Comment on this story
Comment
Anthony S. Fauci, the nation’s foremost infectious disease expert who has served as the face of the coronavirus pandemic response for more than two years, will retire at the end of President Biden’s term after more than 50 years in the government, confirmed Monday in 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.
Fauci, Biden’s chief medical adviser, has been director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases since 1984. In this role, he has advised seven presidents through all kinds of public health crises, including the HIV / AIDS, the 2001 anthrax attacks, Ebola. , Zika and coronavirus.
After President Donald Trump publicly criticized Fauci and said he would consider firing him, Biden announced Fauci’s 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 infection threshold 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.
Fauci was shaped in many ways by the HIV / AIDS epidemic, which had begun to spread across the United States when he was appointed director of NIAID. He faced fierce criticism from HIV activists, who criticized the government for advancing treatments too slowly and for 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.
But Fauci faced a completely different type of challenge during the coronavirus pandemic.
Although Fauci has always been known, the coronavirus pandemic brought him national and world fame, especially after he publicly contradicted Trump about possible treatments for covid-19 and the threat the virus posed. Trump 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 opposed almost every effort. to control the virus. Several Republicans, including Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) and Rep. Roger Marshall (R-Kan.), Have fiercely attacked Fauci, in some cases spreading misinformation about the his work and even baselessly accusing him of being responsible for the pandemic.
Republicans are widely expected to gain control of the House of Representatives in mid-November and several have promised to open investigations into the director of NIAID. 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.”
Dan Diamond contributed to this report.