April 7, 2021
Drawing a line between its mission of Holocaust remembrance and the ravages inflicted by the coronavirus pandemic, the March of the Living honored Dr. Anthony Fauci with an award for “moral courage in medicine” on the eve of Yom Hashoah, Israel’s Holocaust commemoration day.
The award to Fauci, who for decades has been the top U.S. official handling infectious diseases, culminated in an online program on Wednesday called “Medicine and Morality.”
In his acceptance remarks, Fauci referred to Maimonides, the medieval Jewish scholar and physician.
“Maimonides reminded us that goodness and evil coexist, but that we are free to choose one over the other,” Fauci said. “I believe that the healing arts lie on the path of goodness, the same path, all of you have chosen in remembering and listening to the voices of those who perished in the Holocaust.”...
“We’re very fortunate to have one guiding light throughout the pandemic,” [Brian] Strom [the chancellor of Rutgers University] said. “In an era when public-spiritedness and confidence in the disciplines and methodologies of science, were not held up as virtues of high esteem, Dr. Anthony Fauci embodied both.”...
Presentations by historians, physicians and philosophers described the depredations of physicians who collaborated with the Nazis, and also the heroics of doctors who resisted the Nazi rise.
Albert Bourla, the CEO of Pfizer, the first pharmaceutical company to bring a successful coronavirus vaccine to market, described how his parents, Jews in Thessaloniki, survived the Holocaust.