I was astounded to learn that Dr. Anthony Fauci hired personal protection for himself and his family. President Biden issued Fauci — former director of National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, 1984 to 1992 — a preemptive pardon because President Trump promised “retribution” against his perceived enemies. Dr. Fauci spoke as a scientist, explaining facts as he knew them from his four decades’ work in immunology and infectious diseases.

He was confronted by politicians with little scientific knowledge, who viewed his science and scientific method as a hindrance to their objectives and ambitions. I have yet to elucidate Dr. Fauci’s sins.

For many of us, Fauci epitomizes that which is noble in western culture, science and education. Some who detested Fauci’s opinions thought he was opposed to President Trump’s ideas about how to manage the COVID pandemic. In reality, much of their differences resulted from Trump’s ignorance and unwillingness to acknowledge that he was not a scientist.

I heard Fauci’s reasoned statements about the state of scientific understanding of the pandemic, contrasted to Trump’s boisterous pronouncements that had no substance and lacked logical support. Who can ever forget his suggestions that we use disinfectants and sunlight as remedies to fight the COVID infection? In the same vein, listening to defiant anti-vax voices who think refusing to vaccinate their children is a demonstration of their liberty points to their ignorance of scientific facts and a sad misunderstanding of essential public health edicts in a democracy.

To many, physicians and patients, Dr. Fauci is a medical hero, who led the fight against Tuberculosis, SARS, MERS and COVID-19. However, he will always be remembered for his difficult and urgent HIV research carried out at NIH. Finding the cause and cure for HIV/AIDS was urgently required as many died. Starting in 1986 research on HIV still continues to this day; HIV/AIDS still continues to wreak havoc in certain American communities and in many poor countries.

During the COVID pandemic, as death raged across the nation, the daily White House briefings on the progress in diagnosis and therapy of the COVID infection demonstrated the difference between a scientist’s reasoned, methodical, unexaggerated approach; and a politician’s incautious postulates. In the case of Donald Trump, flights of imagination based on no fact, or any knowledge involved incautious pronouncements. It was this difference that many saw.

To the scientific observer, Fauci did a great job despite the overbearing presence. Trump’s relationship with truth and facts is puzzling, compared to a scientist who’s limited to what he can conjecture or say in public. Fauci could only tell the public what the science of COVID infection had revealed at any given moment. Science operates within narrow scientific confines. We scientists understood what was happening and why, confronted by Trump the showman, Fauci would always seem to lose. A nation better educated in scientific thought and methods would have understood that the two narratives: the showman’s and the scientist’s — were like two different idioms.

A society that undervalues science and scientific thought lives in darkness. Our nation is in the grip of a fever manifested by our attitudes towards complex natural phenomena — climate change, changing human migration patterns — that if not solved will inexorably lead future generations, and the earth, to disastrous outcomes. The pity is, we live at a time when scientific information proliferates — from our handheld devices, to our radios, the internet and television. Knowledge and information are all around us, if we open our eyes to see, and our ears can hear.

We are abandoning science and refusing to listen to scientists; in preference of what “influencers” on TikTok, or the endless crop of men and women whose many-decibeled voices replace the quiet wisdom of science and logic. To hear Robert Kennedy talk about what ills vaccines have wrought to man is to abandon centuries of medical research, and actual epidemics — such as the 1918 influenza — that could have been controlled with vaccines.

Fact is scientific progress has helped us to almost eradicate smallpox and polio.

Some may want to believe the magnificent dream that America is an island, isolated from the rest of the world. It is but a dream.

The truth is, we all occupy the same blue dot seen from far away in space. It is only with scientific knowledge, an attitude of generosity and understanding of nature’s constraints, that we will be able to maintain the earth’s health and our wellbeing.

Pius Kamau, M.D., a retired general surgeon, is president of the Aurora-based Africa America Higher Education Partnerships; co-founder of the Africa Enterprise Group and an activist for minority students ‘STEM education. He is a National Public Radio commentator, a Huffington Post blogger, a past columnist for Denver dailies and is featured on the podcast, “Never Again.”