Dr. Anthony Fauci: “It’s Time To Ditch Shaking Hands…Permanently”

As far as Dr. Fauci is concerned, people should leave the time-honored tradition of shaking hands in the past – permanently. Fauci, The Director of The National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases since 1984 and member of the current White House Corona-virus Task Force, said during an interview last week that he’d do away with the custom all together. Fauci says shaking hands is “one of the major ways you can transmit a respiratory-borne illness” and that “we’ve got to break that custom”. Even if you’re not a trained epidemiologist, you can probably figure out that handshaking is a dirty business. Even in the current age of hand sanitizer and social mores that shame those who don’t scrub up after a trip to the loo, the idea of tightly gripping another human’s germ-infested paws gives many of us the heebee jeebees. So, if we did get rid of shaking hands as a social greeting custom, what should we replace it with? This gives us an opportunity to invent a safe way to greet both strangers and close friends/family…maybe the elbow bump? The “acknowledge wave”? I’m open to any safe alternative to the hand shake, as long as the final greeting doesn’t involve complex physical motions…or math of any kind 🙂

John Young