No, I developed the ancestral model strain. I created it,” Fauci joked as the room fell into fits of laughter.
“That’s right. You let it loose,” Corey replied.
“I was in my kitchen,” Fauci laughed.
“Okay. Gain of function, here we come,” Corey laughed.
The reaction he got at the Mariners game seems to fit more with how Americans feel about the pandemic and Dr. Fauci.
Many Americans are not joking and laughing about the effects that the lockdowns and mask mandates had.
According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, of the 16.9 million people unemployed, 9.6 million were unable to work because their employer closed or lost business due to the coronavirus pandemic.
Recently, The White House reported that there was a significant loss in learning and mental health problems for school-age children.
The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities reported:
The COVID-19 pandemic and resulting economic fallout caused significant hardship. In the early months of the crisis, tens of millions of people lost their jobs. While employment began to rebound within a few months, unemployment remained high throughout 2020. Improving employment and substantial relief measures helped reduce the very high levels of hardship seen in the summer of 2020. Nonetheless, considerable unmet needs remained near the end of 2021, with 20 million households reporting having too little to eat in the past seven days and 10 million households behind on rent. In early 2022, some 3 million fewer people are employed than before the pandemic, though steady progress has been made, including in recent months.
People in power, like Dr. Fauci, can laugh and make jokes about a time that was intensely painful and divisive for many Americans. And, what makes it worse, is that it was unnecessarily painful and divisive for Americans.
