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Anthony S. Fauci, the country’s preeminent expert on infectious diseases, who has served as the face of the coronavirus pandemic response for more than two years, plans to retire after more than 50 years in government at the end of mandate of President Biden, he confirmed. Monday at The Washington Post.
“When we reach the end of the Biden administration’s term, I think it would be time to leave that post,” Fauci said.
Fauci’s decision to retire in 2025 was first reported by Politico. The 81-year-old official later suggested his plans were not fully resolved, telling the New York Times he would “almost certainly” retire in 2025 and warning CNN not to see Monday’s news as its official retirement announcement. .
“I want to do other things in my career, even though I’m at a pretty advanced age,” Fauci told CNN, adding that he has “the energy and passion” to continue working after federal service.
Fauci, Biden’s chief medical adviser, first joined the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases as a clinical research fellow in 1968 and became director of the agency on 1984. In this role, he has advised seven presidents through all kinds of public health crises, including HIV / AIDS, anthrax attacks in 2001, Ebola and Zika, although in recent years , became a political lightning rod for his advice on coronavirus. In 2020, President Donald Trump publicly criticized Fauci and told supporters he would consider firing him, while Biden announced his decades in public service and made Fauci his chief medical adviser when he won the presidency.
Biden has relied heavily on Fauci in his response to the pandemic, which has continued to spread rampant across the country despite widespread vaccine availability. Fauci has said since then that the coronavirus has come to stay, but that the United States must reach a lower threshold of infections to get out of the pandemic phase. The BA.5 variant has become dominant in the United States and has been shown to be especially difficult to contain because vaccine antibodies and previous coronavirus infections offer limited protection against the latest omicron subvariant.
The infectious disease expert has also begun warning about the monkey’s smallpox outbreak, and urged Americans on Saturday “to take [it] seriously ”, and has called for more and more efforts to depoliticise the field of public health.
Fauci was shaped in many ways by the HIV / AIDS epidemic in the early 1980s, which shifted the focus of his career and boosted his work as director of NIAID. He faced fierce criticism from HIV activists, who criticized the government because, they said, it was advancing too slowly in treatments and ignoring a health crisis that mainly affected gay men.
But Fauci eventually worked with activists to advance treatments and make them more widely available to patients suffering from the disease, which in the early years killed almost everyone who contracted the virus. Since then, HIV / AIDS treatments have made it possible to live a long and normal life with the virus.
The coronavirus pandemic has presented a completely different challenge.
Overnight, the outbreak brought Fauci to national and world fame, especially after he publicly contradicted Trump about possible treatments for covid-19 and the threat the virus posed. The president and some of his aides began publicly criticizing Fauci and even demanded that he be fired toward the end of Trump’s term.
After Trump tried to minimize and ignore the virus and allowed it to spread uncontrollably before vaccines and treatments became widely available, Biden has taken a different approach, working to implement policies to control the virus. But the Biden administration has faced several defeats in federal courts and the Supreme Court. A policy that would have required companies with more than 100 employees to implement a vaccine or test requirement was blocked by the Supreme Court and a federal court overturned a federal mask warrant on public transportation.
Fauci’s support for covid mitigation measures, such as blockades in early 2020 and mask and vaccine mandates, have made him a sort of boogeyman for Republican lawmakers who have opposed almost all efforts to control the virus. Several Republicans, including Senator Rand Paul (Ky.), Rep. Jim Jordan (Ohio) and Senator Roger Marshall (Kan.), Have fiercely attacked Fauci, in some cases spreading misinformation about his work and even accusing him without foundation of being so. responsible for the pandemic. Meanwhile, public confidence in Fauci has declined, especially among conservatives, according to the findings of the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg Center for Public Policy.
Some notable Republicans have continued to support Fauci, and former Sen. Lamar Alexander, who retired last year after serving as chairman of the Senate health panel, called him “one of the most distinguished public health officials in the world.” our country “.
“In his testimony before the Senate health committee he told the truth as he saw it, even when the news was harsh and unpopular,” Tennessee’s Alexander said in a statement Monday. “It earned the respect of senators on both sides of the aisle.”
But current GOP lawmakers, including Paul and Jordan, have promised to open investigations into the director of NIAID if Republicans gain control of one or both houses of Congress in mid-November. Fauci told the Post in March that he was alarmed by the possibility of Republicans retrieving Congress and initiating investigations into his work.
“These are Benghazi audiences again,” Fauci said at the time, referring to GOP-led investigations into Hillary Clinton’s State Department leadership during the 2012 attacks on U.S. complexes in Libya. That lengthy investigation found no new evidence of Clinton’s embezzlement, but it was a staple of conservative media for years.
“They will try to hit me in public, and there will be nothing,” Fauci added. “But it will distract me from doing my job, as it is doing now.”
Public health experts said Monday they were processing the news of Fauci’s long-awaited departure, accrediting his work to shape the health field and help respond to multiple outbreaks.
“Fauci is one in a generation: data-driven, experimentally rigorous, ethically flawless, and kind,” said Ian Lipkin, an epidemiologist at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health.
“He’s a real man of science,” added Kristian Andersen, an immunologist at the Scripps Research Institute, in an email, praising “his key leadership in controlling the HIV / AIDS pandemic or getting vaccines against COVID-19 very effective in less than one course. “
Gregg Gonsalves, a Yale University epidemiologist who fought with Fauci in the early days of the HIV / AIDS outbreak, and helped lead calls for him to be replaced decades ago, said he has since come to appreciate Fauci as a singular figure.
“I’ve spent my whole life criticizing him and praising him to the same extent,” Gonsalves said. “But when you look around you at long-term public officials, no one comes close to what Tony has done for this country and public health.”