As a way to build public confidence in the federal government’s vaccine program, Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, the government’s top infectious disease expert, told The New York Times on Friday that he intends to “get vaccinated publicly, in the public space, so that people can see me getting vaccinated,” as soon as “the vaccine becomes available to me.”

Dr. Fauci, 79, added that he is not certain when that will be, and is leaving it up to the health secretary, Alex M. Azar II, to decide. The Food and Drug Administration is expected to issue emergency authorization of the Pfizer vaccine as early as Friday evening.

Dr. Fauci also disclosed in an interview with The Times that a healthy 32-year-old who is close to one of his daughters died of Covid-19 — a stark reminder that the disease is deadly in the young as well as the old.

The 32-year-old who died was the brother of the boyfriend of one of Dr. Fauci’s daughters. “He’s a perfectly healthy 32-year-old guy who got Covid, got the cardiac complications and died within like a week and a half of getting infected,” Dr. Fauci said, adding, “It is really very devastating to my daughter.”

As President Trump and his allies have asserted, incorrectly, that the disease is not a threat to younger people, Dr. Fauci has repeatedly testified on Capitol Hill that there is much to be learned about the novel coronavirus, and that scientists must be humble about what they do not know.

Young people are hardly immune; in Florida, for example, more than 100 adults aged 25 to 44 died of Covid in July alone.

A study from Harvard released in September “establishes that Covid-19 is a life-threatening disease in people of all ages,” wrote Dr. Mitchell Katz, a deputy editor at JAMA Internal Medicine, in an editorial accompanying the research, adding that “while young adults are much less likely than older persons to become seriously ill, if they reach the point of hospitalization, their risks are substantial.”

— Sheryl Gay Stolberg The New York Times