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Anthony S. Fauci, a prominent national expert on infectious diseases who has served as the face of the coronavirus pandemic response for more than two years, will retire by the end of President Biden’s term after more than 50 years in government, he confirmed Monday for the Washington Post.
“By the time we get to the end of the term of the Biden administration, I feel it will be time for me to step down from that position,” Fauci said.
Fauci’s decision to retire by 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 that role, he has advised seven presidents on all manner of public health crises, including HIV/AIDS, the 2001 anthrax attacks. , Ebola , Zika and the coronavirus.
After President Donald Trump publicly criticized Fauci and said he would consider firing him, Biden touted Fauci’s decades of public service and made Fauci his chief medical adviser after winning the presidency. Biden has leaned heavily on Fauci in his response to the pandemic, which has continued to spread rampant across the country despite the widespread availability of vaccines.
Fauci has since said that the coronavirus is here to stay, but that the United States needs to reach a lower threshold of infections to exit the pandemic phase. The BA.5 variant has become dominant in the United States and has proven particularly difficult to contain because antibodies from vaccines and previous coronavirus infections offer limited protection against the latest omicron subvariant.
Fauci was in many ways shaped by the HIV/AIDS epidemic that began to spread in the United States when he was appointed director of NIAID. It has faced fierce criticism from HIV activists, who have accused the government of moving too slowly with treatment and of ignoring a health crisis that mostly affects gay men.
But Fauci eventually worked with activists to refine the treatment and make it more widely available to patients suffering from the disease, which in its early years killed nearly everyone who contracted the virus. Since then, HIV/AIDS treatment has made it possible to live a long and otherwise normal life with the virus.
But Fauci faced an entirely different kind of challenge during the coronavirus pandemic.
Although Fauci has always been well-known, the coronavirus pandemic has propelled him to national and global fame, especially after he publicly contradicted Trump about potential treatments for Covid-19 and the threat the virus poses. Trump and some of his aides began publicly criticizing Fauci and even called for him to be fired toward the end of Trump’s term.
After Trump tried to downplay and ignore the virus and effectively allowed it to spread unchecked before vaccines and treatments became widely available, Biden took a different approach, working to implement policies to bring the virus under control. But the Biden administration suffered several defeats in the federal courts and at the Supreme Court. A policy that would have required businesses with more than 100 employees to implement a vaccine or test requirement was blocked by the Supreme Court, and a federal court struck down a federal mandate to wear masks on public transportation.
Fauci’s support for Covid mitigation measures, such as the early 2020 lockdown and mask and vaccine mandates, has made him something of a boogeyman for Republican lawmakers who have opposed almost all efforts 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 targeted Fauci, in some cases spreading misinformation about his work and even they baselessly accuse him of being responsible for the pandemic.
Republicans are expected to win control of the House of Representatives in November, and several have vowed to launch investigations into the NIAID director. Fauci told The Post in March that he was worried about the possibility that Republicans could take back Congress and launch investigations into his work.
“It’s the Benghazi hearings again,” Fauci said at the time, referring to the GOP-led investigations into Hillary Clinton’s State Department leadership during the 2012 attacks on US compounds in Libya. That lengthy investigation turned up no new evidence of wrongdoing by Clinton, but it was a staple of the conservative media for years.
“They’re going to try to bash me in public and it’s going to be nothing,” Fauci added. “But it will distract me from my work as I am doing it now.”
Dan Diamond contributed to this report.
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