The world-renowned scientist, who has worked with seven US presidents and had a harsh confrontation with Trump during Covid-19, will resign at the age of 81 to focus on his research projects
Anthony Fauci leaves. The White House chief epidemiologist, who became world famous during the Covid-19 pandemic, confirmed on Monday that he will leave his post next December after half a century of public activity at the service of seven United States presidents. At 81 years old, the scientist specifies, however, that he will not retire and will open a “new chapter” in which he will continue to collaborate in public health.
The veteran researcher will resign, therefore, at the end of the year as director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. He will also cease to be an adviser to the president, Joe Biden, with whom he has a much more friendly relationship than with the previous president. Donald Trump lashed out at him on numerous occasions for his health guidelines during the coronavirus epidemic, exclaiming: “People are fed up with Fauci and all those idiots,” referring to vaccine advocates and experts warning of the need to take protective measures against Covid-19.
Fauci corrected and contradicted the Republican leader on numerous occasions for his “mistakes.” «It gave me no pleasure to see myself in the situation of contradicting the president. You could feel that it was something that was not going to happen without consequences », he pointed out in an interview in early 2021, just starting Joe Biden’s term. “The idea that you can come here and talk about what you know, what the evidence is, the science and knowing that that’s all, letting science speak, is a liberation,” he added in relation to his new stage with the leader democrat. The call to Fauci to continue his work as White House adviser was one of Biden’s first actions as soon as he occupied the Oval Office. Yesterday, he thanked him for his dedication and stated that, “Thanks to Dr. Fauci’s many contributions to public health, lives have been saved here in the United States and around the world. He has touched the lives of all Americans with his work.”
The tragic years of HIV
The scientist has been at the head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases in the United States since 1984. However, his work in public health services began much earlier, in 1968, as a doctor. His research on HIV placed him in the forefront internationally. An anecdote remains from the beginning of that pandemic between 1979 and 1980. The government of the first president for whom he worked, Ronald Reagan, initially underestimated the extent of the disease. And while those affected and anti-AIDS organizations requested that experimental drugs be used with them, the scientific community showed its reticence in order to ethical precepts.
By the end of the decade the situation had become untenable. Fauci, after meeting with different activists and even turning them into his advisers, decided to launch a dual system that would allow patients to receive these treatments while a controlled process was carried out in parallel to determine their effectiveness. The father of several therapies against the effects of the virus, the scientist later received an accolade in the following administration of George W. Bush and launched, together with other specialists, an ambitious global health program against AIDS budgeted at 100,000 million dollars. With the sponsorship of the US Government, it was implanted in 50 countries and saved the lives of 21 million people.
Fauci has Italian ancestry, although he was born in Brooklyn. His parents owned a pharmacy in this New York neighborhood. He was assigned the mission of collecting the recipes. He studied at Cornell University and obtained his doctorate in Medicine in 1966. He belongs to the National Academy of Sciences of the United States, has published articles in the most prestigious scientific journals in the world and in 2008 Bush awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom. His department, which managed a modest $350 million a year when he arrived, now has a budget of more than $6 billion. The center is today a great world institution in infectious diseases.
Target of conspiracy theories
During his tenure in office he has faced five major medical crises: HIV, Ebola, anthrax, Zika virus and Covid-19. Of all of them, the last one has been the hardest. During the pandemic he became the target of Trump’s wrath, who downplayed each of his guidelines or rejected them directly, but also at the center of numerous conspiracy plots and the darts of the Republicans.
The expert himself admitted that he made mistakes at the beginning of the epidemic, such as underestimating the contagion capacity of asymptomatic people or the importance of masks. However, the rest of his administration has been characterized by a “hard line” in an attempt to mitigate the consequences of a pandemic that has made the United States the most affected country in the world. He deeply regrets that the virus has killed more than a million Americans; a sense of helplessness similar to the one he felt in the 1980s when HIV killed his patients. Paradoxically, Fauci had warned the new Republican administration in 2017 of the probable arrival of an epidemic with serious consequences. He was drawing on the alerts for Zika, Ebola, and the study of other unknown infectious disease outbreaks in recent decades.
Just a few months ago, in an interview with an American newspaper, the scientist announced his intention to retire once Joe Biden’s term ends in January 2025. However, this Monday he has confessed that he will not wait until then. Fauci wants to start other research projects and admits that the threats he continues to receive have led him to advance his life change
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