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Anthony S. Fauci, the nation’s preeminent infectious disease expert who rose to unprecedented fame while enduring withering political attacks as the face of the coronavirus pandemic response under two presidents, plans to step down in December after more of half a century of public service, he announced Monday.
Fauci, 81, has led the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases since 1984. He joined the parent agency, the National Institutes of Health, in 1968 as a 27-year-old doctor fresh from ‘finish the medical residency and quickly identified as a doctor. a rising star Most recently, Fauci has also served as President Biden’s chief medical advisor since the beginning of his administration.
Fauci’s tenure as director of the institute of infectious diseases made him an adviser to seven presidents and put him at the forefront of every modern scourge, including AIDS, the anthrax scares of 2001, Ebola , Zika and the coronavirus pandemic. During the nearly four decades Fauci led the agency, he grew it from a little-known institute with an annual budget of $350 million to a globally recognized powerhouse with a budget of more than $6 billion.
“Because of Dr. Fauci’s many contributions to public health, lives have been saved here in the United States and around the world,” said Biden, who as vice president worked with Fauci on the nation’s response to the ‘Ebola and Zika during the Obama administration. “Whether you met him personally or not, he has touched the lives of all Americans through his work.”
While Fauci is one of the most cited researchers of all time and has been widely known in scientific circles for decades, it was the coronavirus pandemic that catapulted him to global fame and drew criticism from some Republican politicians and threats from the public.
Anthony Fauci is facing more than a virus
Fauci, who discussed his impending departure in a wide-ranging interview with The Washington Post, had been a lightning rod before, especially in the early days of the AIDS crisis, when activists demanded a faster government response as they watched people die. the friends. But the coronavirus pandemic came at a strikingly different time, with social media fueling criticism and baseless conspiracy theories aimed at Fauci and others presiding over the federal government’s response.
Veteran scientist acknowledged mistakes: In the early weeks of the pandemic, Fauci and other government scientists said Americans should not wear masks, which President Donald Trump used toward the end of his presidency to criticize Fauci and question his expertise. And, like many other disease detectives, Fauci did not recognize early on that asymptomatic people were the main spreaders of the virus.
On his 80th birthday, Anthony S. Fauci went live on Instagram with Post reporter Geoff Edgers to discuss our readers’ most pressing questions on Dec. 24, 2020. (Video: The Washington Post)
Fauci admitted that he and other government scientists were wrong about the masks at first. He said they were worried about having enough face coverings for overwhelmed healthcare workers and still saw no evidence that masks were effective at preventing infection outside hospitals, which later became clear, especially when scientists realized that the virus was transmitted through the air.
Those factors “made the U.S. surgeon general, the CDC, and I say, right now, you really don’t need to wear a mask, and suddenly it became Tony Fauci is the mask guy,” Fauci said. . . “Because I’m the main target of the far right, when the far right says you got it wrong, it’s not that everybody got it wrong, it’s that Tony Fauci got it wrong.”
The past two and a half years marked some of the most rewarding and challenging times of his career, Fauci said. His public contradictions of Trump on unproven covid-19 treatments and the threat posed by the pandemic and his advocacy of mitigation measures made Fauci a villain of the political right.
“It was one of the biggest challenges we’ve had to face, and I think my team and I, and let history be the judge, made a significant contribution,” Fauci said. “We didn’t do it alone, but we played an important role in the development of vaccines that have now saved millions of lives.”
But Fauci said the pandemic, which has claimed more than 1 million lives in the United States, was “extremely stressful.”
He attributed this to a combination of dealing with a new virus that has shown a remarkable propensity to infect people and has mutated with stunning speed and the politically charged environment in which the government had to respond. That, along with his fame and the attention paid to his public statements, made it much more difficult to make mistakes and communicate changing scientific direction to the public, he said.
In the interview, Fauci said he wanted to leave his government post while he was still healthy, energetic and passionate about his field and excited about the next stage of his career.
He also reflected on the anti-science sentiment that has proliferated, the mistakes he and other scientists made during the pandemic, the deep national divisions infecting politics that have put democracy at risk, and the lessons learned from the government and response national to the coronavirus.
Fauci has emphasized that he does not leave the public square. He said he hopes to teach, lecture, write, perhaps a book, along with essays and other types of writing, and use his experience to inspire and teach a younger generation of scientists.
“I love everything about this place. … But even with that, I said I’m going to have to leave for a while,” Fauci said. “I don’t want to be here so long that I get to the point where I lose a step.”
White House Chief of Staff Ron Klain said the first phone call he made after Biden was declared president-elect, under Biden’s leadership, was to ask Fauci to serve as chief medical adviser. When he served as Ebola czar in 2014 in the Obama administration, Klain worked with Fauci.
“This is someone who has given his life to save lives and serve this country,” Klain said.
Fauci, who makes $480,654 a year, considered retiring at the end of Trump’s term, he said. But when Biden called during the presidential campaign and asked if he would serve in a possible Biden administration, Fauci reconsidered. He thought he would stay at least a year to help guide the country through the pandemic just as vaccines were available. In the end, the virus proved much more daunting to control than expected, and Fauci will have served nearly two years with Biden.
Still, Fauci said, with an arsenal of vaccines and treatments and boosting immunity through shots and exposure to the virus, the nation is approaching a point of balance where it can live with the virus.
An interim successor is expected to be named before Fauci’s departure, and the NIH will conduct a national search for Fauci’s replacement.
Fauci assumed leadership of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases as HIV was infecting thousands of gay men, nearly all of whom died because no treatments existed. A few years earlier, Fauci had been developing curative therapies for inflammatory diseases and saw that many of his patients who were supposed to die were doing surprisingly well. But in the 1980s, Fauci changed the direction of his lab to focus on the emerging disease that primarily affected gay men. Suddenly, almost all of his patients were dying, and there was nothing he could do to stop it.
“The death of all my patients was really, frankly, traumatic,” Fauci said. “It was extremely frustrating when you’ve been trained to be a healer and you’re doing nothing but putting Band-Aids on bleeding, metaphorically speaking, when you’re treating HIV.”
The Reagan administration for years paid little attention to the crisis, angering gay activists who felt the government was doing nothing to prevent them from getting sick and dying. Fauci and his lab had been studying AIDS for about three years when he became director of the institute, but had made little progress on a treatment.
By the late 1980s, gay activists had organized to bring global attention to the AIDS crisis. NIH and the Food and Drug Administration were the targets of their demonstrations and demanded that government agencies speed up research and approval and access to new drugs.
AIDS activists wanted a say in the design of clinical trials and for patients to have access to experimental drugs. For years, scientists and government officials, including Fauci, refused to change the research process to allow patients access to the drugs for fear it would compromise scientific integrity. Activists staged a “die-in” outside Fauci’s office, chanting “Fire Fauci!”
Fauci said he eventually realized the activists were right: The process had to change. And he befriended the activists, some of whom became close friends and advisers. Fauci championed the “parallel track approach” that allows patients to access experimental medication while a separate randomized controlled trial is underway to determine a drug’s effectiveness. Years later, under President George W. Bush, Fauci was one of the architects of PEPFAR, the multibillion-dollar HIV/AIDS program that has saved millions of lives. Bush awarded Fauci the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2008.
Fauci could usually find common ground with his adversaries and a way to work with them. That changed with the coronavirus pandemic.
Although they sometimes used aggressive tactics, AIDS activists were right that the clinical drug trial process was too rigid and needed to change, Fauci said. But he said his opponents during the coronavirus pandemic have largely relied on arguments devoid of science.
“The situation with politics…