The Sudden Rise of Dr. Fauci & Moderna
Due to the heightened fear of COVID, there were some big names that were associated with educating the public about the severity of this disease. We have Dr. Anthony Fauci, an immunologist and Chief Medical Advisor to the President of the United States. We also saw the emergence of big pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies, the most popular being Pfizer and Moderna. Now, imagine a time when there was no pandemic and everyone was enjoying a healthy life. Would the interest of Dr. Fauci or these biotech companies still be a hot topic? Or did they just ride along the mass hysteria surrounding COVID?
In order to truly understand the sudden interest surrounding Dr. Fauci and biotech companies, let’s head toward Wikipedia and look at the number of page views Dr. Fauci was getting as well as how many page views Moderna was receiving from 2016 to the end of 2022. Since Pfizer is a bit more recognizable due to its relevance in the pharmaceutical industry, it’s safe to leave them out of the measurement.
It’s quite fascinating to see that Dr. Fauci went from having almost no page visits in 2016 through 2019 to well above two hundred thousand page visits around the middle of 2020. Also very interesting to see that Moderna had a bit of a spike during the later stages of 2020.
The visualization also appears to be “right-skewed” meaning that the spike in page views died down near the beginning of 2022. This anomaly could be represented by the success in educating the mass public about the severity of COVID or that the craze around COVID has left the minds of the people.
While looking at news articles in the COVID elevated 2020, it makes total sense as to why we saw significant spikes there. We had received stay-at-home mandates from Dr. Fauci and other sources, there had been critical developments in the early stages of the vaccine. We even saw an article from NPR published on November 5, 2020, stating that Healthcare workers got emergency access to the early vaccine.
Since Dr. Fauci had spiked in page views during May and Moderna had its largest spike in page views in around November 2020. Let’s look at the days in those “spiked” months and see if there were any articles published on days where page views were at an all-time high, starting with Dr. Fauci:
Dr. Fauci had accumulated his largest number of page views at a staggering 227,600 views on May 9th, 2020, interestingly enough, there was an article published by the New York Times that talked about how “the Coronavirus pandemic was a ploy created by global elites like Bill Gates and Dr. Anthony Fauci to profit and grab political power.” There was also a talk with NPR that occurred a bit after the largest spike date on May 22, 2020, to speak about the “U.S. efforts to develop a Coronavirus Vaccine.” Since there was a lot of concern about the efficacy of this vaccine as well as the legitimacy of the virus, people turned to Wikipedia to hopefully diffuse the rumors surrounding the conspiracy and look for reassurance in regard to the vaccine. Now, let’s look at Moderna:
Moderna had its record-high page views of 123258 views on November 16th, 2020. On that day, there was a CNN article published that emphasized the 94.5% efficacy of Moderna’s vaccine. Also, Moderna’s Wikipedia page stated that “On 18 December 2020, the Moderna COVID‑19 vaccine was authorized by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) under an emergency use authorization.” Moderna had its buzz primarily around the vaccine talk and how their progression was being seen as a new hope for the public.
These universal upward trends of Moderna & Dr. Fauci in 2020 tell us that these entities contributed to a large impact on safeguarding the public during the height of the pandemic. Without the education given and initiative taken from these two, the pandemic would still be a large talking point in today’s society. There were multiple reasons why these topics received such high viewership on their Wikipedia pages like conspiracy theories or curiosity about a cure. Due to COVID’s unfortunate rise in popularity, there were emergent lights that gave us answers to our questions when we needed it the most, and when we had enough information, we no longer had an interest.
