Sarah Alexander, Leanne Toe and Tiffany Zorella are three microbiologists who work at the NIH, the National Institutes of Health.

For the past few weeks, like a lot of folks, they've been paying close attention to the

pandemic news, the White House press briefings, the public officials addressing the public

from the podium. And there's one in particular that's really caught their eye. Here's Sarah.

So I think Leanne and I would talk about it and we were like, oh, he's so cute. You know, we brought it up to Tiffany expecting her to think it was strange, but she was right there with us.

And so I think that we started to get a little bit of a science crush on him, if you will.

Yeah. Their crush is Dr. you will. Yeah.

Their crush is Dr. Anthony Fauchy.

The director of Nyad, the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.

So today on the show, the cult of Dr. Fauchy and how the internet helped

build it. I'm Ariel Dermeross. This is reset. We started a group chat and it just kind of started as a joke where we would send each other pictures of Dr. Fauchy and sort of of felt like some of the stuff we were sending each other in our group chat was really, really good content,

I guess. We were like editing some of his photos and we had, I don't know, we were just admiring him and I was like,

we should put this out there and kind of see I felt that other people might feel similarly.

In mid-March the three scientists started a Twitter account at Fauchy fan.

Almost every tweet is a photo of Dr. Fauchy,

sometimes overlaid with heart emojies

and accompanied by a funny admiring comment.

For instance, like our pinned tweet on our profile right now is just a photo of Dr. Fauchy

says, if you don't have a crush on this man, do you even care about public health?

And that was just like some random thought I had and I was like

that would be a good tweet. The Twitter account immediately started

racking up followers. We would text each other constantly like oh my God we made it

...