Comment Anthony S. Fauci, the nation’s preeminent infectious disease expert who has served as the face of the coronavirus pandemic for more than two years, will retire by the end of President Biden’s term after more than 50 years in government , confirmed Monday to The Washington Post. “By the time we get to the end of the Biden administration, I feel it will be time to step down from this 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 crises , Ebola, Zika and 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 when he won 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 must reach a lower infection threshold to exit the pandemic phase. The BA.5 variant has become predominant in the United States and has proven particularly difficult to contain because antibodies from vaccines and previous coronavirus infections offer limited protection against the latter omicron subvariant. Fauci was shaped in many ways by the HIV/AIDS epidemic, which had begun to spread in the United States when he was appointed director of NIAID. It has come under fire from HIV campaigners, who have criticized the government for moving too slowly on treatments and for ignoring a health crisis that mainly affects gay men. But Fauci eventually worked with activists to promote treatments and make them more widely available to patients with the disease, which in the early years killed nearly everyone who contracted the virus. HIV/AIDS treatments have since made it possible to live long and otherwise normal lives with the virus. But Fauci faced an entirely different challenge during the coronavirus pandemic. While Fauci has always been a household name, the coronavirus pandemic catapulted him to national and global notoriety, especially after he publicly disagreed with Trump over potential treatments for Covid-19 and the threat posed by the virus. Trump and some of his aides began to publicly criticize Fauci and even called for him to be fired toward the end of Trump’s tenure. After Trump tried to downplay and ignore the virus and essentially 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 has faced several defeats in federal courts and the Supreme Court. A policy that would have required businesses with more than 100 employees to implement a vaccine or testing requirement was blocked by the Supreme Court, and a federal court overturned a federal mask mandate on public transportation. Fauci’s support for coronavirus mitigation measures, such as lockdowns in early 2020 and mandates for masks and vaccines, has made him something of a boogeyman for Republican lawmakers who have opposed nearly 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 taken strong aim at Fauci, in some cases spreading misinformation about his work and even baselessly accusing him of being responsible for the pandemic. Republicans are widely expected to win control of the House of Representatives in the November midterms, and several have vowed to launch investigations into the NIAID director. Fauci told The Post in March that he was concerned about the possibility that Republicans might retake Congress and launch investigations into his work. “It’s the Benghazi hearings all over again,” Fauci said at the time, referring to the GOP-led investigations into Hillary Clinton’s leadership of the State Department during the 2012 attacks on US compounds in Libya. That long-running investigation found no new evidence of wrongdoing by Clinton, but it has been a staple of conservative media for years. “They’re going to try to hit me publicly and there’s not going to be anything there,” Fauci added. “But it will distract me from doing my job, as it is doing right now.” Dan Diamond contributed to this report.
