Fauci says he will retire from government post by the end of Biden’s term
Fauci’s decision to retire by 2025 was first reported by Politico. The 81-year-old official later suggested his plans were not fully settled, telling the New York Times he would “almost certainly” retire by 2025, and cautioning CNN not to view Monday’s news as his official retirement announcement.
“I do want to do other things in my career, even though I’m at a rather advanced age,” Fauci said on CNN, adding that he has “the energy and the passion” to keep 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 the agency’s director in 1984. In that role, he has advised seven presidents through all manner of public health crises, including HIV/AIDS, the 2001 anthrax attacks, Ebola and Zika — though in recent years, he became a political lightning rod for his advice on coronavirus. President Donald Trump in 2020 publicly criticized Fauci and told supporters he would consider firing him, while Biden heralded Fauci’s decades in public service and made Fauci his chief medical adviser upon winning the presidency.
Biden has leaned heavily on Fauci in his response to the pandemic, which has continued to spread rampantly throughout the country despite the widespread availability of vaccines. Fauci has since said the coronavirus is here to stay but that the United States needs to 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 proven especially difficult to contain because antibodies from vaccines and previous coronavirus infections offer limited protection against the latest omicron subvariant.
The infectious-disease expert also has begun to warn about the monkeypox outbreak, urging Americans on Saturday “to take [it] seriously,” and increasingly called for efforts to depoliticize the field of public health.
Fauci was in many ways shaped by the HIV/AIDS epidemic in the early 1980s, which changed the focus of his career and drove his work as director of NIAID. He faced fierce criticism from HIV activists, who slammed the government for moving too slowly on treatments and for ignoring a health crisis that was primarily affecting gay men.
But Fauci eventually worked with the activists to advance treatments and make them more widely available to patients who were suffering from the disease, which in the early years killed almost everyone who contracted the virus. HIV/AIDS treatments have since made it possible to live a long and otherwise normal life with the virus.
The coronavirus pandemic has presented an entirely different kind of challenge.
Fauci says he will retire from government post by the end of Biden’s term