After decades of public health service, including advising seven US presidents, Dr. Anthony Fauci has revealed his plans to retire.
The director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) and the president’s top medical adviser said he will step down from his many roles at the end of President Joe Biden’s current term, Politico reported Monday.
A source confirmed to HuffPost that he has announced his plans not to stay beyond his NIAID term, which ends in early 2025.
“I don’t think there is anything else that I, Tony Fauci, can do except leave behind an institution where I have chosen the best people in the country, if not the world, who will carry on my vision,” he told the outlet. .
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Fauci also confirmed the news to NBC, but said he doesn’t have an exact retirement date in mind, just keeping 2025 as a placeholder.
The White House did not immediately respond to HuffPost requests for comment.
Fauci, 81, has been NIAID director since 1984 and has overseen the national response to the coronavirus pandemic since the virus emerged in late 2019. In his interview, the infectious disease researcher acknowledged that the pandemic has not yet finished and there is still more work to be done, but it is time for someone else to take over.
“We are in a pattern now. If someone says: ‘You will leave when we no longer have COVID’, then I will be 105 years old. I think we’re going to live with this,” she said of the highly contagious and ever-mutating virus.
The US is currently averaging 126,000 new COVID-19 cases a day after leveling off in May, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
But it’s not his work leading the national response to the coronavirus that Fauci said he wants to be his legacy. Instead, it is his decades of work fighting HIV/AIDS in infectious disease research and his work advising presidents on how to mitigate its spread.
He called the founding of the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief under President George W. Bush possibly “the most impactful thing I’ve ever done in my career.”
That program, touted as the largest commitment of any nation to address a single disease, has saved 21 million lives through global efforts to control the spread of HIV since its inception in 2003, according to the State Department.
Fauci told Politico that an HIV vaccine is likely many years away, but he doesn’t need to be there to see it come to fruition, “because we have enough good people who could pull it off.”
