Fauci Says He Plans to Retire by End of Biden’s Current Term
Dr. Fauci has announced he plans to retire by the end of President Biden’s current term, which ends in January 2025.
The infectious-disease expert, who led the Biden administration’s Covid-response, confirmed the news to CNN Monday. He did not specify a departure date.
“I have said that for a long time,” Fauci told the outlet of his repeated teasings of retirement. “By the time we get to the end of Biden’s first term, I will very likely [retire].”
While it was once the doctor’s explicit goal to preside over the national strategy to eliminate COVID-19 from the population, as the chief medical adviser to Biden, he has recently accepted that the disease may be endemic and present for the foreseeable future.
“I think we’re going to be living with this” for many years, Fauci told Politico in an interview Monday.
Fauci has been director of the National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Diseases of the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) since 1984. Before the COVID-19 pandemic, he advised the White House and U.S. Department of Health and Human Services on global AIDS issues and on initiatives to prepare the medical industry and public to fight against emerging infectious disease threats.
In the years since COVID-19 erupted, Fauci has faced backlash for what critics have claimed was dishonest communication with the public during the crisis. He was accused of suppressing dissent within the medical research community about the origins of the virus and the way government should manage it.
For example, Fauci skeptics pointed to his 180 degree shift on cloth mask-wearing, which he disparaged in March 2020 for the sake of saving supply for front-line workers but then urged in most social settings less than a year later.
“There’s no reason to be walking around with a mask,” he said in March 2020. “When you’re in the middle of an outbreak, wearing a mask might make people feel a little bit better, and it might even block a droplet, but it’s not providing the perfect protection that people think that it is. And, often, there are unintended consequences — people keep fiddling with the mask, and they keep touching their face.”
Over the last two years, Fauci also repeatedly dodged discussion, especially when probed by Senator Rand Paul during congressional hearings, about the allegation that NIH research dollars supported work at the Wuhan lab in China, from which much of the mainstream press now acknowledges the virus could have escaped.
